My wife and I attended a reading that night—it was a Friday—and when we got home, we had several messages from Louisiana, from each of my two sisters, from my father, and from a cousin who hardly ever calls. Before listening to the messages they left, I realized that they had probably received word that my Uncle Joe had drowned in Katrina, and finally had been identified. That was the case. Even though his apartment house in the Lakeview area of New Orleans had a scrawl on it indicating that it had been checked for bodies and none had been found, which gave us hope, his body was inside his apartment. It took a New Jersey cop, a volunteer who did my cousin a favor by returning to the building and checking it again, to find him. Somebody had "cleared" the house, apparently without actually searching it, or the search was so cursory that they missed the body.

He was a great guy. Six years ago, when my mother died, he hitchhiked to Lafayette from New Orleans for her funeral, but ended up at the wrong funeral home. Somebody there gave him a ride to the right place. He hobbled in—he was eighty—and waved. He wore a dark crew neck sweater, light slacks that still held their crease, despite his hitchhiking, and a sports coat with elbow patches that had seen better days but was still presentable. "Where's Dottie?" he said. That was my mother, his sister.

Ever since he retired, some twenty years ago, from his blue-collar job, he took a class a semester (depending on health) at the local college, because he felt when he was young that he had missed out on an education. The last time I talked to him, he wanted to discuss a term paper he was writing about a Walker Percy novel. "Alan," he said, "do you think our life journey is vertical or horizontal?"

I know the Percy novel. "I think it's both," I said. "Trying to make sense of it, and day by day."

"Yes," he said in his careful fashion. He had a New Orleans accent, but it was genteel and deliberate, as if he came from the Garden District, where the monied families live, and not from the Irish channel, where not only the Irish (naturally) but many Italian-Americans once lived. "That's what I think. You know the Jesus prayer?"

My uncle was both religious and secular, able to hold in his mind Keats's idea of negative capability, which he loved ("when someone is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason") and the Jesus prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, son of god, have mercy upon me, a sinner.").

"Yes," I said, "I know it." I'm a recovering Catholic, and I was brought up in southern Louisiana; of course I know it, though it might not have been called that in the church I attended.

"I still find myself using it sometimes," he said. "What do you make of that?"

"Does it help?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "It's like sneezing. I just do it." His voice was clear, but it quavered a little, the way my mother's handwriting does in her last letters to me.

"Well, then," I said. Those were probably my last words to him, aside from the things we say when we say goodbye. We spoke infrequently, and seldom at length, but he was often in my thoughts. There was always a high tone to our talks. He had respect for me because I loved books and even wrote them, and worried about me the way a good uncle worries about a favorite nephew. I had enormous respect for him because he was a wayfarer, both in the literal sense, making his journeys on foot or by bicycle, and in the exalted sense, living alone in a simple apartment with his books and his thoughts, trying to make sense of things. I always thought of him as an old soul with a young spirit.

He never drove, but he had a bicycle, and I can remember the last time I saw him. He was on his bike, which wobbled a little because it was an old bike, though not a clunker, and because his legs had lost some strength and agility with age. He favored sweaters, and had one on that day. It was the color of red wine and seemed to braid together fabric and sunlight as he bicycled away. He was waving over one shoulder as he headed in the direction of Lake Pontchartrain, on a bright day when white sails in a nearby marina fluttered against a blue sky. I stood there flat-footed, I remember, with a backpack over my shoulder, wishing that I had a bicycle too, before I caught the city bus back to the French Quarter, where I was supposed to meet my sister near the levee for a bowl of gumbo and a beer.

He drowned in his apartment. I like to think that the Jesus prayer helped him die. Or Keats. Or something else - whatever he could find in his inflected, educated mind and body. The inflection came from a lifetime of labor. The education came from reading and thought, and from his wayfaring.

Everybody in his neighborhood who hadn't evacuated thought that the hurricane had passed the city and that they were safe. But the levees broke, not from storm surge, engineers now think, but because the soil structure beneath the concrete walls was too weak: it's like a chocolate cake sitting on a plate, one engineer explained. "At first the cake sticks to the plate, but if you push hard enough the globby structure eventually moves." Nobody was watching, though Katrina had moved on, and nobody was there to help. (Somebody should have been watching. Someone should have helped.) Then the water started rising, a foot a minute in some places, I've heard.

He might well have been asleep when he felt it lapping at his bed. I don't know. He probably turned to switch on his bedside lamp, but there would have been no electricity. He maybe had a flashlight there. He would have turned it on and beamed it around his room. It wouldn't have taken him long to gauge his chances. His hip had been recently broken. Perhaps he was a bit dazed from pain killers. The water, from Lake Pontchartrain, would have surprised him, but he might have been contemplative about it, if this is how it happened. He watched it lap at his bed, rising like the tide. He had limited mobility. There wasn't much he could do. It's too late to crawl across the flooded floor, he would have realized. This is the horizontal life, he might have thought. My vertical life is finished. Or vice versa, he might have added, trying to figure it out. My horizontal life is over. My vertical life is about to begin. Then, maybe, he recited the Jesus prayer.

He didn't fight his death, I like to think, because it's too painful to think otherwise, to imagine him flailing and crying out with nobody there to hear him or to help. He wasn't that kind of man. He was a pacifist, and a slightly-built man who always smiled with eyes wide, as if life could still surprise him with its novelty or its beauty. He waited, took one breath after the next, and breathed in the water when there was no more air to take into his lungs. He closed his eyes. There was a sense of suffocation and panic, then peace.

Maybe he wondered if he would be seeing his sister, my mother. In life, they were very close.