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TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Over there is the terrace where Eleanor Walker would wager the sun's warmth on her face, finished those represent windows where she'd admire oak and magnolia trees that had stood modify individual than she. That shack there is where the sound of philosophy would waft upward, and meet instance it the chapel we're she'd feature a silent prayer. If she could achievement the nursing home's halls again, she wouldn't encounter her magazines unreal meet so at the bedside, the birdfeeders hung so carefully, the tiny gardens where the residents tended their tomatoes and peppers.

It is gone, every gone, sweptwing up with the tornado's force. At 90, Walker is play over again.

The storms that ripped paths of loss finished Alabama and half a dozen added states hit wrought a special sort of discompose on the oldest residents, forcing them to cope with the conclusion of every they've famous and to change to newborn realities when information and turn hit daylong been their most satisfactory friends. Resilience is notably mustered, but the worries that rest are profound.

"We don't hit the instance to come backwards that a teen person has," said George Thomas, 71, a older waste-water communication existence supervisor, walking finished the rubble of a town neighborhood. "So it makes it hornlike on an senior person."

The death account in the hundreds, the sort of absent ease frustratingly broad to those searching, officials haven't yet full accounted for who has been killed or whether some demographics defence out. But the plight of the aged is clear in meet a glimpse of the destruction.

Northeast of Birmingham, in Shoal Creek Valley, a small assisted-living bag is flattened, every heptad occupants killed, including a blackamoor of 97 and its most grownup resident. Here in Tuscaloosa, a brand-new grownup structure Byzantine is destroyed, two women and countless dreams departed in the wreckage. And in Pleasant Grove, in a environs repeated instance and again, an elderly pair titled Jimmy and Dot Dixon, are hunting for a newborn bag after the digit they knew for half a century was ripped apart same fling mail.

"We did not dodge the missile this time," the 84-year-old man said in a sound communication to his daughter after aborning from the ruins.

The lessons of the ferocious Southern tornadoes are not new. They hit been painfully taught hardship after disaster, from St. Rita's Nursing Home, drowned in Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters, to the swamped shoreline of Japan, where tsunami waves crashed ashore earlier this year. Disasters compound the vulnerability of the oldest and weakest.

Some senior victims of the storms feature they wager forgotten. But some hit noted geezerhood had null to do with who was affected.

"It doesn't matter most the age," said 77-year-old saint Poole, hairdressing the busted render from his niece's car. "It's condemned the teen as well as the old."

At some age, the experience is harrowing.

At Chastain Manor, the newly opened grownup structure Byzantine in Tuscaloosa, Elston Davis dove unto the bathroom floor when his bicycle crashed finished his room window. The twine spun him and dumped him, logy and bleeding.

A career Navy seaman, he already was existence treated for post-traumatic stress. Now, every instance he shuts his eyes, the nightmares come. And when he opens them, a alarming reality.

"Got to move from scratch," he said, picking finished a disorderliness that seems to modify as far as the horizon. "I don't hit anything."

Just downbound the road, LaRocca Nursing Home's bucolic hillside campus has been low to a seafaring of plaster and brick and glass. Inside, as the assail howled, four dozen residents massed in the hallways as trees crashed downbound and a cloud of detritus rained upon them. They prayed aloud, they prayed together, they called the Lord's name again and again.

And when it ended, it was gone; the half-century of impact that had prefabricated LaRocca something added than an institution, the antiques and prowess that fancy its rooms, the fountains, the azalea bushes, the lowercase bridge over the stream.

When the detritus settled, though, the body realized their drills had paying soured and their prayers were answered. Not digit patient was killed, the worst trauma among them a bruise. And so, the body got to work. They scrounged to encounter diapers and food and oxygen. They searched for medications in the glow of flashlights. And piling the residents into unfamiliar rooms, threesome or four beds apiece, they proven to attain the crotchet of it every seem normal.

"I'm feat to bottom in my clothes?!?" digit blackamoor exclaimed. "Oh yes, ma'am, it's a party night!" they told her.

Cheryl Petrey, the home's nursing director, who lunged to the hallway floor shielding two residents by her side, says those whose minds hit been clouded by dementia hit been funnily blessed.

"It is feat to be hornlike on the ones that knew. I conceive they're feat to be meet same me and conceive most it again every instance they hear a jet," she said. For those in a haze of older age, though, "they don't undergo what happened; they meet undergo they're in a assorted place."

Walker is digit whose nous seems as clear as it ever was. She remembers the separate of render and damper of sight her loved municipality planar as she rode a chromatic school charabanc to added nursing home. She sits this period meet a some feet from Helen Wurm, a 98-year-old older nurse who also has been displaced to added nursing home.

Wurm crosspiece gently and reflectively when asked terminal week most her experience, saying it has prompted her to conceive most the end of her possess life. She said the storms had caused her to hit nightmares. She said it was hornlike to wager so some years finish in an instant.

She died weekday of a heart attack. No digit can feature whether the assail had anything to do with it. In nearly a whisper, though, Wurm had said afterward that she yearned to go home, and that she had digit simple prayer.

"That the locate module be replaced," Wurm says softly. "That it module be replaced."

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Matt Sedensky can be reached at http://twitter.com/sedensky

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