New Orleans died two years ago from the perfect storm of a warming Gulf of Mexico, the ecological destruction of the barrier islands and wetlands that used to protect the city, the poorly engineered levees and the massive incompetence of FEMA. As you drive around the city even today, the “God Help Us!” appeals are still written on the roofs and the walls of decaying homes that have not been re-built, that will now probably never be rebuilt.

Is there life after death in New Orleans? Surely in this town where you can buy gris-gris on the street-corner and the angels on the raised tombs reach speckled white arms towards the sky, life after death should not be such a difficult concept. After all, the dead floated up from their tombs during the floods of Katrina. Why shouldn’t the city float up from its watery grave as well?

One place New Orleans is alive is at the Home Depot. I went with the center director to buy building supplies and while most stores in St. Bernard Parish are still boarded up, the Home Depot is doing a booming business. Home Depot was one of the very first businesses to re-open in the devastated areas of New Orleans—they aren’t the fancy, new style Home Depots, but the old style corrugated metal sheds that echoed from the rain of a brief, hard shower.

And yet, there’s no jazz in the streets. The few street musicians are white and they play country or rock. Bourbon street rocks, it does not moan anymore.

There is a concrete plan to bring a lot of music back to New Orleans, however. “Musicians Village” was conceived by New Orleans natives Harry Connick, Jr. and Branford Marsalis in partnership with Habitat for Humanity. On an eight-acre parcel in the upper part of the devastated 9th ward, a plan was made for the construction of 72 single-family homes on the Habitat model of partnership among volunteers, donors, sponsors and low-income families. Their website www.nolamusiciansvillage.org is very informative. I have visited Musicians Village myself and in the street I was on about a dozen houses were occupied. The Musicians Village website indicates that all 72 houses have been started or completed and there was a dedication last month. I did also talk to one very unhappy musician who could not get into the project, but I have recently spoken to a member of the organization are there are, of course, difficulties that arise in helping people qualify.

Musicians Village is a good, though small start, but on October 12, the New Orleans city recovery director, Ed Blakely, released a drastically scaled down plan from even what his office issued in March. Some public housing is included in that plan, but all admit that the kind of public investment in re-building for the most displaced from Katrina, the kinds of public sector projects that will invit them back, is still a long, long way off.

In all the biblical portraits we have of heaven, there is music, lots of music. The hymn “Amazing Grace” helps us hear the heavenly chorus, “When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, there’s no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’ve first begun.” You’ve got to sing it to believe in heaven.

Jazz was born out of the suffering of enslaved African peoples who rose above their condition to celebrate the triumph of life over death. “Do You Know What it Means To Miss New Orleans?” Louis Armstrong laments in his gravely voice. Yes, I know, a little bit. The soul of New Orleans has not come back and so New Orleans is still dead. The shiny respirator of Harrah’s Casino is pumping breath into the tourist industry, but the funk is gone. These pearly gates are still rusted shut from the brackish water that has receded in time but not in memory. I would have been glad to see a ghost or two in the rain-washed streets late at night. I looked, but there was nobody even haunting the place.

When I die I believe that somehow I will be reunited with God in the kind of transport of soul that is felt deep in your chest, in your innards, when sometimes briefly here on earth you hear the music of the funkier angels of God like Buddy Bolden, Joe “King” Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Fats Domino. Domino had chosen to stay at home during Katrina with his wife who was in poor health. He was thought to have died in the storm; someone spray-pained a message on his home, “RIP Fats. You will be missed.” In fact he was rescued by helicopter and evacuated. He has not moved back to New Orleans, though there is a project to restore his home.

I believe in God; I believe in life after death; I just don’t want to waste my time or yours speculating about the details about what happens after we die because for me trust in God is enough (and anyway I figure that some day we will all know exactly what happens).

I am more interested in death in this life and where we fail one another so massively that life becomes a living death, a specter, a sham, a ghost of its former self. Will there be life after death for the great city of New Orleans or will those whose spirits and bodies were flooded out never be able to return?