CHAVIES, Ky. (AP) – Angel Campbell should have been sitting in her usual chair in her grandmother’s living room this week, looking through her old photo albums and eating her favorite soup beans.
Now the living room is gone, and so is her grandmother.
A week after 82-year-old Nellie Mae Howard died in the devastating floods that killed at least 37 people in eastern Kentucky, Campbell can’t stop thinking about how she was swept away. She said losing her “Mammaw” will plague her for a very long time.
“The way she had to leave this earth just shatters me,” she said. “It just feels so cruel.”
Eastern Kentucky has been engaged for days now in the slow, grim task of recovering and burying the dead. Local funeral homes have settled into a steady cadence of visitations and memorials, sometimes in quick succession. The somber rituals have continued as more rain falls, prompting yet another flood watch across the Appalachian mountain region. People here brace at the prospect of a new round of misery.