I’ve told parts of this story before at various times and in various forms, but I figure now that we’re facing a new and frightening pandemic, the story of how the flu pandemic of 1918 affected my family is appropriate and timely material. So here goes.
My grandparents were married in May of 1914, in Baltimore. She was a Bohemian Catholic, and he was a German Lutheran, which means that their respective families didn’t approve of the union. I can’t say for sure they were entirely cut off, but relations were certainly strained. Their eldest child, my father, was born in October of 1914, which may offer another clue as to why the families may have disapproved. (Do the math.) In the years following, they had two more children, a girl and a boy, before October of 1918 rolled around.
Both of my grandparents got the flu, but my grandmother was sicker than my grandfather. Family lore says that my grandfather crawled on his hands and knees in his attempt to care for her in her illness. He survived the flu, but she did not. She died on October 14, 1918, as did hundreds of others in Baltimore. She was 25. As a young couple, they had no money, nor had they made plans for their deaths or purchased burial plots. Indeed, at the time, the city was overwhelmed with the dead. Many of them were buried in anonymous graves. My grandmother was buried in the plot that had been intended for her mother. As such, she is buried next to her father, who died in 1925, and my great-grandmother is buried elsewhere in the same cemetery.
My grandfather did not have the capacity to both care for his children and hold down a job, so he put them in an orphanage (St. Vincent’s) until he could put his life back together again. To me it has always seemed brutal that family was apparently unwilling to care for those children, but that could have stemmed from the disapproval of my grandparents’ marriage by both sides. The children lived in the orphanage until 1921, after my grandfather had remarried. By that time, the youngest had died of some kind of infectious disease.
My father used to tell the story of how, one day, his father had brought new shoes for him at the orphanage. On his next visit, my grandfather noticed that my father was not wearing his new shoes, and he asked one of the nuns where the shoes were, and she told him they were given to another child who was in greater need of shoes. That was the wrong thing to say to my grandfather, who had a famously bad temper. “You go get those shoes and you put them on his feet NOW!” And they did.
The death of my grandmother was the great tragedy in my grandfather’s life. Of course, I knew him only in the last portion of his life. He was a bigoted, miserable old man subject to explosions of anger. Only rarely did he ever seem contented, much less happy. One has to wonder if he might have been less ill-tempered if my grandmother, his great love, had lived to grow old with him.
When my grandmother died, there was no money for a headstone, so her grave was marked with a shrub. In the 1960s, the cemetery changed its policy on shrubs, and removed it, making the grave truly unmarked. This always bothered my mother. In the 1980s, my mother and my aunt split the cost of a headstone, and now her grave is properly marked. Not what you’d call a happy ending, but an ending nonetheless.
As we stare into the abyss of a new pandemic, I just have to wonder how many families will suffer the way mine did more than 100 years ago.
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