I never knew my father’s oldest sister, Ora Lee. She was a nurse working in the influenza wards during the 1918 pandemic.

It infected a 3rd of the world’s population and killed 50 million people.

675,000 died in our country. Thousands more were in uniform, ready to take on the Huns when a deadlier enemy hit them.

With no vaccine against the infection and no antibiotics, efforts were limited to isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, use of disinfectants and limitations on public events that were applied unevenly.

My father and his brothers and sisters held a strong respect, even reverence for Ora Lee and what she sacrificed.

They did not talk a lot about her but you could see in their eyes the way they felt about her. She was a family heroine.

I can only imagine what it was like to care for the suffering in wards with hundreds of beds for the infected and dying.

Like those she cared for and comforted, the influenza killed her, too.

OUR SON MARK sent me a note the other morning. In it he wrote that the flu killed more soldiers than combat in World War I, the war Americans hoped would become the one to end all wars.

It stalked into camp

when the day was damp

and chilly and cold.

It crept by the guards

and murdered my pards

with a hand that was clammy

and bony and bold.

And its breath was icy

and mouldy and dank,

and it killed so speedily

and gloatingly greedy

that it took away men

from each company rank.

The above is from The Flu written by US Army Private Josh Lee, 1919.

The young soldier was exposed to the flu with so many others.

It was a bloody meat grinder of a war, fought by mortals in trenches with machine guns as the newest instruments of death.

WE HAVE SEEN the former battlefields of western France near Verdun where Mark’s mother went to school. The trenches are still there, now covered in clover.

The unidentified remains of thousands of the dead from both sides of that grim business are retained in the Osserrarium as a lasting reminder of man’s folly.

The 2009 flu pandemic in our country, like the corona virus of today, was a novel strain of the Influenza A/H1N1 virus, commonly referred to as “swine flu.”

As of mid-March 2010, the Centers for Disease Control estimated about 59 million Americans caught the H1N1 virus, 265,000 were hospitalized and 12,000 died.

The CDC estimates that in America in the 2018–2019 flu season an estimated 35.5 million people fell ill and 34,200 died. This year we know more about treating infections and can respond faster despite the Chinese months long cover up.

We will survive this crises. Count on it.

Next: Wallflowers Anonymous

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