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Reflections on Two Pandemics
Posted on April 18, 2020by meemselle
As most of you, my Gentle Readers, are aware, I hail from a small town in Massachusetts, with family on my mother’s side that goes back so far into the mists of New England history that I believe they may actually have been the first flying fish that flopped on the ground and said, “Hello, New Hampshire.”
I was raised in an old-fashioned home, and that world is long gone. We rode our bikes everywhere; cut through everybody’s back yards for shortcuts to our friends’ houses; drank full sugar Kool-Aid; there was no such thing as permanent press fabric; and we walked home from school every day for lunch. Our milkman walked right into the house and put the milk in the fridge, so it wouldn’t freeze or curdle, depending on the season.
My mother’s mother, Mira Cheney Lawlor, was a very great lady, with an emphasis on “lady.” She defied her family by marrying an Irish-Catholic, in the days when intermarriage didn’t happen. There’s another story in there that involves my Great-Nana, Sarah Maria (pronounced “Ma-RY-ah,” like that Carey person) and an Iroquois, but as I say: that’s another story.
Anyway: I digress….My grandmother insisted on the advanced education of each of her very bright (and very beautiful) daughters, in an era when such a thing was considered superfluous for girls.
The eldest, my Aunt Dolores, was so smart, and in such a hurry to get to nursing school, that she skipped two grades and graduated from HS at age 15. Then she found out that she had to be 16 to go to nursing school. She had to cool her heels for a year, but graduated as a member of the first class of the St. Vincent Hospital School of Nursing. Aunt Dolores was born in 1915, and had she been born 10 years later, I believe she would have become a surgeon.
The middle sister was my Aunt Muriel. We always called her Aunt Dutch, for some reason lost to the sands of time. Muriel also skipped grades and became a legal secretary. She could type 90-words a minute on one of those old manual typewriters, and used to write her grocery list in shorthand, which presented a challenge to those tasked with helping her shop. She was my godmother. Had she been born 5 years later, she would have been an attorney. Aunt Dutch was fabulous: she could open any jar because her hands were so strong from all that typing.
And then, my mother, Regina L., OBM, but I’ve already written so much about her.
But there was also a son. A beautiful, much longed-for son, Michael Lawlor, Jr. He was just 18-months old when he died in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.
Back in the day, in the kind of Massachusetts houses my aunts and my family lived, the summer screens had to be exchanged for heavy storm windows every fall. The fall after burying her toddler, the storms were brought down from the attic, and my grandmother saw his little baby fingerprints on the windows, and ordered them back into the attic.
In the 1918 Spanish ‘Flu pandemic, some 50-million people died worldwide, with 675,000 deaths in the United States. There were no antibiotics, and the mortality rates were something of an anomaly. As one would expect, children under 5 and those over 65 were hard hit, but healthy people between the ages of 20-40 inexplicably perished.
When I sit and think and try to write a Few Words about this pandemic and that pandemic, I do freely admit I am at a loss. Mercifully, COVID-19 does not seem to be ploughing through the young with the dark scythe that the 1918 ‘Flu did, and for this, I am grateful. I have too many nephews and nieces and greats, not to mention Beloved Son, who fall in that demographic. I’m on the other end of it, as an elder.
Darlinos, when did I become an Elder?
I daily check the statistics for the number of cases and fatalities in the Dominican Republic. We have 10 million people, with far fewer urban centers than in the First World. Our rate of infection has mushroomed in recent weeks, but with the number of fatalities not curving quite as high as in the developed world. I know that the numbers are far from accurate, but that’s true for the whole world. Here in the DR, the mortality rate is hovering at about at 5.5%, which is pretty good, considering that this is a 2.5 World country, with a vast majority of the population poorly educated, economically disadvantaged, without access to the same kind of hygienic standards of the First World, and largely without the kind of living space or health care that allows for the isolation of infected persons.
I have been extremely proud of my adopted country for its swift and responsible measures to contain this virus. Our state of emergency has been extended to April 30th, and our curfew remains in place from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. However, these relatively positive facts do nothing to erase the reality that this is a very serious health issue for the country, without an end in clear sight.
Am I tired of being alone in the Mango Penthouse? Well, not really, as I basically hate people and am glad not to have to deal with most of them. I am also incredibly lazy, and the fact that I have this fabulous excuse to send somebody else to the grocery store and the bank, and that there are people who will deliver food to me just sets my heartstrings a-quiver.
I also am exquisitely aware of how fortunate I am that I have enough money and enough space to practice social distancing/self-quarantine for as long as I need to: almost indefinitely, in fact. I have the luxury of not having to work. I can afford to pay people to run my errands. I have enough money to buy food and water and to pay my rent and my utility bills and to contribute—in some small way—to charities working to ameliorate the hardships of those affected by this global scourge. These are enormous advantages and I know this.
Not everyone has these advantages. The little boy who would have grown up to be my Uncle Mike didn’t, in the Pandemic of 1918. And hundreds of thousands more will not in the Pandemic of 2020.
So stay safe. Stay in.
And read my blog
