At the end of March New York Times reported: “COVID-19 is the largest public health crisis in modern American history. To date more than 17,000 cases have been detected and 200 people have died.” Four weeks later there are 1.5 million confirmed cases and close to 70,000 deaths in the United States alone. It’s the largest crisis our nation has faced in recent history. It has dramatically changed our world and our lives will not be the same as before.
However, COVID-19 is neither the first pandemic nor the last. A hundred years ago another pandemic generated similar disruptions. Between 1918-1919 fifty-to-one-hundred million people died in a year and a half — 650,000 in the United States. (smithsonianmag.com). Older adults with underlining health conditions are the majority of fatalities of our pandemic. But the majority of lives taken during the 1918-1919 influenza were those of otherwise healthy young adults. Many stricken, soldiers of WWI returning to the States contracted the flu while in Europe. They became sick rapidly while on board closed quarters of ships. Within hours of displaying symptoms, people’s conditions would worsen and they would die.
While the epidemic reached every part of the country including remote Alaskan villages, Boston and several other U.S. port cities were hit especially hard. It’s not clear why healthy young adults were particularly prone to catching the disease and succumbing to death. My grandparents were young adults at that time. They survived–or I wouldn’t be here today. Unfortunately, the stories of how my predecessors persevered are now buried with them. Thus, I’ll have to conjecture based on snippets from historical research and generational storytelling.
My great-grandfather Paul Thorndike was a surgeon at Boston City Hospital and an early advocate of meticulous hand washing and the disinfecting of surgical instruments prior to operations. As late as the beginning of the 20th century little was known about how germs spread. Presumably my great-grandfather had contact with people of Boston who had contracted the virus. Maybe he was even one of the specialists brought to Fort Devens 20 miles west of Boston to examine the young soldiers returning to the US with this deadly unknown virus. In any case there’s no record of him contracting the illness and he lived for another twenty years. His wife, my great grandmother Rachel, did not. A second wave of the virus surged in the fall of 1919. She was one of the several thousand who contracted it and died in October of that year. Her obituary omitted the cause of death; focusing rather on details of the funeral. David Brooks commenting on the PBS NewsHour in early March noted that the influenza of 1918-1919 was widespread and swift. People of all ages died within several days of showing symptoms. Families weren’t able to cope with how fast they were losing their loved ones and often they had to bury their own relatives. Brooks’ point was that people came up short either by lack of financial resources or by circumstances less blameless; the nation wanted to move quickly past the tragic state of affairs.
Helen Allingham 
Anna Thorndike 
Rachel Thorndike with her father
Paul and Rachel Thorndike’s youngest daughter, Anna, my grandmother, was in France volunteering with the Red Cross when her mother got sick and died. Since travel was still by ship in those days she didn’t return home in time for the burial. A few years later, Nan met her future husband, John Rock, who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1918. Earlier he had tried to enlist in the army to fight in the Great War but failed to qualify. Strangely, it appears from his journals he had little if anything to do with providing medical assistance during the pandemic. After graduating he began studies and work specializing in the fields that eventually shaped his long medical practice and research in gynecology and obstetrics including for the working poor of the tenement slums of Boston. Helen Allingham, my father’s mother migrated from New Brunswick, Canada and worked as a nurse’s aid. What were her stories? Facing death daily? Or perhaps caring for the sick in other hidden ways. Who knows? Her stories, like those of my maternal grandparents and their parents from those years, are also forgotten. As a child I remember that she would insist that hand washing, Cream of Wheat and cod liver oil were the best ways to boost the immune system. It never entered my ten year old brain to ask her why.
Two of my grandparents died before I was born or shortly thereafter. The other two were alive while I was writing high school and college essays on what makes for a meaningful life. But it never occurred to me to ask people around me who had lived full purposeful lives how they did so. Maybe that’s still true nowadays; it doesn’t occur to us to ask those who are older and presumably wiser how they faced challenges when they were our age. On the other hand, maybe a pandemic can actually wake us of out somnolence. We can think to ask questions that matter. What can I learn from my ancestors? Maybe I would ask Paul Thorndike and John Rock how and why they chose medicine and what helped them persist in finding solutions to dire human conditions. I would ask Rachel what was it like to care for her own parents when they died. I would ask my grandmother Nan about driving ambulances in post war France and my grandmother Helen about nursing with little training and resources during a pandemic. What can I do to transform knowledge into an art of living of one’s own shaping? How do my decisions and behavior impact the lives of the people around me? Do I care?
If there were ever a time to reflect on what it means to live an intentional, meaningful or caring life it would be now during a crisis that impacts everyone of us. First responders and health care works show us how to strengthen resilience and cultivate compassion. Data may determine public health policy and even best practice for preventing spread of a virus but it doesn’t show me how to care for people around me. Data doesn’t teach me how to be kind and merciful. We may not be faced with such epic moments of life and death. But we all are faced with the challenge of going beyond the froth of a superficial living and navigating into the deep; the wind and waves of a live well lived. Choosing to do so will make all the difference.
