Everybody in the house is sick again. My 4-year-old, Madeline,
packages every virus in Indiana and totes it home from preschool
to share with us. Last week Madeline gave her cough and pink eye
to our infant, Lincoln, whom we call Smiley, since grins through
even the most miserable flu symptoms. He infected my wife, who
now boasts a sinus infection, sore throat, wheezing cough and
two pink eyes.
Thanks to the flu vaccine scarcity this past year, none of us
had shots. Instead we fanatically wash our hands, marching to
the sink the minute we get home and counting to at least 30 before
turning off the faucet. Our doctor says we should disinfect the
door knobs and telephones and TV remotes. It's a good idea, but
I wonder if it's a little too neurotic, like some of my more colorful
relatives.
My Great-Aunt Mary and Great-Uncle John were furious cold warriors.
Like professional hypochondriacs everywhere, they hated to travel,
especially if they had to stay the night at a motel. The white
sanitized strip bisecting the toilet seat meant nothing to them.
They knew motel rooms were filthy. If they had to tempt disaster
and spend the night in one of them, they carried in from their
car rubber gloves, buckets, mops, bottles of disinfectant, and
their own set of sheets. They stripped the beds and scoured the
doorknobs, disinfecting every protuberance. Only then -- maybe
-- could they get a good night's sleep.
Since Aunt Mary and Uncle John had no children, they celebrated
our annual visits to their farm with gusto. The moment our station
wagon rolled in their driveway, they'd burst out of the house
like Labrador retrievers.
"Hi kids!" they'd yell from the porch, their smiles enormous,
their entire bodies wagging. But when my sisters and I trundled
across the grass to hug and kiss them, my aunt and uncle did neat
and graceful veronicas, pivoting like matadors to usher us through
the doors without a single embrace.
"Not before we wash our hands!" they'd laugh loudly, almost
hysterically. "You know the rules! We must wash our hands!"
Germs. My aunt and uncle waged perpetual war against them. So
did many of their generation. Penicillin was the great magic bullet
that separated them from us. It arrived with other antibiotics
in the 1940s and rendered the old folk laughable, paranoid and
fearfully un-hip.
Hardly any of my generation knows or remembers the greatest
single killer in recorded history: the Influenza of 1918. Anywhere
from 40 million to 100 million people died, including 675,000
Americans. So many perished in the United States that funerals
were often limited to 15 minutes. There were extreme shortages
of coffins and gravediggers. Strangers couldn't enter some towns
without a signed certificate. Flu struck down people on the streets
in the morning, and they often died before nightfall.
Mysteriously, nobody knows the origins of this pandemic or why
it was so deadly for men and women in their 20s and 30s. Most
flu epidemics kill the old and infirm, but this one struck down
the young and hale, creating thousands of orphans.
The writer Mary McCarthy lost both of her parents to the Influenza
when she was 6, and raged at the world ever after. Another writer,
William Maxwell, lost his mother to the same pandemic, and the
effects were devastating. "It happened too suddenly," he said,
"with no warning, and none of us could believe it or bear it .
. . the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood
swept away." When asked later in his life what he would say to
his mother if she were alive again, he said, "Here are these beautiful
books that I made for you," and then he wept.
My wife's grandfather lost both of his parents to the Influenza
of 1918. Now Grampy is 87 and one of the healthiest people I know.
He looks like a handsome Scandinavian warlock, with white hair
and sharp blue eyes. He calls himself a Druid. He's always ready
to laugh, especially at himself. His goal is to live to 120. He
might do it. His stash of vitamins and supplements fill entire
rooms of his spacious Connecticut house. It's a full-time job
just consuming the pills -- shark oil, colostrums, kudzu extract
-- every day and at all hours.
One morning while Grampy was taking his pills, I asked him about
his parents. Grampy said he'd been orphaned when he was just a
child, his family destroyed before he hardly knew his mother or
father. He and his sister went off to live with aunts and uncles
until he entered college. When Grampy had finished talking, his
eyes misted over and he squeezed away tears with his fist.
Fear. We know almost nothing about it today. Not collective
fear, not the kind of fear and pain that infected human societies
before 1950. We've had AIDS and Vietnam and other terrible wars.
We tragically lost more than 3,000 lives to 9/11. And last year's
Christmas tsunami killed thousands of people in minutes. But we've
never really experienced whole towns dying off. Every single infant
perishing in winter. It's easier for us to deny this stuff ever
happened. History's so boring.
Many doctors and scientists warn that another plague is coming.
They don't talk of if but of when. At least
three deadly strains of bird flu are already poised to attack
humans, and these are the ones we know about. What's worse is
that antibiotics are losing their punch. It often takes several
prescriptions to lick a bad bug. Madeline is on her third drill
of antibiotics this month. What happens if this wonder drug strikes
out?
I thought of this last night as I comforted Lincoln, who was
coughing and crying in the early morning darkness. Four months
old and already so good-natured, so happy to laugh at the world
and have the world laugh with him. Not this time, though. His
cough rumbled with phlegm, and he began wailing with both his
lungs. I wondered how I'd cope with his death. Or Madeline's.
People say grief of this nature is unimaginable. But they're wrong.
Last night I imagined exactly this. I do it more often than I'd
like to admit, although these thoughts are so unbearable that
I quickly shiver and shake them away.
My friend Wayne says this kind of gruesome thinking is genetic
for parents. Tragedy is hard-wired into our brains, just in case
the unthinkable does happen. Then we can cope. Sort of like people
ingesting tiny quantities of poison to inure themselves against
potentially larger -- and deadlier -- doses later on.
I'm not a religious person, but I still have relapses of faith.
I no longer bemoan the sadness of my own death or beg God to let
me live forever. Instead, I try to make light of our common fate.
"We're all going to end up there sooner or later," I say whenever
death is mentioned in conversation. Sometimes I'll quote the old
acid king Timothy Leary, who said he was thrilled to learn that
he had inoperable cancer. "I'm looking forward to the most fascinating
experience in life," Leary rhapsodized, "which is dying," the
ultimate trip.
But it's harder to be lighthearted once you have kids. Now when
I find myself up alone at night, listening to Lincoln's cough,
snatching imaginary glimpses of my children's deaths, I sometimes
pray. "God, protect them," I whisper. "Please, God. Please protect
them."
Peter Graham teaches creative writing at DePauw University
in Greencastle, Indiana.
(July 2005)
