A desperate letter home shows the panic sparked by great flu pandemic of 1918

My grandmother, the oldest among her siblings, gave birth to my father in 1918. He was the sixth of her seven children.

Fear within their family came to life for me when I discovered a letter inside the family bible that is among the very few items I have from my grandparents.

It was from one of her younger siblings, who was away at school along with another of their sisters about 35 miles from the family farm in southern Alabama.

The envelope is covered with several stamps making up the necessary postage so it could be dispatched for “Special Delivery” written across the front.

Even with that expedited method of getting the urgent message into the hands of her sister, it still took five days as evidenced by the postmarks on the front and back of the small envelope.

The one-page letter to my grandmother from her sisters revealed the urgent help they needed. Their fear of becoming infected with the flu that had sickened others in their school was growing.

They pleaded for their sister to intervene with their mother to “send a car” to pick them up and bring them home.

The letter explained that the headmaster of the school “will not let us go on the train.” No one could ride a train anywhere without a doctor’s certification that they were not sick.

“We could stay here but it would cost 70 cents for medicine if we were to get the flu, so you can see why it would be wise for us to go,” she wrote. “She had better write a note and send by whoever comes for us … we want to come home.”

A post script was added on the back: “We have just heard we would have to pay a nurse $35.00 per week if we get sick so please send for us.”

I don’t know why the two girls asked their sister to intervene for them with their mother instead of addressing the letter directly to her (maybe she couldn’t read), but the historic world-wide pandemic now seems personal to me.

I also don’t know whether they made it home or if any of them became infected with the deadly flu. But the “what-ifs” make for interesting speculation.

That particular strain of the flu was devastating for 15- to 35-year-olds, resulting in a death rate 20 times higher in 1918 than in previous years. Physicians were helpless against the powerful agent that led to some dying within hours of getting sick.

Had my infant father been lost, nothing or any one that his life was responsible for developing would have ever occurred.

As profound at that seems to me personally for something that might have happened over 100 years ago, the reality is that all of history was altered by what remains one of the most devastating pandemic in the annals of medicine.

Estimates are that somewhere between 20 and 40 million people worldwide died of influenza in a single year. That’s more than in four years of the Black Death bubonic plague from 1347 to 1351.

It was a global disaster. Images of that pandemic in the news media in recent days reveal its magnitude. Those pictures also raise the question of whether or not there were protocols of social distancing being practiced.

No wonder my great-aunts, teenagers at the time, wanted to come home, where they felt they would be safe in frightening times. Their instincts to separate themselves from others seemed to reflect at least a fundamental notion of self-preservation.

That’s something a great many are experiencing a century later.