[Susan Kimmel Wright] These Are the Times Set for Us

Maybe we rode a subway to work in the city or got up to feed the chickens. Coronavirus’s new restrictions and fears have changed our lives in a heartbeat. Hunkering down under a stay-at-home order, I can’t help thinking about a long-ago conversation with my grandma Blanche, who survived the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918.

I had the freedom to walk to Grandma’s house alone, growing up in the 1950s. Rarely a day passed when I didn’t trudge the quarter mile to visit, “help” her, and talk for hours on whatever subject crossed our minds. (She had great patience I now realize.) One day while we baked molasses cookies in her sweet-smelling kitchen, she told me about the time she’d nearly lost her life.

Grandma’s Town

Grandma’s Story

As World War I raged in Europe, US soldiers—the famous doughboys—crowded in stateside camps awaiting transport, including her brother-in-law Lester. “The flu started in the army camps,” Grandma told me, “and it spread to the rest of the country.” Many otherwise healthy young soldiers died, and the flu proved impossible to contain.

As she talked, Grandma pressed dented metal cutters into the fat slab of dough, shaping hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades. Before she moved them to the cookie sheet, my job was to sprinkle each with sugar.

“In the past, we always heard of croup or grippe.” She slid the pan into the oven, releasing a wave of heat. “This was the first ‘flu.’”

In 1918, Grandma was only twenty-six, busy and exhausted. She had three children at home: Helen, three; Thelma, two; and newborn Paul—my father.

The virus struck our rural western Pennsylvania community in winter, when deep snow blanketed the countryside and the frozen ground turned to steel. Nearly every household was hard hit. “Only a very few people weren’t sick and were able to go for medicine,” she told me. “Many people died.” The forbidding weather made burials challenging.

Before long, Grandma caught the flu and lay deathly ill. She didn’t expect to live. “Thelma was sick in bed next to me, and she didn’t move for days.” Grandma paused. “I thought she might be dead.” I can scarcely imagine the horror of that…fearing your toddler had died, but being so sick you’re not capable of doing anything about it.

Blessedly, both Blanche and her daughter somehow survived well into their eighties. “Mother poulticed me,” Grandma said. She firmly believed the pungent onion treatment saved her life.

Grandpa and Grandma Kimmel

Today, I imagine Great-Grandma Kate’s love and courage in striding right into a house of deadly contagious illness. Like so many other women, she simply cared for the healthy and ministered to the sick. Her acts of valor, like theirs, would have slipped into oblivion within a generation, if Grandma hadn’t passed the story down to me.

Our Time of Testing

While many of us in the US have never experienced anything like COVID-19, untold millions in other times and places have had to face deadly disease, famine, genocide, war, and other disasters. Today, history has found us. Will we have the faith and strength others have shown when tested? I pray we’ll each be given the heart to trust, the courage to fight, and the humility to sacrifice—whether in helping and encouraging others or simply staying inside when we don’t want to.

God has assigned each of us his or her time and place in history (Acts 17:26). His words to Joshua are true for us, too. “Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Joshua 1: 9(b))