My daughter’s school closed last week, as did mine, as did my wife’s (three different schools; three different closures). My wife and I continue to teach online, working through Google’s G Suite for Education and Zoom. My daughter, a first grader, completes some of her assignments online, communicating with her teacher through SeeSaw, using a variety of online games to work on math and reading, doing yoga with Cosmic Kids on YouTube, and engaging in plenty of independent learning activities, such as drawing, reading, and building with LEGOs. In addition, my wife and I take time away from our students to help our daughter with science, music, gym, etc. (yesterday afternoon, for example, I helped her begin a personal learning project wherein she will, through the development of a coherent slideshow and accompanied presentation, persuade her mother to let us get a puppy — but I digress).
On the second or third day of our schools being closed, my daughter’s schedule called for social studies. I’d received an email that morning from PBS promoting a two-year-old episode of American Experience titled Influenza 1918, which focuses on the 1918 flu pandemic. I asked my daughter if she was interested in watching it for her social studies class. She said, “Yes,” and we sat down and watched it together.
There’s a lot to digest in the documentary. Caused by an H1N1 virus, the pandemic killed over 50 million people worldwide. In one month in 1918 — the month of October — over 195,000 Americans died from the virus (for comparison’s sake, the total number of American military deaths in all of World War I is 116,516). Towns throughout America were forced to bury their dead in mass graves. Children watched their parents die; parents watched their children die. Cousins were lost to orphanages; families and dreams disintegrated.
As I hear the governor of my state declare a “Stay Home, Stay Safe” order, I think back to the Influenza 1918 documentary, and I remember the way I had to describe to my daughter what a mass burial was, and I see my wife in the other room giving me a look like, “What the hell are you showing our seven-year-old daughter?”, but then I think of my daughter, later in the week, days after we watched it, standing in the door of our bathroom, telling me how lucky we are because we don’t live in 1918.
I also think about the day this week when she and I went out for a walk and we came across two of her best friends playing together and I had to tell her that no, she couldn’t go play with them, and how she listened to me, but how she also put her head down and walked home in silence, and how as soon as we entered the house, she ran up to her room in tears, not even stopping to take off her coat, and how I followed her upstairs to comfort her, and how she collapsed on her bed with her face in her pillow and her knees pulled up tight, and how she didn’t even argue with me about it or scream at me to “go away!”, but instead how she told me she “gets it,” she knows why she can’t play with her friends, but how it still makes her sad and she just needs to cry, and how I walked back downstairs to the sound of her wailing into her pillow, and how later, when she got quiet, I was able to go back upstairs and help her take off her coat, and how, after a good cry, she was ready to go on with her day.
I think about my seventy-two year old parents, one of whom is immunocompromised. I think about my father needing to keep himself busy, and venturing out to a hardware store for some item that will help him do just that, but I also think about all the other people in his hometown who have to keep themselves busy and who also need to go to the hardware store to get an item to do just that, and I imagine all of the people they’ve interacted with and been breathed on by, and like a terrifying movie, I watch the virus move from person to person until it touches my father’s hand, which soon touches my mother’s hand, and soon…
I think about my mother just wanting to spend time with her grandchildren, and their governor’s shelter in place order.
I think about my students, teenagers who have already experienced so much trauma, now being forced to stay inside with their families, some of whom contributed to that trauma. I think about my students’ parents, many of whom are single mothers, now robbed of even unsteady employment, and the number of mouths they need to feed.
I think about my coworkers who are home alone, my cousins and uncles and aunts, my in-laws, my friends across the country, and the loneliness, pain, and anxiety that so many of us are feeling.
But then I think about those mass graves, and with my seven-year-old daughter, I feel thankful to be alive.