Flu

I haven't been all that concerned about the flu. I suppose I might be if I were still commuting into New York, but even then, I probably still wouldn't think much about it. It's just isn't in my nature to worry over a problem before it becomes a problem. I was discussing this with someone in the medical profession, sharing our frustration with panic and overreaction.

Many years ago, long before this present anxiety over the potential for pandemic, even before fears of bird flu had entered the popular culture, I started reading Flu. It's a terrific book, though I had to put it aside about the time my son was born. (It would be years before I was finally able to finish it.)

It was from this book that I first learned of the 1918 flu pandemic. These days, most people are aware of that event, if only in vague, frightening detail. But as recently as fifteen or twenty years ago, it was as though it had been almost completely forgotten. (I don't even recall it being discussed during the flu panic of the mid-1970s.) It came as a startling revelation to me.

We have this peculiar custom of making our grief public — politicizing it, even celebrating it. In the United States alone, estimates are that a quarter of the population was afflicted by the 1918 pandemic, and 500,000 to 675,000 people died as a result — yet there are no memorials, no days of remembrance. The sole legacy of that event seems to be the "living room" (this came to replace "front parlor," at the suggestion of Ladies Home Journal, as that had been the room where people customarily left the bodies of the dead.) Most people aren't even aware of the origins of that term.

It still seems remarkable to me that such a significant event was so quickly and intentionally forgotten. One explanation suggests the rapid pace of the virus (most of the victims in the United States died within a period of less than nine months); another that significant incidents of disease were not uncommon in that era. (Typhoid, yellow fever, diphtheria, and cholera outbreaks all occurred around that same time.) But it's difficult to imagine such an incident could pass today without being commemorated.

Maybe that's the better way, though. You suffer and you mourn and you grieve, but that passes. And you get on with your life.