This moment in history offers a troublesome perspective. As we monitor the news and focus on staying safe during this time of the coronovirus, we find ways to push away fear by learning how to protect ourselves, following the guidelines put out by the authorities. Focusing on the positive, we try to persuade ourselves that it won’t happen to us.
But the fear is real—we each have a limited life-time. I often say that I am on the twenty-year plan—a luxury in my family at my age. But I am not prepared to do a six-week plan, or a two-week plan. I take quarantine very seriously and listen to all advice on how to stay safe.
We are now in a position similar to that of our ancestors several generations back when scourges such as smallpox, yellow fever and typhoid, could devastate communities within weeks. Quarantine became a way of life then. Some family members contracted the illness, some were already immune. Most survived, others did not.
At that time children knew all about death from sudden illness. No family was untouched. I recently met a distant relative in her 90s who told me her story of an eight-week quarantine period the family endured in the early part of the last century. Relatives brought food, schooling was done at home, all work stopped. That experience had made such an impression on her that she took us to the site (foundation only now) of the house where they had stayed, relating the story as if it were yesterday.
We then went down the road to the cemetery where family members were buried. Death was an integral part of the life of that community. People supported each other, suffered together, and survived together.
When I first saw the headstones depicted below I was shocked by the extraordinary loss experienced by the families whose children had died, one after another, in such a short time. The grief of the parents seemed unimaginable to me. The pandemic of today makes this experience much more real, and though this one does not seem to target children, it is nonetheless devastating, partly because of its swiftness and scope.
Children of Abijah and Sarah Childs died August 19, August 23, August 24, August 28, August 29, and September 6, 1778, Lexington, MA.
Children of Benjamin and Priscilla Davey, died July 5, 7, 15, 1890, Montague, PEI, Cananda.
Children of Robert Campbell, died March 6, 12, 18, 22, 1876, Montague, PEI, Canada. Robert Campbell died 3 months later.