The 1918 flu

We were all sick with the flu after  Christmas.  It has been a bad year here for sickness.  And as we were focused on that so centrally for over a week I thought about a couple of things.

First, my Great-Grandmother Archange Garneau died of the flu in 1918 (she is the woman in the back of the picture). She was a nurse.  My grandfather was two and she has another younger child as well.  I thought of how she might have felt, that sort of weariness when you are getting sick and you have children you have to look after and you see the hard hazy days ahead.  That point when you are so sick you don't care abut anything else.  Did she hold her little children as she lay in bed?  Did she know she was dying?

I thought about how lucky I am to have help so close if things got worse.  I thought about how much her death affected the family - how the community failed at that point.  My great grandfather turned the alchol.  The younger kids went to the orphanage and grew up without a mother.  There is story I read that great grandfather spent the day she died going around town and keeping fires lit.  There was so many sick people that bare life and not freezing was the goal.

I thought about how my family survived all those other rounds of disease brought from Europe only to loose the fight then.

I was also thankful to have those times with the children.  There was so much I meant to get done over the holidays, but being sick forced me to bare life.  To enjoy lying beside my family, to share a tea together.  It was also a time of learning, phrased not so elequently in "I am sicker than you so do for yourself"  mostly with my little one to remind her that she needed to give back into the family community once she was feeling better.

I only know what I have read about Archange, but I so feel for her as a mother.  I feel her loss as echos through our family.  With her death we lost our Metisness and turned to bare life for many years.