I grew up believing my grandmother’s gradual decline in well-being was due to a series of mini-strokes over the last decade or so of her life. Tiny, broken branches, what you’d see if you looked straight up at what were once the colorful canopies of now-barren New England oaks and elms come November, is how I pictured the blood vessels in her brain. Lots of sticks doing nothing and going nowhere.
I suspect I internalized this image while listening to my mother, storyteller extraordinaire, fabulist of the highest order who never let a bunch of facts get in the way of dramatic retellings, share repeatedly the stories of my grandmother’s past. My mom had a gift.
Perhaps to some folks, kids especially, the why’s behind the circumstances of an elderly relative’s failing health wouldn’t be all-consuming. I’m guessing lots of kids probably wouldn’t think twice about why their old people were falling apart – it’s what happens as you age, right? -- and maybe wouldn’t be too interested in the hows and whys of their elders’ early lives.
But I was raised by my grandmother, so I always had questions. My mother was more than happy to answer, in story form. Per my mom, a proven unreliable though entertaining narrator, I spent more time with my grandmother during the first ten years of my life than I did with my own parents. Who knows how true that is. But it at least partially makes sense, given our living situation.
Me, my grandmother, my parents, and baby sister all lived in the same three-decker. My mother and her siblings had grown up on the first floor. With marriage, her older siblings moved out to their own homes across the city and state. My mom, baby of the family, stayed close. After their nuptials, my parents could have easily moved to another part of the city or even to one of the nearby towns. Instead, they moved into the apartment right above my grandmother’s.
My mother was a good Irish girl and good Irish girls put their mothers’ needs first, per my mom. My grandmother lost her husband a few years before I came along and struggled mightily with loneliness and depression. She bribed my mom into attending college nearby, rather than take a full scholarship to the school in faraway Washington, DC that she had set her sights on, per mom. My birth, ten months after the wedding, filled a hole in my grandmother’s heart and gave her purpose, per mom. She took on the role of almost live-in nanny. She was always in our apartment. I was always in hers. We were close. This part I know for a fact is true.
I don’t remember exactly when I realized that my grandmother was failing, but I recall that by the time we moved to a house across the city when I was in fifth grade, she shuffled rather than walked, mumbled in a language I couldn’t understand, said “eh?” a lot, and didn’t seem to comprehend my words. Her apartment was not as clean as it used to be. Her white hair, once pulled back tight, braided, and wrapped in a bun, hung in a barely-there loose knot, wisps and tendrils escaping everywhere. She once spent most of her time cooking, reading, going for walks. But by the time I hit the double digits, she could be found most days sitting on a chair on the back porch, one arm set on the railing edge, staring mutely across the backyard or into the darkness of the musty hallway. I can’t even begin to put into words what that was like as a little kid, watching the center of my universe slowly fade away. More on that another time, perhaps.
It was only a few years ago, after I became a grandmother myself, that my mother came clean about a lot of things, including that my grandmother had had Parkinson’s Disease, not a series of mini strokes. As far as we know, my grandmother is the only one in our family to have had Parkinson’s.
The vaccine for the so-called (first documented US military cases were in the middle of the American heartland, on a base in Kansas) Spanish Flu of 1918 was the mitigating culprit, per my mom. She swore that my grandmother was vaccinated and was told in later years by a physician that one of the side effects was adult-onset Parkinson’s. At the time, I bought that story hook, line, sinker. It was only a few weeks ago that I learned that there was no vaccine at the time for that flu. I also learned that though scientists continue to investigate, they haven’t yet been able to draw a solid connection between the Spanish Flu and Parkinson’s.
By 1918, my grandmother had been in the US perhaps a half dozen years and was likely closing in on her late twenties. A proud daughter of the hard mountains and rocky fields of the storied kingdom of Munster, Ireland, she was used to hard work. She supported herself by working as a maid during the day and improved herself by studying for her high school diploma at night.
Her graduation class picture, which is printed on heavy white card stock, is dotted with the black and white photos of each of the eighteen grads. My grandmother’s oval portrait reveals a classic, young beauty of undeniable County Kerry lineage: unblemished skin, clear, deep-set eyes, rounded, high cheeks, prominent nose, shy, thin-lipped smile. Her dark hair pulls back softly from her face and, following the fashion of the time, is held in place by a thin ribbon that matches the color of her unadorned, starched blouse, modestly buttoned to her collar bone.
She looks healthy, sweet, and likely felt ready to take on the world. It’s also likely that she was temporarily thrown off course by the flu that year. I say this not because she developed Parkinson’s in her old age – the jury is still out on whether there is a correlation between the two, but because in 1918 the flu ravaged her city at the time, Holyoke, Massachusetts, along with most of the world.
By October 1, 1918, which was the year she graduated Holyoke High School’s night program, more than 85,000 cases of Spanish Flu were reported throughout the Commonwealth, though some researchers posit that total infections were much higher because milder infections went unreported.
Per Holyokecanaltour.org, annual mortality in that city more than doubled in 1918-19, rising from a base of 1,200 deaths per year to 2,500. The heaviest concentrations of fatalities were in the densely populated, immigrant-heavy neighborhoods were my grandmother and her friends likely lived. If my grandmother didn’t have the flu, at the very least she knew many people who did. I know of at least one of her dear friends who succumbed to the illness.
Across the state, the statistics were devastating. Boston, an industrial giant and thriving seaport, reported two hundred deaths per day. Worcester, MA, the third largest city in New England at the time, estimated that one third of the population contracted the virus. This mirrored the rest of the country, which reported on average a 30 percent infection rate. (ForgottenNewEngland.com).
Times were tough. Overseas, things were even worse.
More to come.
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