New Old Thing

“This Coronavirus is sure an eye-opener,” I said to Mom. “We’ve never seen anything like it.”

And Mom looked at me like, “What planet are you from?”

“Yes, we have,” she said. “Lots of times.”

And she’s right. Although this is an unprecedented phenomenon for most Americans, Mom has a perspective that literally 99.9% of the U.S. population does not – because my Mom, Beulah, is 97 years old. In that near-century, she has survived scourges that the rest of us have all but forgotten, among them measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough, mumps, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and polio. 

“Someone would get sick, maybe one of the kids who went to our one-room school, and the next thing you knew, everyone was sick,” Mom recalled. “We’d be so, so sick.”

“What did the doctor do when you were so sick?” I asked.

Another blank look. “Oh, we didn’t call the doctor. He couldn’t do anything.”

Oh, that’s right. In the 1920s and ‘30s, there were no antibiotics, no antivirals, no bronchodilators, no cough suppressants. Mom didn’t even have aspirin, which wasn’t yet widely available in rural Wisconsin. 

So how did they handle devastating disease? “Goose grease and turpentine,” Mom said. “When we were coughing or had a hard time breathing, our mother would make a salve of goose grease and turpentine. She’d rub it on our chests and cover it with a piece of flannel.” The ailing child was then tucked into bed. Not a cushy mattress, fleece sheets or a down comforter. Bed was a home-sewn mattress of cotton fabric stuffed with straw.

“Did the salve help?” I asked

“I don’t know that it did. It stunk something awful – turpentine is paint remover, you know,” Mom said. “Sometimes it burned our skin, but at least we felt like we were doing something to get better. We just had to let it run its course.”

What a helpless, humbling feeling – to be at the mercy of rampaging disease with nowhere to turn for help. By those standards, today’s Coronavirus situation – while deadly serious – is in some ways less daunting.

We lament, for instance, that there’s no getting away from the news. Mom sees it differently.

“We had no electricity, no telephone, no TV. All we had was a battery-powered radio that we turned on for a few minutes each night to hear the news,” she says. “Today we know what’s happening all around the world and we can do things to help each other.” 

Just think, with our knowledge and actions, we can slow the spread of Coronavirus, save countless lives, change the course of history by simply staying home, washing our hands, and helping out where help is needed. 

If we’re in trouble, we don’t have to hang a white sheet on the porch, which is how families used signal the neighbors that there was sickness in the home. We can call our doctors, who have a modern arsenal of treatments that can restore all the but the very sickest people to health. We have access to powerful medications and machines that can lower burning fever, ease pain, help our bodies battle infection, even breathe for us, if it comes to that. And for many of us fighting Covid-19, it may well come to that.

There are about 6 billion more people on the planet than when Mom was a child. Today’s average adult meets more people in a year than Mom has met in a lifetime. We are interconnected in ways that earlier generations could never have foretold, and informed beyond their wildest imaginings. Yet we are the same, in ways we may have forgotten, but that my mother remembers well.

We are all vulnerable.

We need each other.

We are stronger than we know.

“We can do this. We’ve done this before,” Mom said with the perspective of someone who’s lived through epidemics, the Great Depression and two World Wars. “Today, it’s a crisis. Tomorrow it will be a memory.”

Sincerely,

Greer Deneen