re: #126 Shiplord Kirel

My maternal grandmother, who lived till 2013 and age 105, was 10 in 1918 and had vivid memories of the flu epidemic. She said it was the worst public event of her lifetime, which is saying a lot since that encompasses both world wars and the Great Depression. Her teacher and 5 of her 24 classmates died and many people thought it was literally the end of the world.
In 2010, when she was 102, one of the yokel media outlets tried to capitalize on a flu scare by contacting grandma and inviting her to talk about the 1918 pandemic on the air. I guess she was the only coherent person they could find who could remember it first hand. She told them to jump in the river. “You are trying to scare people and spread sensationalism and I won’t be part of that. When you have 5 or 10 thousand people a day dying from the flu, get back to me and we’ll talk about 1918.”

My maternal grandmother was only five at the time, and her mother twenty-two.

It never occurred to me to ask my great-grandmother about it (she died in 1993), because I was unaware of the Spanish Flu’s existence at the time.

She lived in what was then deeply rural lower Michigan, miles from a town.