Hope and a Prayer: Spanish Flu to COVID-19
Before the lockdown, before COVID-19, I never understood what I saw in my grandmother Mary’s eyes. She always seemed sad, despite a ready smile. As a child, I loved to nestle against her ample bosom, and play with cousins at her house. But I was a teenager when she died, and teenagers generally don’t have much time for family history. Now that we are in the midst of a pandemic, as she was in 1918, I have many questions.
What happened to Grandmother and her family? As a nurse caring for COVID-19 patients, what can I learn from her? So I re-read her autobiography, interviewed long-lost relatives, and sought old photographs. Faded photographs tell a story so old, yet so new as I grieve for life I as I once knew it. Here is Mary’s story, told through her voice.
“We cried and coughed together.”
The winter of 1918 was unforgettable. For eleven days, a feverish Mary lay in bed alongside her older sister Fannie, both stricken by the H1N1 influenza pandemic known as the Spanish Flu. One by one her brothers became sick and took to their beds: Jacob, Abe, John, Dan, Isaac, Walter, Phares, and Paul. While none of them joined the rows of bodies filling the morgues that winter, seventeen-year-old Abe came closest.
December winds rattled around the Delaware homestead as Abe lay on the wooden operating room table; part of his lung on the kitchen floor. Normally the kitchen bustled with the squabbles of Mary and her 11 siblings and the aroma of their mother’s fruit pies. Now, there was only the sound of quiet desperation and the smell of chloroform and ether. It drifted under the doors and over the children and baby Elizabeth, anxiously praying with their mother Lizzie.
“No use sewing him up. He’s too far gone,” despaired one doctor to the other. Dr. James, the family physician, disagreed, “Where there’s life, there’s hope. Let’s finish our job.”
Four weeks prior, the oldest brother, Henry, had come home from work in Dover, Delaware, sick with the flu. Businesses, schools, and churches were closing due to the contagion sweeping the world. Although Lizzie told the children to stay out of Henry’s room, Abe and John soon became sick. While John quickly recovered, Abe did not. Because the hospitals were full, Lizzie cared for Abe at home with the help of a nurse who came to stay with the family for six weeks. Dr. James made house calls and returned time after time to drain Abe’s lungs but Abe’s condition worsened, until Dr. James made the last-ditch effort to save his life in the kitchen operating theater, on a table hand-hewn by the second oldest brother, Jacob Jr.
Lizzie took care of all of them, giving up her bed to sleep on the couch. According to Mary, Lizzie seemed to forget herself, caring only for her family night and day. Lizzie fought against the specter of death that had claimed her 43-year-old husband, Jacob Weaver, less than a year earlier.
On March 5, 1918, Jacob Sr. had come in from trimming grapes on the 135-acre fruit and vegetable farm.
“I can still see him standing on the end of the porch looking at the orchard that evening. As a child, I wondered what he was looking at.”
He had laid on the couch, saying, “I don’t feel well,” then he had gotten up to eat dinner with his wife and children. A few hours later, he was gone, leaving a pregnant Lizzie with 11 fatherless children, and a large farm. Dr. James attributed his death to a heart attack.
On the day he was buried, ten-year-old Mary and Fannie stood outside for hours in a biting cold wind wearing only the new sweaters Lizzie had bought for them, hoping for spring temperatures. Approximately one-thousand mourners viewed the body outside the Pike Old Order Mennonite church, as was custom.
“I shook and shook with cold and fear.”
There was no Christmas that year; however, the family celebrated Abe’s new lease on life and the safe birth of Elizabeth. Despite the resurgence of hope, Mary frequently saw her mother crying, and praying.
“She couldn’t understand the many ‘whys.’”
Although Lizzie’s spirits improved, her strength never returned after nursing her children back to health. She finally sought medical care and was told she needed an operation to remove gallstones. Before leaving the farm to take the train to a Philadelphia hospital, Lizzie asked Mrs. Pickering, their kind neighbor lady, to look after the children while she was gone.
“What is taking Lizzie so long to get ready?” Mrs. Pickering wondered, as the car idled outside. Jacob Sr. had bought the Michigan Buick despite the Pike Old Order Mennonite church’s ban on cars, and his subsequent discipline. Defending his decision, Jacob told the elders from his hometown church near Hinkletown, Pennsylvania that his large family could not fit into his horse-driven buggy, and he needed the car to get his family to the Greenwood Mennonite church in Delaware, 30 miles from their homestead.
Mrs Pickering finally peeked into the bedroom and saw Lizzie on her knees, praying, beside Elizabeth’s cradle. Finally, Lizzie came out with Elizabeth in her arms, handed the baby to a seventeen-year-old neighbor girl, Lucy Bender, and instructed Jacob Jr. to look after his siblings. She kissed eleven-year-old Mary and told her to be a good girl.
“I’ll be back soon,” Lizzie reassured the children.
But she never returned. On September 4,1919, three days after the operation to remove over 500 gallstones, Lizzie died of unknown complications, and 12 children became orphans.
Initially, the Bender family and the children struggled to help the newly-married Jacob Jr. and his bride, Lydia, maintain the farm and keep the family together. Within a year, however, the decision was made to sell out and put the children in private homes. Thus, the younger children were driven across the state line to a church in Morgantown, Pennsylvania.
On a bleak morning, the children lined up in front of the Conestoga Mennonite church congregation, wearing their Sunday-best, handmade clothing. As was the community custom, church members selected one single child, or perhaps two, from the lineup: a mouth to feed versus hands to milk a cow, work the farm, or wash dishes and diapers. Barely twelve-years-old, Mary was chosen by a family with three boys to work as a hired girl, along with her brother Dan. For Mary, the separation from her beloved sister was especially devastating.
“I was terribly homesick and cried myself to sleep many nights. We [the orphans] were expected to work for our keep.”
Mary missed her mother’ gentle voice and home life. Through the thin bedroom walls, she often overheard the farm couple arguing: the wife wanted less conservative clothing than the husband. Up at 5 am to milk the cows, Mary and Dan had to finish their chores before school, so they often arrived late to the one-room schoolhouse. Books were scarce, and Mary had already studied the same books for two years. She soon dropped out of school.
The other younger siblings suffered similar hardships, also dropping out of school to work. Paul cried so much his adoptive family returned him to Jacob Jr. and his wife. Phares’ new family sent him out to plow an impossibly stony field; discouraged, he quit, and returned to Delaware.
Throughout her teens, shuttled from family to family as a hired girl, Mary struggled with “mountains of loneliness and discouragement.” When she was 19, she finally found what felt like a real home with Elmer and Sarah Stoltzfus, who lived along Mill Road, Morgantown, on a dairy and chicken farm. They asked Mary to live and work with them; she stayed five years.
“Sarah’s interest in me changed me. She showed such love that spoke to me.”
Having found a loving family, Mary naturally fell in love with Elmer’s beloved brother, Naaman. They married in 1932. Eighteen happy years followed, along with the birth of 11 children. Lillian arrived first, born with a broken leg. Mary described Lillian “as a little jewel of our own” and Naaman Sr. declared her as “the prettiest and nicest baby ever.”
In 1935, scarlet fever entered the Stoltzfus home, and both Lillian and her eleven-day-old brother, James, became sick. For 42 days, the family had a quarantine tag on their home. No one could come into the house, but friends came to see Mary with her babies at the window.
Tragically, on August 17, 1951, history repeated itself. Mary became a widow at age 43, after her husband died suddenly following a back operation, leaving her with 11 children, including a newborn, David Ray, whom the doctors called a “flesh water” baby. Naaman Sr.’s death came less than one month after the family photograph. Once again, over one-thousand people came to view the body. Within a year, David Ray also died.
“I cried until I could not cry any more… I learned to never start my day without prayer.”
With heavy hearts, Mary and her children carried on the work of the farm, which included 80 purebred Holstein cattle. In June, 1953, a field representative from the Dairy Herd Improvement Association (DHIA), visited the 126-acre farm to transfer Naaman’s membership in the Holstein association to Naaman’s widow. The representative, E.P. Bechtel, expected to find chaos; instead, he found one determined widow and “each child doing their part.” Bechtel’s farm tour included an introduction to a prized Holstein named Bessie Mercedes Fortilla, a pony named Presto, a flock of 50 goslings, 150 ducklings and two fox-terrier puppies.
According to the Milk Producer’s Review, “Certainly no lone woman could be expected to feed and clothe, much less educate, a family of twelve single-handed. Obviously, the only thing for her to do, under the circumstances, would be to find the best possible homes for her children, thus giving her an opportunity to find employment, and thereby support herself,” (“The Mary B. Stoltzfus Story,” E.P. Bechtel, June,1953).
Mary thought otherwise. Her family was staying together.
For me, this winter of 2020 is unforgettable and cruel; the quarantine — long, as it stretches into spring, and now, the summer. Since I returned from abroad in March, I have not been able to visit or hug my elderly mother, Lillian, who lives in a retirement community. But for the children of the year of the Spanish Flu, and the generation that followed, I suspect their winters were longer, their family separation — crueler.
I grapple with Grandmother’s choice to name her autobiography, “God’s Care for an Orphan,” when it seems that care was long in coming and short-lived. Snuggling on her lap when I was four years old, two braids and dirty, bare feet, how could I know then to ask what I want to know now? Why did she never talk about being lined up in front of the faithful, and chosen, like slaves, to serve as hired help? Why did I learn this tragic detail from others, and not her autobiography? Did she block it from her memory? Her misfortune occurred in an era when church was the main form of community and child welfare, of sorts, and in a time when orphan trains existed, before child welfare services and before federal child labor laws.
Although I will never know Grandmother’s full story, and I can never ask my great-uncle Abe, puffing on his beloved cigars, how he felt lying on the kitchen table, I think I better understand what I saw in my grandmother’s eyes: a legacy of sadness, faith, love, resilience, and always, hope.
Life continues, not always as planned, and sometimes — minus a lung — and, for this great-grandchild of the Spanish Flu generation, a new appreciation for family togetherness. When I am tempted to feel sorry for myself behind my stifling mask, I remember Grandmother, and I start each shift with hope and a prayer.
Taken from “God’s Care for an Orphan: My Autobiography,” 1978, by Mary B. [Weaver] Stoltzfus, edited by Rosanna R. (Stoltzfus) Graber. The assistance of Lillian (Stoltzfus) Stoltzfus, Rosanna and Robert Graber, Ethel (Stoltzfus) Shank, Naaman Stoltzfus, Jr., Marelle (Mary Ellen Stoltzfus) Groteluschen, and Mae (Weaver) [Abe’s daughter] and Richard Patterson, is gratefully acknowledged.
