The Nurse’s Aide

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

When Daughter #1 interviewed for a spot in graduate school, she told me one of the professors asked how she planned to pay for it. She replied that her mother had promised her that, “if need be, we’ll second mortgage the house.”

The professor was incredulous. He’d never had a female student tell him her parents were willing to go to such lengths to see that she got an advanced education. (As it turned out, she paid for her own advanced degrees—all of them—and she has several). Men went to grad school all the time, and nobody was surprised. Why were there raised eyebrows when a woman did it?

Daughter #1 comes from a long line of women who were forces to reckoned with. My mother followed my dad from one military assignment to the next, overseeing moving, school withdrawals and registrations, navigating unfamiliar cities (big ones like Dallas, Detroit, and Baltimore), spending a year as a single mom while my dad was on tour of duty in Greenland—and never blinking an eye when she had to climb on the roof to repair the air conditioner or replace the condenser when the fridge went out during the year we spent in Las Vegas waiting for my dad to come home. Oh, and seeing to it that all four of her children got the college degrees that her situation never allowed her to earn for herself.

Her mother was a woman of equally daunting strength. When my grandmother was 14, her father sent her to Chicago to help with the children of one of his sisters after the sister became critically ill—perhaps cancer?  My grandmother was young enough not to understand the disease. It was the year 1917, and while she was there, the Spanish flu came ravaging through the world, eventually killing almost 700,000 in the United States alone, and somewhere between 20 and 50 million worldwide.

Still an adolescent, my grandmother was terrified that her family back home in a remote part Lincoln County, Nevada, would succumb to the virus and die before she could get home. I can her hear voice as she told me that her father had made a long-distance phone call to Chicago, telling her not to even consider traveling home. (In those days such a call cost about $20–$400 in today’s dollars. I checked.) It was too dangerous to be exposed to the many people who might be carriers of the flu that such a trip would entail. “He told me to stay put until the epidemic was over.” At 98, her voice was still strong and her memory clear.

But she was a kid and scared, so against her father’s orders, she took a deep breath and boarded a train. The trip was slow, stopping at every small town along the way and taking several days. When she arrived at her own small town—Pioche, Nevada, population less than 400 at the time—her own grandmother was waiting for her at the deserted train station.

“They’re all scared of the Flu,” her grandmother, the local midwife, explained. “Me too. So, I made a deal with Heaven. I promised I’d nurse every single person around here who got sick as long as it took for them to get better if He wouldn’t let any of our people die. I need you to help me keep that promise.”

She loaded my grandmother and her suitcase into the back of a buckboard, and they set out to save the town. My grandmother tells of visiting almost every home in the surrounding area at one time or another. In some houses, every member of the family was sick, so the two of them cooked, sponge-bathed, sat up all night with feverish family members, washed bedding and clothing in wringer machines or copper kettles in the front yards, kept pots of soup boiling on wood burning stoves, rocked babies racked with fever, and soothed children terrified that their parents might die.

My grandmother never said how many weeks or months they went from house to house. But in the end, not one person in that small community died from the Spanish Flu. Not one.

Daughter #1 going to graduate school is not an anomaly. Her path is clear, ongoing evidence that it is always a mistake to underestimate the power of good women to do what’s best for their families and their communities, whatever generation they happen to belong to.