My grandmother died aged 25 when my father was only 14 months old. One of the few photos we have is her sitting with him, a baby on her lap. She looks so lovely, but it feels strangely heartbreaking knowing that in a matter of months, she would be dead. What caused her death or even any details of her death seems still shrouded in mystery. It was 1925 and attitudes to death were different in those times. The general approach then could be summarised as ‘least said soonest mended’!
A friend, even in the 1960s, said her mother had died when she was just 13 and her sister 11. They were sent to school the day of their mother’s funeral and no one ever mentioned her mother again. Such a reaction was fairly common in those earlier years of the 1920s, and to be fair, there were so many deaths from diseases and other causes that perhaps not talking about such losses was a practical way of coping. What is there to say about the death toll of World War I when 40 million died between the years 1914 and 1918? My grandfather fought in that war. The Spanish flu which followed from 1918 to 1919, killed another 50 million. In the face of such a scale of loss, possibly people opted to just accept death as an ever-present feature of their lives.
My grandfather was born in 1898 and entered the army aged only 16. It is hard to imagine him going through World War I as a teenager and facing the brutal horror of those days including the battle of the Somme. During that time he was shot in the upper arm and once recovered was sent right back into battle. By the time World War I was over he was in his early 20s. He returned to Northern Ireland fell in love with Beatrice Magee and married in 1923, aged 25. They had a baby boy but after just two years, his young wife suddenly died.
Because her death was seldom discussed my father knew little of his mother’s death. He was fortunate that his mother was one of many siblings and during his childhood, he had many loving aunts lavish attention on him. But that void where a mother should have been was ever-present. He had questions that were never answered. One gossipy villager whispered that she had been sent to an asylum and died there. In the absence of real knowledge, toxic gossip often takes its place. Also in today's world, not knowing your family’s health details leaves you uninformed about important things like any inherited diseases there may be. When a relative examined one side of our family tree, he was horrified at the number of male relatives who had died quite young from heart disease.
Last week, my brother found an old tray in the attic of our garage and brought it down for us to see. It had been there for decades but we read its inscription as we examined it. Given to Beatrice Magee on the occasion of her marriage in 1923. My brother took it home and cleaned, polished and fixed the tray and my Mum placed it in the living room behind the photograph of Beatrice holding her baby. It triggered renewed memories of this lady that none of us had ever met. Several family members had failed to find Beatrice’s death certificate while carrying out their research and there seemed to be a mystery in its absence.
This week I applied online and bought a copy of her death certificate using a different birth date than the one commonly used. This morning the death certificate arrived and I felt that at last the mystery of almost a century would be solved. However, the death certificate was written in such poor handwriting I could not make out the cause of death! In frustration, I sent it to relatives, medical and otherwise hoping they could help decipher the words. It took a day but the answer eventually came, she suffered from “mitral regurgitation 2 years cardiac failure certified”. So there in back and white at last was the answer.
In examining the names on her grave there are signs of the scale of loss of life in those days. Of her 10 siblings a five-year-old Violet died of scarlet fever in 1914 (the scarlet fever epidemic would peak in 1914). The Spanish flu in 1919 took two of her brothers 24-year-old William and 19-year-old Charles. They had to carry out the coffin of one brother through the family front door in November and then the second brother in December. The scale of such loss was repeated through homes throughout this country. It hurts the heart to think of it all. There are no words. How that generation weathered so much in such a short time should remind us all of the preciousness of life that we too often take for granted. War and disease rip families apart. Each loss leaves a void that lingers in the hearts of all those who loved them.
PS The Spanish Flu originated in the US on March 11, 1918, at Fort Riley a military camp in Kansas. When those soldiers went to fight in World War 1 they took the disease to Europe and the rest of the world. It feels odd that the war my grandfather fought resulted in a disease that killed his wife's two brothers. However, pestilence and warfare were often fellow bedfellows over the millennium and no doubt recent wars will continue to contribute to the re-emergence of infectious diseases. Already diseases such as cholera, polio, measles, tuberculosis and malaria are rising in the conflict areas of Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen. The sad truth is that adequate prevention and treatment of communicable diseases are often impossible in times of conflict. In fact, war itself provides perfect vectors for disease such as refuge camps, mass movements of populations, poor sanitation, and a lack of access to either proper medical assistance, water or a healthy diet.
