Happy New Year. For my mother-in-law, it’s a new century, since Mary turned 100 on December 22. And as she’ll tell you, it’s the second pandemic that she’s connected to, since her parents met during the last one in 1918. 

In fact, because of it. 

Mary’s father, Cecil, was a U.S. serviceman who landed in England during the summer of 1918 to fight in the First World War, part of the final wave of American military arriving overseas. Not that they knew the war was almost over. Everyone had been saying for years that it would end any day, but it kept dragging on. Cecil was a Canadian but he’d been working for an uncle in Indiana, and had signed up to fight in the U.S. armed forces at 28 when they lowered the height requirement. He wasn’t very tall. 

We still have Cecil’s helmet somewhere, barely used. Almost as soon as he landed, he fell ill with what they called the Spanish flu, a highly contagious virus that could kill people in a day. That’s not an exaggeration, as Emma Donoghue’s novel, The Pull of the Stars, makes clear. The book is set in Ireland during the 1918 pandemic, the main character a nurse named Julia Power whose trials we follow through four astonishing days in a makeshift obstetrics ward. All the women in labour are suffering from the flu. Double jeopardy. It sounds awful.

Mary’s mother, Daisy, was a nurse at the Bagthorpe Isolation Hospital in Lincolnshire when Cecil landed in England. That’s her picture at the top, taken while she was nursing at Bagthorpe. Daisy wasn’t a Downton Abbey-style upper-class girl playing at being Florence Nightingale. Her father owned a pub, the wonderfully-named Crooked Billet in Fleet, Lincolnshire, while her grandmother was the proprietor of another pub called the Jolly Crispin Inn, where Daisy was born in 1893. 

She worked as a maid while she was a teenager—and in the family photos, the young Daisy looks like the tiny, fierce Anna Bates on Downton Abbey—but she’d always wanted to be a nurse. It was one of the few professions open to women at the time, and Daisy got a chance to train at Bagthorpe in 1915, when she was twenty-one. Bagthorpe wasn’t a military hospital. It had been established years before to treat infectious diseases among the local population. Daisy remembered one woman arriving with a case of elephantiasis after living for years in the tropics, and she often made home visits to children suffering from scarlet fever. But soldiers with infectious diseases could be sent there, and Cecil arrived in the autumn of 1918, not long before the Armistice, suffering from the flu. By the time he was discharged from hospital a couple of months later, the war was over and Cecil was shipped back to the U.S. 

A couple of months later? I recently re-read another book about the 1918 pandemic: Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a novella by Katherine Anne Porter. Porter herself spent months in a Denver hospital suffering from the flu and its long after-effects, and wrote about the delirium it brought through her main character, Miranda.

“’I know those are your hands,’ she told (the nurse) Miss Tanner, ‘I know it, but to me they are white tarantulas, don’t touch me.’

“’Shut your eyes,’ said Miss Tanner.

“’Oh, no,’ said Miranda, ‘for then I see worse things.’”

After Cecil got back to the U.S., he started writing letters to Daisy. When she wrote back, he steered the correspondence toward marriage, finally asking her to sail to either Montreal or New York. He would meet her wherever she wished and they could marry. This wasn’t an easy decision for Daisy, who had recently been offered the position of Matron—head nurse—in a new children’s hospital. When Mary asked Daisy years later about her decision to turn it down and marry Cecil, Daisy said she had opted for adventure. 

She also made Cecil come back to England to marry her, telling him in a phrase famous in the family, “If I’m worth having, I’m worth fetching.” They were married in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, in October, 1920. 

Mary was born in Ohio a couple of years later, and her parents moved her to Canada when she was two years old. Much later, when Mary applied to get her first passport, she discovered that the informality of border crossings at the time meant she’d never been registered as a Canadian citizen, although she’d been voting in every election since she’d turned twenty-one. But that’s another story. Cecil lived to be 93, dying in the same Toronto hospital on the same day that our son was born in 1983—his first great-grandchild. Shortly after Gabe was born, a nurse came into my room. She asked my husband, Paul, “What do you want to do with your grandfather’s glasses?”

We took this in. “Did Granddad die?” I asked. The nurse felt awful.

Daisy lived for another decade, mostly on her own, and died when she was three months shy of her hundredth birthday. 

Now here’s Mary turning 100 during the next great pandemic, which has often left her feeling trapped. Mary has always walked every day. But she has an apartment in an assisted living facility, and Public Health has declared lockdowns during several outbreaks, which have thankfully proven small and well-contained. Still, they’ve meant she’s often been locked in her apartment, where all she can do is pace from window to door and door to window and back again. When residents are allowed to move around the building, she takes the elevator downstairs and slowly circles back up on foot. 

Mary has also survived a case of COVID, hospitalized just before her second dose of vaccine last summer after she fainted in her room. When she first arrived in hospital, she tested negative, then positive a day later, and soon spiked a fever. Under COVID protocols, they wouldn’t let us into the hospital to visit her, but the nurses were good about holding up a phone so we could talk. Mary would always say emphatically that she wanted to go home. Eventually she did, surviving COVID at the age of 99, to medical amazement.

With the waves of outbreaks rising and falling, we’ve been able to visit Mary and to go on walks, even out to restaurants. Then not. We planned her 100^th birthday party in the residence party room for 12 close relatives. Sorry, cancelled. Then, the night before her birthday, Mary had a fall and hit her head. She can’t remember what happened, but she was able to call for help, and the night nurse at the residence sent her to hospital. Her daughter, my sister-in-law, met her there, and while the Emergency room staff let them say hello, COVID protocols meant Sheila had to wait outside in a tent they’d set up in the hospital parking lot. 

Canada. Winter. Cold.

At midnight, as Mary officially turned 100 years old, the nurses brought her a piece of cake and sang Happy Birthday. She said the nurses treated her like royalty. I love nurses. My mother was a nurse, and she and Daisy got along very well. The ER doctor closed up the gash on the back of Mary’s head and found no other damage, sending her home with her very cold daughter at 3:15 am. At least Sheila and my husband and their brother were allowed into Mary’s apartment the next afternoon for a small family celebration. The rest of us FaceTimed and phoned. So this story starts in an infectious diseases hospital during the First World War and ends up on FaceTime. 

Happy New Year. Happy Omicron. Happy Brave New World.