Orphaned By the Flu

My grandmother was orphaned in 1918, when she was 9 years old. Between July and December she lost her father, her mother, and her older sister. This was the Flu Epidemic of 1918. San Francisco was a city of immigrants then, as it is now. My great-grandmother, Annie, came from Ireland with her sister and brother and settled in San Francisco's Mission District. She married an Austrian man and they had four children. Her sister Mae married an Irish man--he was killed in a car accident on the day of their child's baptism in 1914. Mae was left a single mother, but she had her sister to rely on. They shared a pair of flats on Bartlett Street. Then in July of 1918 Annie's husband, Fred, came down with the flu. He died five days later. Her daughter Louise was next, and then Annie herself in late December of the same year. My grandmother, Kathryn, was left alone with her younger sister and brother, with only their Aunt Mae to care for them. Imagine three girls. Their parents die of the flu. They live together in a boarding school, and visit with their aunt once a month. Mae worked in a milliner's shop, decorating hats. When she found herself with four children in her care, she did what any good Irish Catholic would do, she made an appointment to see the Archbishop to ask advice. Archbishop Hanna advised her to send the children to a convent boarding school outside of the City, so that's what she did. She worked to pay for their schooling, and they boarded at St. Gertrude's and St. Joseph's Academies in Rio Vista. Little Dorothy used to fall asleep on her sister's lap during school hours. At first the nuns at the Orphanage, St. Gertrude's Academy, didn't want to take Dorothy. "She's too little," the Superior said. "We don't have any girls under 5 and we have nowhere to put her during the day." But Aunt Mae convinced them not to separate the sisters who had lost both of their parents and their older sister to the flu epidemic, and whose brother had been sent down the road to the boys' school. "Please don't separate them," she said. "Kate will take care of her sister." And so Kate had to promise to keep Dorothy with her at her desk in the schoolroom during the day, and to keep her quiet. Dorothy was a good girl, so she would curl up on the bench next to her sister and listen to the lessons until she was sleepy enough to take a nap. She was only 3 years old. Their brother is down the road at the boys' school, but they don't get to see him until they are 16. And so they helped each other grow up, and they helped each other through life's trials, because they had only each other to rely on. When they turn 18, they leave the orphanage and move back to San Francisco and live together in a flat in the Mission District. They find work. They buy a house together in a new development out near the ocean beach. One evening they get a visit from a policeman. Knocking on the front door, he comes to tell them that their aunt, the aunt who had worked so hard to put them through boarding school, who had been their only lifeline, apart from each other, the only reminder they ever had of their parents, had died. Stepping off of the streetcar on the way home, she had been hit by a car. They mourn again. They meet young men. They marry and celebrate their new lives together, close, separate. They branch out and buy homes, all within two blocks of each other. Their families grow. Cancer strikes. One boy becomes ill and dies. Another young girl is born. They are together and care for each other. Sickness strikes again. They come together to care for the children. Life goes on. The children get married. Some of them go away to war. They come back and the grandchildren begin to arrive. Imagine the time passing. There is love, there is family, there is food, there are parties, there are friends, there are weddings, there are baptisms, there are drinks, there are travels. The funerals begin. Kate goes first. Then Helen. Dorothy is the last one, and she watches over all of us. Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, matriarch to all. Perhaps she suffered more, watching so many go before her. And perhaps she loved more, she had us all to herself the longest. They are together again now.