On PBS’s Downton Abbey

On PBS’s Downton Abbey in 1919 just after World War I

ended Her Ladyship contracted Spanish Influenza.

Lavinia, Mr. Crowley’s fiancée took a sudden

turn for the worse.  The physician stated, “Strange

disease with sudden, savage changes.”

Her Ladyship, after severe bleeding from the nose,

and vomiting blood lay in a pool of sweat.

The physician said that if she made it through the night

she would be alright. Her Ladyship made it; Lavinia didn’t.

In 1918, my motherless, thirteen-year-old father sat all alone

watching his father, who had been a captain in the Swedish military but who had

contracted Spanish Influenza from American

soldiers returning home, writhe and sweat and bleed out and not

make it through the night,

leaving my father a thirteen-year-old orphan in a strange land.

I never knew what he went through until I, a 67 year-old,

watched Downton Abbey on PBS on a lovely, balmy, winter’s Sunday

night in Phoenix, Arizona. The thirteen-year-old

never told me.