What Would My Mom Be Thinking Now?

As I’ve filtered through the family photo albums, I came across some great photos of my mom, Joyce Florence Wordsworth (nee Healey).

I mention her maiden name to help other family members who may be using this site to get some family history, and because when the photos I’m talking about were taken, she was Joyce Healey.

My mother was born in about 1920 in England. In this photo she’s identified as being “About 5 years old.”

This would have been just after the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918. It’s estimated that 500 million people contracted the flu worldwide, and 50 to 100 million people died from it, depending on what source you use. Obviously there simply wasn’t the ability to accumulate accurate data of this nature in 1918.

The reality though, is that my mother grew up shortly after a massive dislocation in the social fabric, where young, healthy people died, often very quickly, from a flu. The stories are horrific and heart wrenching.

By the time the second photo of her was taken in 1927, with her younger sister Peggy as a baby, the world was about to enter the Great Depression. My mom never talked about how it affected her family, but it was also worldwide and devastating. Lives changes dramatically. It was not a time of plenty for most.

By the time this third photo was taken, the world was about to enter the second world war, with England in the German crosshairs. Mom actually drove a firetruck and would have lived through epic death and destruction.

Through most of this time vaccines weren’t available for many of the diseases we rarely hear about today. Kids still died of measles, and there wasn’t a vaccine available for it until 1963. The first polio vaccine wasn’t available until 1955 so mom might have known kids who became afflicted with it.

This was about the time I came along. I was born into a time where vaccines were eliminating so many of the diseases that parents had lived in fear of. There were now antibiotics to deal with so many of the afflictions that previously had deadly results.

Economies were starting to use fossil fuels and technology to deal with providing so many of the basics like food and heat, that my mother may have experienced shortages of so often previously. I have never lived through a depression, or a war, or a pandemic … well, a depression or a war.

The CoVID-19 pandemic that is now afflicting the whole world opens up a whole new perspective for me on what my mother lived through.

For the first time in my life I’ve experienced shortages. Stores have been sold out of basics like hand sanitizers and toilet paper. Whole supply chains have broken down. We’ve learned new terms like ‘social distancing’ and ‘self-isolating.’ People haven’t been able to visit parents and grandparents in long-term care facilities, and this is where over 80% of fatalities have been in Canada.

When I got back from Florida this winter I had to stay out of the office for 14 days for safety. We’ve had to restructure our work environment and try and isolate the factory and warehouse from the business office. International travel has been curtailed and it looks like huge swaths of the economy like the hospitality and travel industry are going to suffer a massive and sustained downturn.

I wonder how my mom would be reacting to this? Would it be a “been there, done that” response? Would this seem like pretty small potatoes compared to what she lived through? It would be easy for her to say, “You want to talk about a pandemic, let me tell you some of the stories my parents shared about the 1918 Pandemic.”

“You want to talk about shortages, let me tell you about the depression.” “You want to talk about social disruption, let me tell you about London being bombed during ‘The Blitz!’”

I suppose it’s all relative. I have lived through a time of tremendous peace and prosperity and social cohesion. Improved sanitation and food supplies, vaccines and improved health in general has prevented a wide spread pandemic, until now.

It’s clearly a challenging time for many of us. Life has clearly been transformed. One wonders when, or if, things will ever get back to ‘normal’, and what that new normal will be?

I will take solace in how my mom would probably have reacted. She was British and lived through very tough times.

I’m pretty confident her advice would be to “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Thanks mom. Sounds like a plan. I’ll do my best.