Blog: If nothing else, the human spirit is surprisingly resilient

My grandma is about 90 years old. The truth is, she doesn’t really know.

Her original birth certificate was lost, and by the time she got one reissued, the only date on record was her baptism July 2, 1931. So that's the date they used as her birthday, even though it's likely that she was already one or two years old by that time.

Technically, she'll be 89 in the summer of 2020, but the truth is, she's probably going to be 90. "Who knows, maybe I already am?" she whispered to me one day, giggling.

For being a 90-year-old, my grandma (we call her Mom Mom) has an incredible memory. She forgot to call me on my birthday this year, and we both chalked it up to old age. But if you ask her about anything from her childhood, she can recall it like it was yesterday. Probably better than yesterday.

It's funny how the mind works like that as you get older.

"I can remember as far back as when I was five years old," Mom Mom declared on the phone last weekend, sounding surprisingly chipper—despite being about 90 and being stuck at home during a global pandemic.

"This is the second time I've been quarantined, you know," she says, and I knew it, but I didn't really know until now.

The first time Mom Mom was quarantined was during the polio outbreak of 1940 in Fort Wayne. She was living in a little red brick country house that her grandfather built himself off Illinois Road just between Fort Wayne and Columbia City. It burned down about 10 years ago in a fire, so you won't find it today, but it's still there in my mind, reminding me that just two generations ago, my family lived in houses they built with their own hands, without any running water.

Mom Mom's family was rather poor, she says. She tells stories about how all of the siblings shared the same bed in the same room, and went outside to use the outhouse, and helped their father clean and gut pigs on the farm.

"My, how the times have changed," she says, laughing again.

Mom Mom was the youngest of what was once five siblings. Her older brother, John, was killed by a car crossing Illinois Road, and one of the children died at birth and was buried in the backyard.

It was her oldest sister, Grace, who got polio, which required the family to quarantine for six weeks. Grace was 18-years-old and engaged to be married at the time, but she was still living at home. When she got sick, they put yellow tape around the house, and nobody was allowed to enter or leave besides doctors. Mom Mom was about 9-years-old at the time, and she has scattered memories of her parents caring for Grace.

Polio is a contagious viral illness that causes nerve injury, leading to paralysis, difficulty breathing, and death in its most serious forms. The virus primarily spread orally or through poor sanitation until a vaccine was developed in the 1950s. But that was too late for Grace.

Her condition deteriorated quickly, and while a doctor said she could continue to live inside a steel lung if the family got one from Chicago, there was no telling if it would arrive in time. Even if it did, she would have a terrible quality of life.

Grace ended up dying at home, and since they couldn't have a funeral, they laid her body to rest in the front window of the house and set up chairs behind it for the family to sit. Then friends and neighbors walked past the window to pay their respects.

Whenever I think about that house today, I always picture Grace there in the window, and all of the people walking by slowly, wearing black and dabbing their cheeks with embroidered handkerchiefs.

I can't imagine what it would be like, not only to lose a sibling, but also to lose someone to such a scary disease in your own house, and then have their body right there with you, and you couldn't leave.

Miraculously, no one else in the family got polio, although Mom Mom's sister, Donice, believed she had some lingering health effects from it.

That fall, Mom Mom and Donice ended up missing the first two weeks of school because of the quarantine. They usually went back to class after Labor Day, but that year, it was September, when all the leaves were starting to change and fall off the trees in Fort Wayne.

That's one of the reasons Mom Mom hates fall to this day. While I grew up in an era where fall means cinnamon candles, pumpkins, and pumpkin spice lattes, Mom Mom feels a deep depression every time the leaves start to change. She remembers it as the season she lost her sister and lived through something that was previously unimaginable for us today.

In some ways, it still is, but as we sit at home under quarantine, going into week five (or is it six?) of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as news comes in about the death tolls each day, I feel like I have a little window into Mom Mom's experience. While I don't fully feel her pain, perhaps I understand it on a deeper level.

During the first few weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak, I remember joking with a friend about how all of the young people I knew were taking extreme precautions. But a lot of the older people I knew weren't taking it as seriously, even though they were technically more at risk.

"Maybe it's because they've lived through so much more," my friend said, and that stuck with me.

My Mom Mom is going to be about 90 this year, which is nearly a century old. She's lived through the Great Depression and the Great Recession. World War II and Vietnam. The invention of the color television and the personal computer and M&Ms. The rise and fall and rebirth of downtown Fort Wayne. Polio, and now you can add the COVID-19 pandemic to the list.

While there is not much that can give any of us comfort in this uncertain time and it feels like we are living through unprecedented circumstances, it gives me a strange sense of peace to hear Mom Mom's stories and to remember that things like this (and arguably worse) have happened throughout history—even if they haven't happened to our generation.

Our elders—and the wealth of history behind them—remind us that, if nothing else, the human spirit is surprisingly resilient.