On The Prairie

An extended family member tested positive today. So, I pass on this story of something I did about 15 years ago, that I composed and held in the past week, in order to make sure people understand history and gravity.

There is an old, largely forgotten cemetery in Eastern Washington, close to the Idaho border, where the prairie gives way to rolling hillocks and apple orchards which, in turn, preview the rising Selkirk range to the north and East. Across the road from a beautiful old and distractingly postcard-perfect barn, this collection of tombstones hides in plain sight, and like a coyote in the grass, unless you spotted it, you wouldn’t even know it was there. It’s small, almost intimate in size; a very old place, with a simple gate, flanked by pillars capped with old crumbling cherubim.

It’s a pioneer place: some of the browner and less defined headstones go back well into the 1800s. A few newer headstones are closer to the gate, and a number of grave sites cluster, simply, humbly in the far corner, with basic limestone plaques in the earth, bordered by an equally plain limestone border. Brown earth, burnt grass, no flowers.

In this farthest section, two larger headstones mark the graves of a man and woman, the dates obscured by time and hard to read. Brushing away the dirt reveal the letters and dates: a woman in her 30s and a man in his 50s. Looking closer, working out the timelines reveals that she preceded him in death by about 15 or so years – counter to the usual pattern in those hard times, of the man going first. The three smaller headstones quite sadly mark the graves of three children with the same last name, ages 5, 3 with the youngest having the same birth and death year. It’s not known how long the child lived, if it lived at all. Looking more closely, all three children had the same death year as the mother: 1918.

I had not really been aware of the Spanish Flu epidemic before this day. I went home and looked up the date on Wikipedia that afternoon. It seemed that all the family, except father, had perished due to the epidemic. He lived on, to bury them here in this quiet and forgotten place, on this beautiful open prairie. Near their home.

On days subsequent I went back to their site. I brought a rake and broom. I cleaned it up, and placed plastic flowers at their graves. It all felt important in some distant way.

I moved to California shortly thereafter, and have not been back to that place since. But I remember them all, especially now.

The point of all this writing, is that when people fall ill, it can have great consequence. A person who gets this illness likely passes it on 2.3 times. Maybe to a loved one, a parent, a child, to the love of their lives. And some never recover from the illness, or from having passed the illness. 

Who knows what happened to that poor family in Eastern Washington? We – all of us across the world -- stand in the same place today. We need to take this seriously.