Even if School Kids Survive COVID-19, They Won't Be Spared "Contagion Guilt"

Last week, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson said on a talk radio show that schoolchildren needed to go back to school and that parental fears about the idea were overblown. “They’re at the lowest risk possible,” Parson told the radio host. “If they do get COVID-19, which they will … they’re not going to the hospitals. They’re not going to have to sit in doctors’ offices. They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.” Rational people everywhere opened up their windows and screamed, “It’s a contagious disease!” into the street, and once again, William Maxwell’s 1937 influenza novella They Came Like Swallows flew, unwelcome, into my mind.

This unbearably sad book draws from Maxwell’s experience of the 1918–19 flu pandemic. Maxwell, who was 10 years old when the flu hit, went through his own bout with the sickness at his aunt and uncle’s house, while his mother was giving birth in a hospital in a nearby city. She died of the flu (caught on the train to the hospital, maybe? They never knew for sure.) three days later. Maxwell, later an editor at the New Yorker, said that the experience changed his life completely. “My mother was marvelous,” Maxwell wrote, “and when she died the shine went out of everything.”

The 1918–19 flu hit a different population than our current pandemic—mostly those in the prime of life. Because of that, it was a pandemic that generated many orphans. By the first week of November 1918, in New York City alone, 31,000 children were orphaned or lost a parent because of it, scholar Elizabeth Outka wrote in her book Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. Outka argues that They Came Like Swallows is one of the 1918 narratives that best shows the intense impact the pandemic had on young families: “The impalpable loss of structure and meaning the death of a parent leaves in its wake, creating a deep sense of unreality.” (Or, as Maxwell later described it, “It happened too suddenly, with no warning, and we none of us could believe it or bear it … the nightmare went on and on … the beautiful, imaginative, protected world of my childhood was swept away.”)

The novella shifts perspectives between family members: two elementary school–aged brothers, Bunny and Robert, and a father, James, all of whom get the flu and survive, and the mother, Bess, who dies right after giving birth to a third brother. The story opens with Bunny, the family’s younger son, imagining to himself what would happen if his mother were to suddenly vanish. “If his mother were not there to protect him from whatever was unpleasant—from the weather and from Robert and from his father—what would he do? Whatever would become of him in a world where there was neither warmth nor comfort nor love?”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/even-if-school-kids-survive-covid-19-they-wont-be-spared-%e2%80%9ccontagion-guilt%e2%80%9d/ar-BB179XHf?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=DELLDHP