Disclaimer: I own nothing
It was late in the year of 1918. I was seventeen years old and caught up in the world of a teenager; school, sports, and my part time job at a typical, nondescript factory (more out of boredom than necessity). I was counting down the months until graduation but was very conflicted about the nearly unavoidable fact that I was going to be drafted and have to fight in the great war. However I was ready (or thought I was) to be an adult. It's hard to explain to a modern person how it was back then, as we always tend to build the past, in our minds, to be more quant and innocent then the present, when really it is us that has become more corrupt. I lived with my mother and father in a big brick apartment building in the good part of town. I think about my life back then more than I admit, I think we all do. Lately I've thought about it less and less, probably because in the last thirty years or so all the friends I had grown up with and secretly kept tabs on after my transformation had died. Only three months ago the last person I knew from my human life, my cousin's daughter, Louise, who was two years old when I was changed, died of old age.
We were neither poor nor rich back then. My father was a serious and quiet man; he was from an old family and well known among the lawyers and businessmen in Chicago. We had a good enough relationship, but we never had similar interests. I was much closer to my mother, who was a small, cheerful woman with many friends. She's the one who I get my intuitiveness from; she could always spot a liar or a person who should be avoided. Her marriage to my father had caused a bit of anger from his family, who had wanted him to marry one of the high society ladies they introduced him to, instead of a poor Irish girl he met at a bar. The only disagreement I had with my mother was about all the silly superstitions she expected me to subscribe to. I figured they were just old stories passed down to her from her grandparents. Now I appreciate this irony.
When I first heard of the Spanish Influenza, I thought of it as a foreign thing that would never affect me. I was young and thought myself invincible, and I thought I had much more important things to worry about. The Red Socks, for example. I was worried the Spanish flu would have an effect on the war, but I at first thought of it as a foreign problem, hurting the people in India or Southern Africa. When it got to where I saw people closer to home getting sick, and then getting better, I thought what a waste of energy it was to worry so much about the flu. It was around this time that my father got sick. We thought he would be fine. He called off work right away because of all the panic surrounding the Spanish influenza, and spent a few days lying on the couch in our living room reading the paper. Then, one day, I came home from school and my parents were gone. There was a note on the table that said "Went to hospital, meet us there" a few days later my father was dead.
He wasn't the only one. There were a lot of people who died in that first wave of influenza; but life went on and I still thought myself invincible. Perhaps people in general were more comfortable with death back then, or maybe we were just in a healthy denial. You would be surprised how far the human mind will go to protect itself. My mother and I were understandably frantic. As my father was a lawyer we were rather well provided for, but our home became dark and unhappy; the light in my mother was sort of extinguished.
After a few months of this the second wave of influenza hit. Because of my father, I was very paranoid. I stayed home from school and avoided people like the plague (well the Spanish Influenza was the plague of its day) but in the end it was all pointless. My mother and I fell sick at the same time, and went to the hospital right away; but medicine wasn't what it is today, and even now people die from the flu. There was nothing they could do for me, my mother, or many of the other victims of the flu that year. Carlisle was the attending physician, and you know the rest. –Edward Anthony Masen Cullen