Chapter 2 - War and Illness

It was August 1918 and World War 1 was in full swing. My mother was upset that the Draft Board had just lowered the drafting age to 18, it was only a couple of months earlier that I had just turned 17. A few of my friends had already received their draft notices. She could not understand why I wanted to go. Her aspirations for me were that I was to go to college and become a lawyer like my father. I did share that dream for awhile, but like most young men my age, we were excited about joining the Armed Forces and going off to fight for our country. We felt that it was our patriotic duty to go off to war.

At the same time, another war broke out on the home front, Spanish Influenza. Across the U.S., it was reaching pandemic proportions, much like the current H1N1 virus is trying to do now. But you must understand where as now they can develop vaccines and antibiotics to fight these viruses. Back then, there were no antibiotics, you could only hope and pray that your own body's immune system could fight it off. Many lives across the country were lost due to this strain of influenza. In Chicago alone, 8,500 lives were lost to Spanish Influenza.

September 1918, my parents and I were stricken with the influenza and we were hospitalized. My father was the first one in our small family to succumb to the bacterial infection caused by the influenza. The attending physician at the time seemed to have taken a personal interest in my mother and I. I faintly remember fading in and out of consciousness due to the fever. He always seemed to be hovering about us, placing his cold hands on our fevered brows. The physician's name was Dr. Carlisle Cullen.

That is right my sweet daughter Renesmee, it was your grandfather, Carlisle.

My mother must have known that we were not going to survive. How she knew, I cannot say; it must have been a mother's intuition. She could not bear the thought of her only son dying at such a young age. She begged him, pleaded, in her final hour, for him to save me. Mother must have known or figured out something about him to warrant that kind of reaction from her. Dr. Cullen agreed to do what he could, with that, my mother passed away in peace, knowing that I would be taken care of.