What do you do when you’re fighting for survival and balancing grief on a societal level at the same time? This is a question many of us are facing now and asking ourselves in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One of the historical reference points we can access are stories from the 1918 Flu Epidemic. Dubbed the Spanish Flu, the deadly pandemic killed at least 50 million people worldwide, including a half a million in the United States. These numbers can sound abstract, or worse, like cold statistics. It is hard to fathom such loss.

We also know that the 1918 pandemic coincided with World War I and deeply impacted military operations worldwide. More American troops died from the virus than in combat. But there are few monuments and memorials to victims of the Pandemic in the United States. No statue, no historical marker even in Philadelphia, one of the hardest hit cities in the U.S., where 20,000 people died of the Flu. This includes my great-great-grandmother.

Our guest on this episode, Nancy Hill, one of the Philadelphia-based organizers of the Mütter Museum’s exhibition on the 1918 pandemic, Spit Spreads Death. She shares insights with us about how the pandemic is and is not remembered.

“People could either choose to celebrate the armistice or they could choose to grieve not only the flu dead, but the military dead, the war dead. And they chose to celebrate the armistice instead and try to move on with their lives because it was just too much. And hopefully, we've gotten enough distance from this that we can start to commemorate those people because their families are still talking about them today, there are experiences that they survived and that they remembered have shaped their family for generations whether or not they knew it at the time.”

This episode, we speak to Hill about cultural memory and timely lessons from the 1918 pandemic. The parallels between then and now are astounding, informative, and troubling.

She shares stories of vulnerable communities – immigrants, African American migrants – who were hard hit by the virus and society’s response. She also unpacks how the ways everyday residents stepped up to help one another to care and commemorate in urgent ways. She also helped me shed light on my great great grandmother’s story, how she and her community may have experienced the 1918 pandemic.

Hill closes with her hopes for greater understanding about viruses, and science behind them, as ways we can cope and look ahead.