Photo from The Flint Journal showing masked auto workers in 1918.
unmasking
Thinking of our relatives who died from diphtheria: my grandfather’s mother Rosemary Farley Schaaf (seen in the sidebar photo here), my grandmother’s sisters Frances and Josephine Barber, and Alex’s grandmother’s siblings Ruth and Bert Waldman.
Friday they will unmask us
and what will our faces do?
twitch nervously or beam gratefully?
after two years of suspended anticipation
my hope muscles have atrophied
I’ve lost the knack for moving on, moving forward
we’ve no link with the 1918 survivors –
the year my grandfather was born,
he’d no memory of it
instead, diphtheria is the story my husband and I grew up with:
four of our grandparents’ siblings and one mother claimed
while our grandparents were still children
now we get the Tdap or DTaP shot and
our grandparents’ devastating loss feels like
something from a different world
but those 1918 flu survivors –
how did they shed their masks and re-emerge?
how did masking become unknown to us all again?
I’ve lost my bearings for judging what is safe
I don’t even know what Greek letter comes next
let alone how to recognize it hovering on the horizon
it’s like trying to judge which smoke is from California
and which is from the next block
ready to claim what’s yours
in these days
when threats are everywhere
and we’ve grown unacquainted with joy
I still can’t imagine bringing my naked face
somewhere it could calmly swallow
anything new
