Endurance

Mabel Jessie Corbett

On the fourth finger of my left hand, tucked right next to my wedding band is a slender gold ring with "Blue River" inscribed on the inside.  I have worn it since my mother gave it to me many decades ago.  It was my grandmother's wedding ring, worn by the gentle, artistic and enduring spirit also known as JM Burnet, the signature she used on the beautiful oil paintings she created in the last 40 years of her life. The ring never left her finger until the day she passed away, well into her 80s.

It was placed on Jessie's finger on her wedding day on July 29, 1912, when she was 23 years old.  Just two years later, World War One was declared and only four years after that, the Spanish Flu decimated the world's population.  At 29, Jessie already had three children and her husband, a quiet, shy man, worked at the Bank of Toronto.  They survived the influenza.   In 1929 the Great Depression arrived.  By then she was 40, with a thriving family of six children, including my mother who was born in 1922, the only child to be born in a hospital.  Her sons fought in World War 2, and all survived.  Smallpox ended in Canada in the mid 1940s, but between 1949 and 1954 the polio epidemic ripped through the population, the most serious epidemic since the 1918 influenza pandemic.  Measles arrived too, and chicken pox, and mumps.   Then, and for the next 40 years, the best thing to do was to expose your children to it so as to get them through it and confer immunity as quickly as possible.  Measles parties were popular and hugely attended, with the mothers quietly resolved to see the inevitable course through as it infected their families.   I myself did the same thing with chicken pox in the early 1980s and as fate would have it, our chicken pox course was followed almost immediately by mumps.   It was two months before we found our feet but at least I knew my children had earned lifelong immunity to both.

There is no comparison to Covid with those diseases of yore and although I hate to use the word unprecedented  - I am so heartily sick of hearing that term - there is no other way to describe it. Our current challenge is unmatched because of  its novelty, giving it an extra springboard of threat.  And truly this is the first global systemic scare to come our generation's way.  911 was terrifying and violent but it was not global and it did not threaten our elder population or occasionally our young, healthy people.  Of course the past two or three generations have fretted about climate change, economics, politics, social disruption and personal implosions but nothing has ever given us a gut-punch like this. We are also blessed and cursed with a barrage of media, unlike the pandemics before.

In these poignant and reflective days I often look to this ring for comfort, and I spin it around my finger searching out the history locked within the muted glow that saw Jessie through so many threats, so much worry and dread.  I pray it will also protect my family through this perilous time.  Then, as now, those who endure, conquer.