As Bright as Heaven(116)

You might be wondering what prompted me to write a novel with the Spanish flu pandemic as a backdrop. As a lover of historical fiction—both reading it and writing it—I am always on the lookout for untold stories from the past that reveal the resiliency of the human spirit despite incredibly difficult circumstances. In 2016, I began to study the 1918 Spanish flu as a possible setting for a novel, as I was aware its centennial was fast approaching. I realized rather quickly this historic pandemic is an untold story. It is millions of untold stories. Until I started researching, I had no idea how globally devastating this event was and how much it changed the human landscape of the entire world. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was arguably one of the deadliest diseases in history, second only to the Black Death, yet few people living today are aware of its impact. Fifty million people worldwide are estimated to have died from Spanish flu. That’s a staggering number, far more than the number of lives lost in World War I. This pandemic is more than just a sad moment in history; it is the untold stories of people just like you and me—and our parents, our brothers and sisters, our children. It is millions upon millions of stories of people just like us.

I could have chosen any number of American or European cities in which to set the story, and I likewise could have given the setting to a variety of individuals. This flu killed the poor and the affluent with equal indiscriminate force. I selected Philadelphia because it was one of the hardest-hit American cities, with more than twelve thousand dead, and I chose to give this story to the wife and daughters of a newly installed undertaker because theirs would be a unique perspective on a world turned upside down by such a cavalier killer.

Death comes for us all in one way or another. It is a certainty. Our lives will one day end, and most of us never know when. Interestingly enough, it is our mortality that gives our existence its value and beauty. If our days were not numbered, we probably wouldn’t care how we spent them. How does this knowledge that we are mortal affect our choices? The risks we take? The risks we don’t? These were the questions I wanted to explore as I wrote this book and that I wanted you to ponder as you read it. We are, all of us, living out the stories of our lives. Each of our stories will end, in time, but meanwhile, we fill the pages of our existence with all the love we can, for as long as we can. This is how we make a life.

I would love to hear from you via e-mail or via one of my social media platforms after you’ve read this book. Tell me your thoughts and insights, dear reader. You are the reason I write. . . .