In the end, my grandfather had to dig his wife’s grave.

Southwest Philadelphia, PA

My grandmother Anna Harrison Willis was 7 months pregnant in October, 1918. She caught the flu and died.

My mother remembers the day she died, my mother had this sudden urge to go into her mother’s bedroom and see her. My grandfather told my mother that my grandmother passed away before my mother reached the door as she was leaving. My mother had turned 2 years old 2 months before her mother passed away in October. 

My grandmother was in the bedroom, dead, for 2 weeks because the undertakers were so overwhelmed. They told my mother she was sleeping. Caskets were piled in the street. In the end my grandfather had to dig his wife’s grave. Years later an obstetrician told my mother that he knew of no pregnant woman who got the flu and lived through it in 1918. So the death toll is even higher because of all babies who were never born.

I only know they lived in southwest Philadelphia. I don’t know their exact address at the time. My mother and her father moved in with his sister at 63rd and Reedland St in Philadelphia. It was a 3 bedroom row house with my mother, her father, his sister, her husband, their 3 kids, and another brother of my grandfather’s. Single men had no hope then of working and taking care of a baby. I have found my grandmother’s grave, but it only has a number for a marker and the cemetery told me there were 3 people in the grave.

Contributed by Anne Rettenmair, Granddaughter of Anna Harrison Willis.

Editor’s note; Anne’s death certificate lists her as being buried one week after death, not two- however, this is still longer than average during the pandemic- most others were buried within 2-4 days.