Just Write

I began writing Counterfeits when a story that had haunted me for years finally demanded to be written. The 1918 Spanish influenza took the grandmother I never knew, a twenty-six-year-old kindergarten teacher in a small southern town. She left behind her husband who was a traveling candy salesman and her four-year old son, my father. Since his father’s sales route crisscrossed the south, her little boy went to live on his grandparents’ farm.

With only a faint grasp of the impact of World War I and Spanish influenza on the U.S. home front, I immersed myself in this overlooked chapter in history. As captivating as the research proved to be, the cold facts and statistics failed to come alive for me.

Everything changed the day I ripped into the envelope from the Bureau of Vital Statistics and held my grandmother’s death certificate. Scrawled in the cause-of-death line, the words “Spanish Influenza” leaped off the page. This was the moment that grabbed hold of my heart and wouldn’t let go.

Like my grandmother, each archived statistic bore testament to a life tragically cut short and each had a story waiting to be told.

Since little is known about my grandmother’s life, Counterfeits is a work of fiction. Inspired by research, individual stories, and sprinkled with family lore, the book slowly took shape. I completed the first draft well before Covid struck a century later.

During the heart-rending and tumultuous course of the Covid pandemic, remarkable echoes emerged from the 1918 pandemic in terms of the decisions made by both government and the people, some commendable, others regrettable in scope.

Just months before World War I ended, three waves of a frightening new influenza struck the home front already reeling from loss, conflict, and deprivation. In 1918 without today’s vast network of resources and support systems, the Red Cross, county health, churches, and charities served as the sole safety nets.

Military conscription left widespread shortages of local doctors and nurses just when they were needed most. As the plague spread, while many terrified individuals refused to leave their homes for work or to check on stricken neighbors, others selflessly risked their lives to provide care to strangers.

I wrote Counterfeits to shine a light on this forgotten era in U.S. history, a time that resonates so deeply in the present. I wrote Counterfeits to commemorate all those whose lives were forever diminished or ended too soon.