The Painful Story of Life and Death and the Role that We Play

In earlier times, measles was an incurable disease without a vaccine. It was a severe illness for many generations and menaced the soldiers of General Washington. You can name just about any war where measles played its devastating role. The reason is a vaccine was not invented until 1963.

One afternoon, as I toured a certain cemetery searching for the tombstones of my relatives, I came across an oddity. It was the re-occurring death date of October 1941 prevalent in a large number of children’s graves. What a sadness, I thought, and what terrible disease cost so many little children their lives? Sadly, the second-born child was sometimes given the same family name as the first child who’d died. I glanced about. It was midday, and the sun was at its highest in the sky. Who could suppose that life was but a flash of light from a petal blue sky of summer dreams?

Some parts of one’s life are sometimes difficult to recall, especially from the younger years. That is unless something occurred that could not be forgotten. Ever.

Then I remembered.

It was 1941, and I was only five years of age when German Measles first attacked our family.

Our neighborhood was one of the two-story Victorian houses with pitched roofs, intricate railings, and…