Remembering the Spanish Flu 100 Years Later
100 years ago in September and October 1918, the Spanish Flu was at its peak. The virus, which often led to pneumonia, killed between 50 and 100 million people, about 5 percent of the world's population. In the U.S. 600,000 died, and 20,000 people in New York alone. My grandmother was one of them. She died in the third wave of the virus, in the spring of 1919. It was her death and the stories my father told me about life afterward that set me on the path to writing Between B
