The Pull of the Stars

by Emma Donoghue

Here we are in the golden age of medicine—making such great strides against rabies, typhoid fever, diphtheria—and a common or garden influenza is beating us hollow. No, you’re the ones who matter right now. Attentive nurses, I mean—tender loving care, that seems to be all that’s saving lives.

That’s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle—the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed.

Let them go, I told myself as I did at the end of every long shift. Eileen Devine, and Ita Noonan with her never-to-be-born son; Delia Garrett’s stillbirth. Secretive Honor White gripping her prayer beads; Mary O’Rahilly trapped in a labour that seemed like it would never end. I had to let it all fall from me so I could eat and sleep and be fit to pick it up again tomorrow morning.

Nursing was like being under a spell: you went in very young and came out older than any span of years could make you.

(Almost every infant did come out perfect, even from women who bore all the stigmata of poverty, as if nature designed babies to take as much as they needed, no matter the cost to the mothers.)

I’d never believed the future was inscribed for each of us the day we were born. If anything was written in the stars, it was we who joined those dots, and our lives were the writing.

She looked pretty in a half-destroyed way.

The human race settles on terms with every plague in the end, the doctor told her. Or a stalemate, at the least. We somehow muddle along, sharing the earth with each new form of life.