Go to any symphony hall, any cinema, and you’ll hear a few who cough through the event, just as we did that night. You don’t think a thing about it, and neither did we. During the 1918 influenza, some cities had passed laws requiring everyone who went out in public to wear surgical masks over the lower face. Most people refused, or forgot and left the masks at home. In any case, the epidemic seemed over and done with. It would have felt absurd to take any such precautions in Cleveland that night.

Lillie and I were nearest a man who sneezed and wheezed through the lecture, but it was Douglas who sickened first. Maybe he had shaken the hand of an acquaintance when he was entering the theater after parking the car. Or maybe one of his students was coming down with the flu and had exposed him earlier that day. Who knows?

Unsuspecting, Lillie and Douglas drove back to Mumma’s to pick up the boys after dropping me off at Mrs. Motta’s boardinghouse, on Mayfield Avenue. I myself went to school as usual on Friday, eager to share with my students what I had learned the prior evening. Instead, I shared something I did not know I had.

That afternoon, I developed an awful headache but put it down to being up so late the night before. God forgive me, I spread the flu to my students. Several died, including one of my favorites. Elisabeth Maggio. I’ll never forget that poor child’s name, but I remember very little of the days that followed.

Near the end of the Great War, just before he was killed, the poet Wilfred Owen provided us with a simple searing description of the damage war had done to his spirit while his men were destroyed in wholesale lots: “My senses are charred. I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write ‘Deceased’ over their letters.” Later, when the fighting ended, Mr. Aldington and Mr. Graves described trench warfare with such bitter exactitude, it seemed to me a mercy that Ernest had died before he reached France, if die he must. Like the doomed Persians of Aeschylus, “he was happiest who soonest gasped away the breath of life.”