Is Stay Safe the new God Bless You?
How two pandemics caused expressions of solidarity to “go viral”
A few days ago, I heard someone I love very dearly letting out a sneeze.
It was a glorious, bright-blue-sky, beautifully sunny day; not at all the kind of day when the coronavirus would dare to come around, and certainly not a day when it would dare to come near anyone I loved. Certainly not my 83-year-old very dear friend who also happens to be afflicted with an underlying heart condition that almost killed him after coming to light when he suffered through a bout of pneumonia two years ago.
Depending on who we are, our utterance of the words bless you or gesundheit (health) in response to a sneeze can be anything from a reflex reaction, to a throwaway courtesy, to something almost comical.
When I first learned as a child that there were historical origins behind the custom, I thought it was somewhat humorous. The idea that ancient people might actually have believed that those words could have the power to stop one’s soul from escaping, or prevent another entity from entering one’s body seemed laughable to my comparatively sophisticated sensibilities.
But given the current climate of global anxiety, and given the fear and concern many are now living in for the most vulnerable among us, perhaps we can better understand what it might have meant to say those words during a time in history when a sneeze could be so much more than just a sneeze.
I found myself reflecting on this particular shift in the collective lexicon a number of years ago, when I fell ill with chicken pox in my thirties, after somehow managing to avoid it throughout my childhood, in spite of multiple exposures.
Unlike the 10,000 people hospitalized every year from the illness, I didn’t suffer any complications. But I certainly felt sicker than I ever had, as I experienced the virus working its way into and through me, turning my skin into a blanket of blisters, and commandeering the systems of my body as a production site for its own proliferation.
Within a few days, I felt like I had turned into a virus factory; suddenly painfully aware of every single thing I touched, in spite of obsessive hand-washing. Doorknobs became a particular source of anxiety, as I resolved to limit my movement to a minimum through the house I shared with multiple others, a number of whom were older than I was by decades.
While confined to my bed with discomforts that couldn’t be alleviated, I found myself thinking about what it might have been like to fall ill in eras past — during periods when the experience must have been vastly more torturous due to the simple lack of basic sanitation, not to mention the modern comforts and conveniences for which I suddenly found myself infinitely more grateful.
I thought about what it might have been like to suffer from another pox; the 3000-year-old disease known as smallpox that killed an estimated 300 million people in the 20th century alone, and which continued to kill until the 1970s.
I recalled a joke I had once heard referencing Mercutio’s famous line from Romeo and Juliet — A plague on both your houses!— and I was filled with a profound recognition of the horrifying implications of such a curse uttered from friend to friend, in a script written only two and a half centuries after the Black Death had ravaged Europe, leaving 20 million people dead in its wake, and lessening the population of Europe by close to 30%.
At the end of the 1800s, a French biologist by the name of Alexandre Yersin discovered that the plague was spread by a bacillus that travels airborne from person to person, as well as through bites from the fleas and rats who were almost ubiquitous in the filth of medieval Europe, and were especially common on ships, giving this devastating plague free rein to overwhelm one European city after another. Simply touching the clothing of the deceased was sufficient to contract the disease, but at the time, no one understood how it was spreading or why the afflicted were being found dead within 24 hours of previously being perfectly healthy.
Healthy people began to avoid the sick like… well, like the plague.
According to History.com,
“Doctors refused to see patients; priests refused to administer last rites; and shopkeepers closed their stores. Many people, desperate to save themselves, even abandoned their sick and dying loved ones.”
We still don’t know for sure whether this devastating epidemic was the actual cause of the emergence of the ‘God Bless You’ sneeze superstition, but it does stand as one of the primary possibilities, as does an earlier epidemic of the same plague that led to over 100 million deaths in ancient Rome, and apparently gave birth to “the custom of calling out ‘deus te adjuvet’ [God help you] to someone who sneezed.”
Multiple sources claim it was during this earlier outbreak of 590–610 AD that Pope Gregory issued a papal decree that anyone hearing the now potentially terrifying sound of a sneeze respond with the words, ‘may God bless you’.
In its five short months among our human population, we are told that the coronavirus has already sickened more than a million people, and killed nearly 60,000, with those numbers rising exponentially as we are reminded daily of what it really means to ‘go viral’.
Just two days ago, the White House was informed by a scientific panel that the virus might not even need coughing or sneezing to proliferate, as it can possibly be spread by breath alone.
Meanwhile, sons and daughters of aging parents have had to stand by, helpless, as the virus has held care facilities hostage; sending mothers and fathers to hospitals and morgues, or threatening imminent sickness and death while their children are unable to even see them, let alone be with them or comfort them in their time of need.
Family members of COVID patients have been forced to stay at a distressing distance from those receiving emergency care; saying goodbye via phone call or FaceTime to soon-to-be intubated loved ones or, in some cases, not having that opportunity at all.
In the disaster zone that has become northern Italy, some mourners have found themselves quarantined along with the bodies of departed loved ones; trapped with the remains of their dead in the homes where they were only a little while before sharing life’s miracles and mundanities.
And here in the US, as predicted, doctors are finding themselves faced with agonizing decisions of whom to sacrifice when there is simply not enough life support to go around. In the most hard-hit parts of the country, first responders are receiving orders not to bring those in cardiac arrest to the emergency room, and healthcare professionals are weighing questions of whether resuscitation of COVID-positive patients presents too much of a danger for doctors and nurses whose efforts are critical to the relief efforts.
As explained by The Washington Post:
“The concerns are not just about health-care workers getting sick but also about them potentially carrying the virus to other patients in the hospital.”
In immigration detention facilities around the United States, medical teams are preparing for the inevitable outbreaks that threaten to spread like wildfire through their crowded populations, endangering the lives of over 37,000 detained individuals including elderly men and women, and children as young as only weeks old. With no access to testing or essential supplies such as PPE, sanitizer, or medication, they are “basically preparing themselves to administer palliative and end-of-life care, in the case that an outbreak occurs.”
While the daily news cycle bombards us with panic-inducing statistics and sobering reality checks about the broken and sabotaged systems that simply cannot support a crisis of the potential magnitude we are only beginning to experience, the individuals who have been lost to this epidemic are actual people; as of the time of this writing, 58,795 gaping holes where 58,795 beloved persons once were, each shaped by a lifetime of experiences and lessons learned, each now a memory mourned by those who once loved them and no doubt love them still.
When I heard my friend sneeze on that shining summery day, the magic words did, indeed, come into my mind. I found myself holding back from uttering them, confident that putting that particular superstition to use would not be considered necessary by this very practical man who has never, to my knowledge, employed such a tool against the evil of which a sneeze could potentially be a harbinger.
Those humble little words might not have the power to invoke the authority of the heavens to save a life, but it is becoming increasingly easy to understand why this simple three word prayer once seeded its way through the soil of our collective consciousness.
In certain cases, I can’t help but imagine that the words God bless you might have welled up from the inside less as an involuntary reflex, and more as a heartfelt plea, however momentary, for the mercy and charity of the great powers-that-be.
With every chilling news story comes an intensification of the threat that it could be someone I love being sent to the morgue rather than the emergency room, or that someone I love could end up struggling to breathe in a hospital emergency room, terrified for his or her life, and without the touch of anyone but strangers for comfort.
Religious or not, as we find ourselves fearing for the lives of those we love, whether they be parents, grandparents, spouses, siblings, children, or cherished friends with whom our lives and stories have intertwined, we might just find that this crisis leads to the evolution of our own modern version of a custom that was once more than just a matter of simple etiquette.
Stay healthy. Stay safe.
