Over the weekend, Facebook reminded me that 2 years ago, I had posted a reminder to tell your story for National Write Down Your Story Day, but rather than focusing on what I was posting two years ago, I've been thinking, nonstop, about a village of people who lived 355 years ago and what they had "posted" for all to read.
A few years ago, I published my first series, and even though the main characters lived in modern-day, much of their story pointed back in time, to England’s Derbyshire Dales in 1665. It was a strange twist of events that led me to this point in history.
The residents of a tiny village called Eyam (rhymes with dream) battled the Black (Bubonic) Plague, and while it may not have been considered a pandemic, for their time and circumstance, it was certainly an epidemic of epic proportions.
In London, fleas bit infected rats, and those fleas ended up on a bundle of cloth that was delivered to the tailor in Eyam. The tailor and his assistant were the first to die. It spread quickly from there.
The reverend and his wife, who hadn't been in town very long, saw the wisdom in containing the spread of the virus, so they spoke to the townsfolk, who unanimously agreed that their entire village should self-quarantine in order to save the neighboring villages.
It was the 1600s. Social distancing didn't mean staying home and watching Netflix and ordering necessities from Amazon. Self-quarantining meant cutting themselves off from the rest of the world and fighting a plague on their own.
They were instructed to care for their sick at home and bury their dead on their own land, rather than bring them into the town. They didn’t have drive-thru testing stations, or squirty bottles of hand sanitizer, or disposable masks, or cutting-edge ICUs with ventilators. They had little in terms of medicine or education in how to deal with the terrible boils and used whatever homespun treatments they'd heard might help, most of which sounded absolutely horrible to both administer and endure.
They met to worship at Cucklet Delph, a little valley in the dale where the families would stand twenty-four paces apart from one another in the open air to hear the reverend's sermon from the hillside. To glimpse other families from 24 paces away was the only socialization that occurred.
When they needed something from outside the village, they went to the Boundary Stone, which marked the entrance to the village. They soaked their coins in vinegar in the large holes that had been drilled into the stone, and left a list of needed items. The neighboring villagers would collect the list and the coins and later return with the items, which they'd leave at the stone.
In order to incorporate their experience in my story, I researched methods of treatment, community response, progression of the illness, and the means of dealing with the dead, so I could piece together what happened to these people. I read everything I could find about Eyam, its residents, and the Plague. I watched documentaries. I studied old maps.
I grimaced and I wept and I thanked the Lord for the miracle of modern medicine.
By the end of the outbreak, the Plague took 260 lives from Eyam's 76 families.
All of the surrounding villages were spared. Their quarantine worked.
The Bubonic Plague killed some 20 million people in Europe, which was around 30 percent of the continent’s population.
The village of Eyam still exists today in the Derbyshire Dales of England, and each year its residents meet in August to commemorate the selfless sacrifice of their ancestors.
The few journals/personal writings I found were precious to me as I pieced together my own story. Only later did I learn that I had ancestors living in a nearby village at that same time. It was a sobering thought that the people I had been studying may have very well saved my ancestors (and me) from the plague with their selfless acts.
In our own modern way, how many people might we save, by voluntarily distancing ourselves while this new virus rages?
Hopefully, the Coronavirus pandemic can be quelled soon, and we can all return to our regular lives, but make no mistake, we are making history at the root of this.
If you find yourself socially-distanced and in want of something to pass the time, write down your story. Jot down what this experience is like for you, what you’re doing to combat the interruptions of normalcy and how you're facing the fear of the unknown.
This is your story. Only you can tell it. And someday, people will look back at what you went through, and they will want to know what it was like for you.
Tell your story. Because only you can do it justice.
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