This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
My wife may have tried to kill me yesterday. I can't prove it yet. The lab work is still being processed. We should know for certain within a week. Sooner if I die before then.
The possible attempt on my life happened when she handed me a sick baby, in this particular case, my 7-month-old granddaughter Ada Grace, one of the nine treasures of my heart.
Ada has a low grade fever, which is not at all uncommon in babies who have recently been inoculated. But these days you simply can't be too careful.
When my wife tried to hand off Ada so she could finish making breakfast, I balked. What if my granddaughter had the Ebola virus?
Wife: "It's just a baby fever, you moron."
Me: "Let me smell her first."
Ebola is one thing. A dirty diaper is a whole other worse thing. Ada is making the transition to more solid food. Changing her diapers lately is like opening Christmas presents in hell.
Never mind all of that. The main point is my connection with my youngest granddaughter. Holding her in my lap and letting her treat my mustache like the pull start on a lawn mower, I found myself confronted with an important question.
If the entire world was dying from some hideously infectious pandemic, would I really refuse to hold my infected granddaughter? Or would I put her outside with the already dead and dying and listen to her cries while the life faded out of her?
It's happened before in history. The Plague of Justinian in the fourth century killed a quarter of the population of the eastern Mediterranean. Half the city of Constantinople died.
The Black Death in the 14th century came close to depopulating Europe. The dead and nearly dead were piled in heaps. People avoided each other like … well, the plague.
Diseases brought to the New World decimated American Indian populations. History would read a lot differently if it hadn't.
More recently, the 1918 Spanish Influenza killed an estimated 40 million people worldwide. Quarantines were enforced at gunpoint, but entire families still died.
According to researchers, it's a choice the world may be faced with again. Some say it's a certainty. Lots of scary stuff out there waiting to infect us.
Ebola kills 70 percent of the people it infects, and there's no known cure. That was no big deal to most of us when it was confined to Africa. But now it's here in America. What if it gets away?
It's easy to prepare for a plague. We stock up on water, food, medicine and ammunition. When it hits, we close ourselves off from everyone but those we love. But like Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death," it still gets through.
Holding my granddaughter I realize there's no way I could let her go. I'd stay with her until the end, even if it killed both of us. That's my job. That's what love means.
Ada smiles up at me as if reading my thoughts. I get a gummy smile and wide blue eyes, and then the explosion of a diaper being filled.
Robert Kirby can be reached at rkirby@sltrib.com or facebook.com/stillnotpatbagley.