The Donohue Family: Witnesses and Caretakers in the 1918 Epidemic

Overview

The Donohue family occupies a distinctive place in Amanda Gorman's Call Us What We Carry—not as fully dramatized individuals with dialogue and interiority, but as historical witnesses whose real-life archival record anchors two poems in documented truth. The family operated a funeral home during the 1918 influenza epidemic, and their experience reaches the reader through the voice of Michael Donohue, whose account Gorman credits as source material. Across chapters 43 and 44, the Donohues embody the intersection of immigrant identity, communal service, and the grinding logistical burden of mass death. They are at once specific historical figures and representative vessels: an immigrant family who came to America seeking the "Promised Land" only to find themselves burying its dead.

What makes the Donohue family remarkable within the collection is their grounding in material evidence. Gorman does not invent their story; she transmits and interprets it. The family's private ledgers—messy, crossed-out, scribbled in margins—become a counter-archive to official history. Where public records might tally numbers, the Donohue ledgers preserve the human difficulty of tracking tragedy. The family thus functions as a hinge between the book's larger meditations on collective memory and erasure and the granular, intimate labor of caring for the dead.

Plot Role and Structural Placement

The two Donohue poems appear in the latter portion of Call Us What We Carry, well after the collection has established its core concerns with pandemic, loss, and historical reckoning. Their placement is deliberate. Chapter 43, "The Donohue Family," is a brief, fractured lyric that introduces the family and the demographic reality of the 1918 epidemic: most of the dead were immigrants. Chapter 44, "Donohue Family Ledgers," moves deeper into the archival artifact itself—the physical ledger where burials were recorded.

This two-part structure mirrors the book's larger movement from broad historical sweep to intimate documentary detail. The first poem states the facts starkly: people fell, people died, people should not have died, and they were predominantly immigrants who came to the Promised Land and were destroyed. The second poem enters the ledger's pages, showing us the handwriting, the crossed-out entries, the marginal scribble about an unnamed girl buried in a trench. Together, the poems form a diptych: thesis and evidence, statement and artifact.

Within the collection's architecture, the Donohue chapters sit near other historically grounded pieces such as "Selma Epp" and "DC Putsch," forming a cluster of poems that insist on the recoverability of marginalized histories. They precede the book's culminating sequence—the inaugural poem and the acknowledgments—which means the Donohues' quiet, steadfast caretaking is one of the final historical examples Gorman offers before pivoting toward hope and transformation.

Motivations and Traits Shown Through Actions

The Donohue family's motivations emerge not through psychological exposition but through the actions recorded in their ledger and Michael Donohue's retrospective account. Three core traits define them.

Steadfast Responsibility. The ledger's voice states plainly: "To take care of people / Was the decent thing to do. / We had a responsibility." This is not grandiose moral language. It is the vocabulary of duty stripped to its essentials. The family did not choose their historical moment; they responded to it with the tools they had—a funeral home, a ledger, and a willingness to serve. The word "decent" is crucial here. It suggests that their actions, however extraordinary in context, felt to them merely appropriate, the baseline of human obligation.

Impartial Caretaking. The ledger records that the Donohues buried both people they knew and strangers. There is no hierarchy of grief in their record-keeping. The known and the unknown receive the same burial, the same entry in the book. This impartiality is a form of moral consistency: death does not discriminate, and neither did the Donohues' service. The family's actions suggest a worldview in which every body merits dignity, regardless of relationship or status.

Documentary Persistence. The family kept the ledger even as the logistical strain made neat record-keeping impossible. The entries grew sloppy and confused, crossed out, scribbled in borders. The fact that they continued writing at all—that they preserved the record even when it was messy—reveals a commitment to memory that transcended aesthetics. The Donohues understood, perhaps instinctively, that the ledger would matter beyond the immediate crisis. Their persistence transformed a practical business document into a historical witness.

Chronological Arc

The Donohue family's arc is compressed into implication rather than narrated across years. The poems do not provide a before-and-after structure, but the arc can be inferred from the evidence.

Before the Epidemic. The family had established a funeral home, presumably as a stable immigrant enterprise. Michael Donohue's account, attributed in the poem's annotation, implies he is speaking retrospectively—an older voice recalling events from decades earlier. The family came to America with the hope embedded in the phrase "Promised Land," a term Gorman uses with bitter irony given what followed.

During the Epidemic. The 1918 influenza pandemic overwhelmed the family's capacity. The ledger entries degenerated from orderly records into hurried, crossed-out fragments. The volume of death exceeded the systems designed to manage it. The family buried a girl whose name they may never have known, placing her in a trench—a detail that captures the collapse of individual memorialization under mass casualty conditions.

After the Epidemic. The ledger survived. Michael Donohue reflected on the experience and shared his account. Gorman encountered the ledgers as archival material and wove them into her collection. In this sense, the Donohue family's arc extends beyond their own lifetimes: their actions during the crisis created a record that, a century later, speaks to another pandemic generation. The arc is one of quiet, local action radiating outward across time.

Relationships

The Donohue poems depict relationships at three levels.

The Family's Internal Bond. The poems refer to "we"—the collective voice of the family. "We buried people we knew. / We buried strangers." This plural pronoun suggests a family unit acting together, sharing the labor and the emotional weight. There is no individuation among family members; they operate as a cohesive whole. This collectivity mirrors the book's recurring insistence on "we" over "me," a theme crystallized in the titular poem "Call Us," where the human microbiome becomes a metaphor for interdependence.

The Family and Their Community. The Donohues served their immediate community by burying those they knew. This relationship is intimate and reciprocal: the community trusted the family with its dead. At the same time, the family buried strangers, extending their service beyond existing social ties. The community relationship thus oscillates between the familiar and the anonymous, the personal and the civic.

The Family and the Immigrant Collective. Gorman explicitly frames the Donohues within the larger immigrant experience: "Most of them immigrants. / These people came Promised Land." The family is not an exception but an exemplar. Their story represents countless immigrant families who served on the front lines of the 1918 epidemic, often in undervalued roles such as funeral home operation, nursing, and sanitation. The relationship between the Donohues and the broader immigrant community is one of shared vulnerability and shared contribution.

Key Decisions and Consequences

The Decision to Keep Operating. The Donohue family could have closed their funeral home, but they did not. This decision meant exposing themselves to infection risk and emotional trauma. The consequence was that they became indispensable to their community during its moment of greatest need. The ledger's existence is a secondary consequence: had they ceased operations, the archival record that informs Gorman's poems would not exist.

The Decision to Keep the Ledger. Even as handwriting deteriorated and entries became confused, the family continued recording. This decision ensured that the girl buried in the trench was not entirely erased. The ledger entry—"This girl was buried in the trench"—is sparse to the point of brutality, but it is an entry nonetheless. The consequence is that a century later, readers encounter her absence as a presence. She becomes, in Gorman's phrase, "our trench," a shared site of grief and responsibility.

The Decision to Annotate and Share the Record. Michael Donohue's annotation—the poem's footnote credits "Donohue on his Family Ledgers"—represents a deliberate act of transmission. By explaining the ledger's context, he transformed a private business record into a public historical document. The consequence is Gorman's poetic intervention, which amplifies the Donohues' story to a global readership and connects the 1918 epidemic to the COVID-19 era.

Theme and Symbol Connections

The Donohue family connects to several of the collection's central themes.

Grief and Trauma. The Donohue poems are saturated with grief, but it is a grief that takes practical form. The family did not have the luxury of mourning in private; their grief was channeled into the labor of burial and record-keeping. The ledger's crossed-out entries and marginal scribbles are physical traces of trauma overwhelming orderly systems. In this, the Donohues embody the book's argument that grief is not merely an emotion but a material reality that must be handled, recorded, and carried.

Collective Memory and Erasure. Gorman contrasts the "common era" of official records—which can tell who a person was, where they lived, what they died of—with the messy, private ledger that nearly fails to track the tragedy at all. The Donohue ledger operates at the boundary between memory and erasure. The unnamed girl almost vanishes entirely, reduced to a scribbled note. Yet because the family wrote something, however fragmentary, she survives in the archive. The poems argue that collective memory depends on such precarious, imperfect acts of documentation.

Resilience and Healing. The Donohue family's resilience is not triumphant. They did not overcome the epidemic; they endured it by doing the work in front of them. The poem does not describe them healing—it describes them continuing. This aligns with the book's nuanced treatment of resilience as something closer to persistence than to recovery. Healing, in the Donohue context, may simply mean that the ledger still exists and can be read.

Unity and Fellowship. The family's "we" is a microcosm of the collective "we" that Gorman develops throughout the collection—from "Call Us" to "The Hill We Climb." The Donohues acted as a unit, serving their community without distinguishing between the known and the unknown. Their example suggests that fellowship is not abstract sentiment but concrete action: burying strangers, recording names, doing the decent thing.

Hope and Transformation. The Donohue poems are not overtly hopeful, but they contain a buried optimism. The ledger survived. Gorman found it and made poetry from it. Readers a century later encounter the Donohues and recognize their own pandemic experience mirrored in the past. This temporal transmission—from 1918 to 2021—is itself a form of hope. The Donohues' actions, performed without knowledge of their future significance, became a gift to generations they would never meet.

The Ledger as Symbol

The Donohue family's ledger deserves special attention as the central symbol of the two poems. A ledger is a record of transactions, usually financial. By using a business document to track human death, the Donohues inadvertently highlighted the inadequacy of any system to contain grief. The crossed-out entries, the scribbled borders, the reduction of a girl to "This girl was buried in the trench"—all these details expose the ledger's failure as a sufficient memorial.

Yet the ledger is also a triumph. It exists. It was kept. Gorman's metaphor of language as an "ark" in the poem "What We Carry" resonates here: the ledger is a small, flawed vessel that nonetheless preserved something across the flood of time. The Donohue family placed their records in an ark of paper and ink. Gorman, a century later, opened it.

Distinguishing Interpretation from Explicit Fact

Several elements of this analysis are explicitly supported by the text: the Donohues were immigrants, they ran a funeral home during the 1918 epidemic, they buried people they knew and strangers, they recorded burials in a ledger, and one entry noted a girl buried in a trench. Michael Donohue's account is the attributed source.

Interpretive elements include the characterization of the family's motivations as "steadfast responsibility" and "impartial caretaking," the reading of the ledger as a metaphor for the limits and power of documentation, and the connection to Gorman's broader themes of collective memory and the ark metaphor. These interpretations are grounded in textual evidence but represent analytical extensions rather than explicit statements in the poems.

Questions and Answers

1. Who were the Donohue family, and what role did they play during the 1918 influenza epidemic?

The Donohue family were immigrants who operated a funeral home when the 1918 influenza epidemic struck. According to Michael Donohue's account, which Gorman credits as source material, the family buried both people they knew and strangers during the crisis. They kept a ledger recording the burials, though the volume of death made neat record-keeping impossible. Their role was simultaneously professional and ethical: they provided a necessary service while also acting on a self-described sense of responsibility to care for people simply because it was "the decent thing to do."

2. What does the girl buried in the trench represent in "Donohue Family Ledgers"?

The girl, recorded in the ledger only as "This girl was buried in the trench," represents the near-erasure that mass death inflicts on individual identity. She is unnamed, possibly unknown to the Donohues, and her burial in a trench signals the collapse of ceremonial norms under epidemic conditions. Gorman transforms her into a collective symbol with the line "This girl was our trench"—suggesting that the girl's unmourned death becomes a shared site of grief and moral obligation for the community and, by extension, for the reader. The girl is both a specific historical person and a metaphor for all the dead whom official history overlooks.

3. How do the Donohue family poems connect to the book's theme of collective memory and erasure?

The Donohue poems stage a direct tension between memory and erasure. The "common era" of official records can presumably tell who a person was and what they died of, but the Donohue ledger reveals a messier reality: entries are crossed out, scribbled in margins, and nearly impossible to track. The ledger almost fails as a record. Yet because the family persisted in keeping it, the entries survive—including the fragment about the unnamed girl. Gorman argues through these poems that collective memory depends on imperfect, private acts of documentation. Without the Donohues' ledger, the girl in the trench would be entirely erased. With it, she becomes a presence that demands acknowledgment a century later.

4. What does the phrase "Promised Land" signify in "The Donohue Family," and what irony does Gorman draw from it?

"Promised Land" refers to America as a destination of hope for immigrants seeking better lives. Gorman deploys the phrase with bitter irony: the immigrants came to the Promised Land and "got / Destroyed." The ideal of America as a place of refuge and opportunity collides with the reality of an epidemic that killed immigrants disproportionately. The irony operates on two levels: first, the immediate tragedy of people who fled hardship only to die in a new country; second, the historical pattern of America promising opportunity while delivering suffering to immigrant communities. The Donohue family, as immigrant funeral home operators burying fellow immigrants, embodies this contradiction—they found not the Promised Land but a landscape of mass death that they nevertheless served with dignity.

5. How does Gorman use the Donohue family's story to connect the 1918 epidemic to the COVID-19 era?

Gorman does not explicitly name COVID-19 in the Donohue poems, but the connection is structurally embedded in the collection. Call Us What We Carry was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Donohue poems sit within a sequence that includes the "Monomyth" timeline of 2020–2021 events. By placing the 1918 epidemic beside the contemporary crisis, Gorman invites readers to recognize patterns: immigrant communities disproportionately affected, undertakers and frontline workers overwhelmed, private records compensating for public failures of memory. The Donohue family's quiet, persistent caretaking becomes a model and a mirror. Their ledger is an ark that carried the dead of 1918 forward to readers navigating their own pandemic, suggesting that the labor of documentation and dignified service is never wasted—it arcs across time, connecting one generation's catastrophe to another's reckoning.