Thanksgiving week, 1989

Thanksgiving week, 1989, is a hinge between private grief and an outbreak becoming harder to contain. From November 20 through 25, Nancy and Jerry Jaax travel to Kansas to be with family, carrying the recent murder of Jerry’s brother, John Jaax, into a holiday marked by illness and mourning. At the same time, Dan Dalgard’s cautious hope that the monkey deaths at Reston were confined to Room F gives way to evidence that the virus has spread elsewhere in the building. The week holds these stories side by side: a family trying to make room for loss, and a veterinarian discovering that the danger may be moving beyond the space where it was first recognized.

The Week’s Two Timelines

The account marks the period as November 20–25, then moves between the Jaaxes’ Thanksgiving journey and the developing crisis at the monkey house. Those strands do not resolve together. For Nancy and Jerry, the trip means returning to Kansas and staying with relatives whose own circumstances intensify the family’s grief. For Dalgard, the week begins with a tentative diagnosis and ends with a concrete sign that the deaths are no longer limited to a single room. The holiday’s familiar routines—driving, meals, family stories—unfold beside the less familiar work of interpreting a spreading infection.

The timing gives the Friday discovery its force. Dalgard had already worried that the virus might have escaped Room F, but he did not yet know that monkeys elsewhere were dying. After his family’s Thanksgiving trip to Pittsburgh, he returned to the monkey house on Friday to check for changes. The five deaths he found in Room H transformed a possibility he had been carrying into an immediate operational concern.

The Jaaxes in Kansas

On Wednesday, November 22, Nancy and Jerry put their children, Jaime and Jason, in the family van and drove through the night to Kansas. Jaime was twelve and Jason thirteen; both slept during the long journey. Jerry had almost lost the ability to sleep since his brother’s murder, so Nancy stayed awake with him, the two taking turns at the wheel. They reached Wichita on Thanksgiving Day and ate turkey with Nancy’s father, Curtis Dunn, who was living with Nancy’s brother.

Curtis was seriously ill with cancer and had lost considerable weight. The children were frightened by his appearance, while he tried to express sympathy to Jerry about what had happened to the Jaaxes. Jerry did not want to discuss the murder. The visit therefore brought the family together without making its grief easy to speak about: Curtis offered compassion, but the subject remained painful for Jerry, and his illness was another presence at the table.

Nancy’s feelings toward her father were mixed. She pitied him, yet felt a distance she could not overcome. His talk of selling the family farm and going to Mexico for a cure involving peach pits angered her; that anger existed alongside her concern for him. After the meal, Nancy and Jerry drove to Andale, Kansas, for a second Thanksgiving dinner with Jerry’s mother, Ada, and the rest of the Jaax family. They stayed in Wichita for several days afterward to help Curtis get to his cancer treatments, then drove back to Maryland with the children.

Ada’s House and the Missing Brother

Ada was a widow who lived alone in a ranch house near the grain elevator, looking out over bare fields planted with winter wheat. She could not watch television because she feared seeing a gun. The family recalled the old days on her farm, joking and laughing as they tried to spend the holiday together. But whenever John Jaax’s name came up, the conversation faltered. People looked down; someone began to cry; tears appeared on Ada’s face. She had always been strong in her children’s eyes, and they had never seen her cry. When she could not stop, she left the room and closed her bedroom door.

The gathering continued around the grief rather than overcoming it. The family served roast beef because the Jaaxes did not like turkey. Later, relatives drifted into the living room with their plates to watch a football game, while Nancy and the other women cleaned the kitchen and helped with the children. These ordinary activities gave the visit a shape, but John’s absence repeatedly broke into it. The contrast between shared stories and sudden silence makes the loss visible through what the family can no longer sustain: a conversation, a meal, or a moment of ease without remembering him.

Dalgard’s Diagnosis and the Friday Discovery

During Thanksgiving week, Dalgard called Peter Jahrling at the Institute to ask whether there was new information about what was killing the monkeys. Jahrling had a tentative diagnosis of SHF. He believed it was harmful to monkeys but not a problem for humans, while stopping short of a categorical conclusion until the final tests were complete. Dalgard hung up believing that his decision to sacrifice the monkeys in Room F had been correct: in his understanding at that point, those animals had been infected with simian fever and would have died anyway.

That provisional reassurance did not settle the problem. Dalgard was concerned that the virus might have escaped Room F and be moving quietly through the building. If monkeys in other rooms began dying, he feared, control would become much harder. He left for Pittsburgh with his wife on Thanksgiving morning, then returned to Virginia on Friday and went to inspect the monkey house. Five monkeys had died in Room H over the holiday. The room was two doors down the hall from Room F, and the pattern seemed to skip rooms as it spread. Dalgard was left with a more unsettling question than whether the Room F decision had been right: how could the virus be moving this way?

Significance of the Period

The week’s structure places separate forms of uncertainty in parallel without equating them. The Jaaxes can travel, eat with relatives, and help Curtis reach treatment, yet those acts do not repair the family’s bereavement. Dalgard can receive a plausible diagnosis and believe he made the right decision about Room F, yet neither removes the possibility of spread. In both strands, practical action continues while certainty remains out of reach.

Thanksgiving week thus marks a change in the Reston story: the threat is no longer only the deaths in Room F, because five deaths in Room H suggest movement through the building. At the same time, the family scenes show grief recurring within the routines meant to hold people together. The week ends not with an answer, but with a sharper understanding of what is at stake: the Jaaxes must return to their lives carrying a loss that remains present, while Dalgard must confront evidence that the outbreak may be harder to contain than the tentative diagnosis had suggested.