Where to begin in what can only be a pause in the middle?

You mother has the coronavirus. She sits in quarantine in an ICU, on an empty ward in a civilian hospital in San Diego. She can have not visitors. Even the doctors must cover themselves from head to toe to examine her.

This news, in the scheme of the previous several days, actually relieves you and your brothers. They — whoever “they” are, which has proved to be part of the problem — lost her for a few days. In searching for her from afar, visions of films in which a person disappears with authorities forcing family members through a reluctant and hostilely incompetent bureaucracy only to find their loved one on a slab in a morgue run through your head. The first season of Treme‘, Sissy Spacek and Jack Lemmon in Missing. Your brother and you contemplate going on a Thelma and Louise mission out to California to find her, which, given that you thought she might be on a Marine base at the time, may have led to a visit to Guantanamo Bay. So, yes, relief has become the odd feeling for the eye of this shitstorm.

How did they — whoever “they are — lose her? Well, that goes back to her circumstances. She had taken a cruise a few weeks ago, before news about the coronavirus broke. While she was floating about Hawaii, the news about this aggressive illness in China broke, then the news about the illness appearing in the U.S. broke, many of those cases in Washington state and California, then the news about the illness causing a localized epidemic on a cruise liner broke.

These bits of information floated about your consciousness until you listened to the New York Times podcast The Daily on which the host interviewed the Times‘ science and health reporter Donald G. MacNeil. He spoke your language: history, the 1918 pandemic. When he said, that the mortality rate matches that of the 1918 influenza and “in 1918, not everybody died, but everybody knew somebody who died,” all of the bits in your head snapped into place.The coronavirus travels across the Pacific. Your mom is in the Pacific. It spreads on cruises. She’s on a cruise. It’s in Washington and California. She’s going through California back home. Your niece, frolicking about Disneyland on her Make A Wish trip, will return to her home in — yes — Washington state. You don’t care about yourself getting sick, but you damn well do care about the oldest and the youngest persons in your family possibly dying from the illness.

You held that bit of information on the periphery of your consciousness so you could function because what else are you going to do. So, you were not that that surprised to wake up to the news that her ship had been quarantined.

No, that isn’t exactly accurate. The OED must have a word for the emotion of “holy shit!” followed by, “of course.”

The Grand Princess news anyone can find online, and if someone reads this after some other news cycle has overwhelmed the outbreak on the cruise — indeed as is happening while these words appear on the screen right now — the Grand Princess was the ship that took a voyage from San Francisco to Mexico and back, then out to Hawaii and back in February. A handful of passengers sailed on both legs, as did crew. Passengers on the first leg disembarked, then tested positive for the coronavirus, one dying not long after. All of which happed while the ship took the second voyage. Meanwhile, passengers on that second leg began to show symptoms, forcing the vessel into quarantine while authorities — the “they,” whoever “they” are — figured out what to do next. The passengers and crew risked falling victim to a localized epidemic if they stayed on board, but where else had the capabilities of taking them without spreading the virus further? Meanwhile, the ship floated about San Francisco until a port with fewer tourist could be found in Oakland (we will leave aside Oakland’s racial and socioeconomic make-up relative to San Francisco’s for the time being).

Your mom now found herself confined to a tiny cabin with only a bunk and a desk chair, in weather too cold for the balcony (but at least with a view), and herded back into her room when she slipped out at night to stretch her legs in the halls. Neither a California resident nor obviously ill, she fell toward the bottom of the list for disembarkation.

Then, she went silent. No text. No phone calls. No e-mails. No Facebook comments.