“Have you seen what’s happening in Italy?” she replies. The fatality rate there appears to be just north of 10 percent — as of Friday, 9,134 dead out of 86,498 confirmed cases. My mother was born in Milan (or, as she would correct me, Mi-LA-no), and she takes her native city’s suffering especially to heart. When I point out that one likely reason why Italy has been so hard hit is that it is much more densely populated than the U.S. and has one of the world’s oldest populations, she asks tartly, “And how is that supposed to comfort me?”

I think of my mom as a stoical pessimist. She considers herself a highly experienced realist. She knows that calamities happen in the lives of people as well as nations — and that they happen far more quickly, unexpectedly and irreversibly than most members of my generation have either known or been led to expect.

She has been widowed twice, first at 26 and again at 71. Her mother fled Moscow and the Bolsheviks shortly after the October Revolution of 1917 and Berlin and the Nazis sometime after the Reichstag fire of 1933. She remembers the Allied bombings of Milano, which obliterated much of the city. She remembers the poverty after the war, and the time she snuck into a vineyard to liberate some grapes. She remembers the prejudice, when a grocer told her mother to “go back to where you came from.”

When I see her, she recalls a memory from around the time she was 3, when a young nun abruptly pulled her under her habit. By then the Nazis had effectively taken control of northern Italy. “She must have smelled that I was Jewish,” she surmises, without knowing for sure what had induced the nun to hide her. “Well, not smelled. Sensed. Maybe that’s why I’ve always been fond of the Catholic Church.”

The conversation returns to the coronavirus pandemic. “You’re not taking this seriously enough,” she says. “I do take it seriously,” I reply. “I just don’t think we should panic.” She gives me the kind of look I used to get over some doubtful assurance that I’d done all of my homework.