Like most members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, I couldn’t reach my family and friends on the island for more than a week after Hurricane Maria made landfall on Sept. 20. All I had to work with was a quick phone call my mother’s neighbor had made to my sister. The neighbor said that my mother and my aunt had ridden out the storm together, that they were basically fine. My mother’s home, made of sturdy concrete, was intact.

My sister, her husband and I spent several days booking flights to San Juan that wound up being canceled. We were finally able to get one in early October. I’d been poring over media images of the destruction, but I was still shaken by what I confronted as we drove the 25 miles or so from the capital to my mother’s home near the El Yunque rain forest.