Enrique López’s leg had gone numb again. Unable to stand, Enrique remained slouched on the couch while his children scrambled to pack his belongings and clean the hotel room as the checkout hour drew near.

“Should we give Dad his passport now or at the airport?” José López, 55, asked his sister, Magaly López.

“No, he’ll lose it,” Magaly, 56, said. “And make sure there are no liquids! Did we pack Mami’s medicine?”

Their mother, Emma López, gobbled rice and beans from a plastic container, her last meal at the all-suite motel in Queens.

Enrique, 81, and Emma, 75, weren’t just checking out of a hotel. The couple was about to embark on a daunting and, to their children, frightening journey — they were boarding a plane to Puerto Rico, five months after Hurricane Maria’s devastating fury had forced them to abandon their home.

On the floor, Omaira López, the younger daughter, sat on her parents’ only suitcase as she struggled to zip it shut. Omaira, 44, was quieter than usual. She worried about her mother’s ongoing struggle with Alzheimer’s and the severe stroke her father had suffered two weeks earlier.

Omaira and her three siblings, who live in New York, had been dreading this day, fearful of how their parents would fare alone on an island that is still reeling. But the couple had been anticipating their return since they fled the island in October.

As Enrique put it before leaving the hotel for the last time, “I’m in heaven here, but I’m going back to paradise.”