The phone rings every few hours.
"Are you OK, my son? Are you wearing a mask? Please don't go out. Please don't touch anything."
From his home in Washington, D.C., Haris Tarin, 41, does his best to answer his mother's calls. These days, he knows how much it calms her to hear the voices of her children, spread across three states.
"She's been through so much, she's constantly afraid of the worst happening, of losing everything," Tarin said. "I understand her. I've inherited the same anxiety."
For families who have survived untold hardship _ war, persecution, natural disasters _ the coronavirus pandemic has provoked a mix of emotions and coping methods. There's a lingering trauma, an instinct to protect your own, to focus on life's most urgent needs. In some cases, the elders who lived through the worst of times, many of them immigrants, have become the greatest source of strength.
Tarin's mother, Latifa Tarin, doesn't linger on lectures or advice. When she calls from Phoenix, she wants to know if her son, a senior policy adviser for the federal government, has enough money in his bank account. "I'm going to send you something," she says.
"You don't need to," Tarin tells her. "We're OK."
Back in Afghanistan, when life was good, the mother of six used to manage every detail of her home while her diplomat husband traveled.
After the Russians invaded in 1979, the Tarins, like millions of families, lost everything. Latifa forged ahead alone, smuggling three of her kids into Pakistan to reunite with her husband. For three weeks, the family rode at night on camel and donkey over rugged mountains as helicopters rumbled in the sky, threatening to bomb them.
Tarin was 6 years old. He was so terrified, he'd sometimes vomit from the nerves. He'd watch in awe as his mother, barely 5 feet tall, would scold the gun-toting smugglers if they tried to cheat them out of food _ all paid for in advance by Latifa.
"If she needed to scream, she would scream at them," he said. "She did everything to keep us safe."
Today, as the COVID-19 death toll swells by the day, it is Tarin and his siblings who do everything to protect Latifa. She lives in an apartment attached to her second eldest son's home. She used to see several of her children and grandchildren daily. Now, she sees their faces only in photographs that decorate her walls.
"Are things getting any better out there?" she often asks by phone.
"No," Tarin tells her. "People are still dying."
Recently, Latifa lost a family friend to the virus. She knows about 10 others who also got sick. Not long ago, she revealed to Tarin that his great-grandfather and great-uncle died in the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
"I could tell that in her mind she was still trying to piece it all together," Tarin said.
Many Afghans like to call themselves resilient, he said. They're expected to be tough, to move forward.
"But there's trauma and pain that comes from going through so much."
