Dark humor defines some members of my family, a characteristic sometimes difficult to comprehend by outsiders. And yet, it has allowed surviving, even thriving under trying situations: loss of country and family members, the ups and downs affecting first and second-generation citizenry. It’s been our way of confronting rebellious kids and toxic marriages, broken promises, and unfulfilled expectations.

With the onslaught of Covid-19, we interact the same way we have for generations: up with the humor shield, down with dwelling on fear, or at least tone them down with sarcasm. Let’s mock this thing down to a manageable dimension.

Better laugh than kvetch would have been my grandmother’s saying if she had been endowed with the same propensity to mock challenges her kids developed: she didn’t. Who can blame her for lacking the ability to sneer when her husband left her a widower at 44, tackling to raise fifteen of the original nineteen offspring: some might say that losing four wasn’t nearly enough to give a breather. Instead of running for the hills and never looking back, which would have been understandable or pulling a Medea to remove some gaping mouths, she opted to move to the capital schlepping the kinder. Who was going to ask her to be jovial? As the years passed, she turned more cantankerous, it was as if bile increasingly colored her world. Only now, over half a century after her passing, do I realize that she couldn’t have been a loving, nurturing grandmother; she was surviving amid the chaos she endured for most of her life. Tightening her belt and grip on the survivors was her response; theirs was to get on by their wits. It was part of my upbringing; I learned by observing how the siblings took to one another and the world, except for Mamá. She was the only one safe from their modus operandi.

By watching them interact, their offspring learned a way of coping, sometimes to the detriment of more compassionate encouragement. Even at sensitive times, our tendency to make pungent off the cuff remarks have raised more than one eyebrow. From the uninitiated, of course: what do they know? We silently tell them off by shrugging our shoulders or keeping to ourselves, via a private group chat.

Earlier today, some cousins exchanged notes on their partners’ frequent online purchases to replenish well-stocked pantries.

• SM: PM, has H1 discovered online shopping?
• PM: Of course: Instacart, Amazon Pantry, Target Deliver, etc. I’m over the moon with it; we have several deliveries a day! It makes the dogs go into a wild howling mode, so loud that the neighborhood is considering us for the household of the month.
• SM: You-know-who over here is ALL about it. I swear that at any moment, I’ll wake up and find one of the stock boys with a pricing label maker sticking a price on my forehead. We’ve got paper goods to share with the county and then some.
• PM: Well, I feel like I’m dating the Amazon delivery man, which at this point sounds like a plan, Think about it, with the current situation: he is still employed, has access to goods, is allowed to drive around town and always shows up bearing gifts. It sounds like all the boxes checked.

Dogs started howling and comic release turned off, for a little while. Amazon was at the door.