Driving me back to the hospital in early May, my mother tried to distract me with stories of dead relatives from the old country of preindustrial Yugoslavia. I was five days out from an unplanned Cesarean section, slightly high on oxycodone, and distraught that I had been discharged from the hospital the day prior, on Mother’s Day, and had to leave my baby in the NICU.

My mother’s anecdote was about her maternal grandfather, a man named Rade, whose entire first family, except for son Jovan, had died of some plague while he was off fighting in World War I.