My mother’s life, which began in dire poverty on Anguilla, shouldn’t end amid rubble caused by a hurricane, I thought.

My brother, Marcus, paced back and forth, checking to see if the windows and doors to our home were still intact.

We all worried about my father, who is 80 and has Alzheimer’s. He was crouched in his wheelchair, and we feared he might suffer another seizure like the one that nearly took his life in July.

Once again, our house was flooded. The blue tarpaulin that we had put up on our roof after Irma lay shredded on the ground. Once again, I looked up through the rafters and beheld blue sky.

My fear of heights now somehow cured, I grabbed a ladder and headed back onto the roof, balancing myself on rafters while draping the torn tarpaulin back over the open spaces and nailing it to the wood.

While on the roof I saw neighbors going door to door on our street, Ridge Road, a community cut into the hillside on the eastern end of the island. Some offered to repair roofs; others carried canned goods. Cassie, the nurse who helps to take care of my father, brought us ice.

My 74-year-old mother, machete in hand, was in her garden clearing brush away from her beloved mango, star fruit and soursop trees. “I’m just happy the rest of the roof remained! God is good!” she called up to me. Her gray Afro made her now look royal.

After all, we had just survived two huge hurricanes in less than two weeks, a feat, however bittersweet.

Later that week, my neighbor Tony and I headed to Charlotte Amalie, the territory’s capital, to get tarp.

St. Thomas’s narrow, winding roads were an obstacle course, blocked by floodwaters, snapped light poles, crumbled houses and uprooted trees. Residents were already out with chainsaws clearing as many fallen trees and poles they could.

The long lines for food at the grocery stores and local feeding center (originally a nonprofit focused on youth enrichment) told us the news of Puerto Rico’s devastation. Our main supply line had been destroyed.

After grabbing a tarp I returned home to find my neighbor Robert sitting in his green pickup truck waiting to help me, just as he had after Hurricane Irma.

“You’re ready to head back up again, bro?” Robert said, grinning. “I know Mother Bailey doesn’t want any more water wetting her.”

A sturdy six feet tall with a shiny bald head and a goatee, a parishioner at my mother’s church, Robert was a roofer in his native Grenada. There, he learned to build stormproof roofs after Hurricane Ivan barreled through in 2004. We used that expertise to build the best makeshift roof we could by gathering actual pieces of our roof. Piece by piece we nailed them together like a puzzle before covering the roof with the new tarp.

Below us, his 9-year-old son, R.J., amused himself with the hermit crabs, forced out of their caves by flooding, scurrying around the yard.

Robert and I gave each other high-fives after we finished our second makeshift roof. Then our small talk turned to whether our fellow Americans on the mainland cared about us.

Our governor, Kenneth Mapp, reminds us of our resilience in his daily radio news conferences, often saying, “We will be a constant force in our own recovery.”

But Robert saw things a different way. “It feels like we’ve been left to ourselves,” he said. “Bro, you think Trump will visit?”

Before I could answer, the sunset reminded us of the daily 6 p.m. curfew, so Robert and R.J. headed home.

That night while I took my usual bath outside with a bucket of water under the moonlight, I thought about Robert’s question. In fact, I’ve thought about it ever since.

Daily life on these storm-ravaged islands is taxing indeed. Commercial flights have finally been cleared to fly, sparingly, and seriously ill patients in our battered hospitals have had to be airlifted off the island. Hundreds of people remain in shelters, with many on waiting lists for mercy flights.

I think of my father’s illness and the possibility of another seizure. But my family is resilient, as Governor Mapp keeps saying. We’ve had the greatest storms thrown at us — and survived.

Nonetheless, many here in what’s billed as “America’s Paradise” are disappointed that our struggles have been overshadowed by the devastation in Puerto Rico, a short distance away.

As for President Trump’s visit, one that was anticipated here for weeks, the commander in chief instead opted to have Governor Mapp meet him aboard the assault ship Kearsarge off Puerto Rico. (Trump’s apparent snub was probably for the best, sparing us the embarrassment of being tossed paper towels.)

Military personnel have finally started to reach the island to help in the recovery. Some jog past our house in the mornings since we live close to the National Guard armory.

My mother enjoys waving to them as they pass, but reminds me that our true heroes are those most familiar to us: “Son,” she says, “we’ve been taking care of each other just fine and we’ll continue to.”