The kindness of strangers: she bought a new sim card for my mum and installed it on her phone

‘Mum said she immediately burst into tears … she just wanted to speak to her children but couldn’t get her phone to work.’ Composite: Getty images/Guardian Design

One week before I was due to fly to Sweden to see my son get married, I got a frantic, jumbled message from Mum. My elderly parents were desperate to attend the big wedding but as they were both in their 80s, they’d decided it would be more comfortable to take a cruise ship from Australia to Europe than to fly. They’d set off two months before the rest of us.

Mum’s message asked me to call her. “We’re being thrown off the ship,” she wrote. “Your father’s in an ambulance – I think it’s pneumonia. We’re somewhere in Spain.”