So my Aunt Anni, known in official records as Ethel Ann Quinn, died between Friday, August 28, and Monday, August 31, 2020. We still don’t know the cause.

Her health was not good. Though she had given up smoking over a decade before, she was in late-stage COPD. She had some kind of heart problem but was always very vague about it.

She was fiercely independent and protective of her privacy. I came to visit her a few times a year, but she hadn’t let me see the inside of her house for 20 years. When I visited, we always stayed at a hotel/casino. Over the years, she took me to see Siegfried and Roy, the musical Chicago, the Beatles’ Love show, and the Ethel M. Chocolate Factory’s Cactus Garden decked out with holiday lights. She usually didn’t go out to see the sights in her own city, but whenever I visited, she went full tourist.

Occasionally, I invited her to live with me in Maryland. She got cold when the temperature fell below 80 degrees Fahrenheit, though; she’d been living in Las Vegas for 40 years. I told her that we could keep my house very warm in winter, but she had no intention of moving.

Years ago, she mentioned that her air conditioner was broken, but she hadn’t said anything about it recently. We didn’t know that she still had no air conditioner in her place, though she had the money to get it fixed; I think she might have been hoarding and that it might have been impossible for a repairperson to get to the A/C. The coroner said it was 96 degrees inside when they found her. In previous summers, Anni had gone to stay at hotels when Las Vegas summers were at their worst. This year, she was afraid of getting covid, so she rarely left her house.

Three or four weeks ago, I remember that she was very upset because a delivery man had come into her house without wearing a mask. She had a sign on the door that warned that she was at high risk for covid, but I guess he didn’t see it or didn’t care.

In the week before she died, she told me “not to panic,” but she had a temperature of 100-101 degrees for a few days. I panicked, but I was over 2,000 miles away. She said she thought it was “just a kidney infection”—that she had these all the time—and her doctor had pre-prescribed azithromycin for it. Another relative and I implored her to go to a doctor and get tested, but her general practitioner had gone to some “boutique operation,” and she wouldn’t have an appointment with her new doctor for another month.

We should have been more insistent, I think, but she could be quite insistent right back at us.

At some point in those last days, she scheduled a covid test but never made it to the appointment.

I don’t understand why concern for others has become such a point of contention. Thatcher’s “There’s no such thing as society” has become “F**k your feelings! I’ll do what I want!”

Anni was one of those few people who was there from the beginning of my life. Maybe you know the type: the ones who were there on the day you were born, and who, as parents should, love you no matter how obnoxious you are as a teenager, what you get pierced in college, etc. After my father died when I was an infant, Anni helped to raise me. She taught me how to swim and how to keep my hair from turning green afterward. She saved me when I thought I was going to have to drop out of college because my mom told me, mid-semester, that she would no longer help me pay for my expenses or tuition.

Anni accepted me when others rejected me. I guess she felt alienated, too.

My world is emptier now. She was a confidante and friend—though sometimes a querulous one—but ultimately, someone who also brought joy to others.

What is it that I mean to say here? We don’t have to be strangers. We don’t have to be so alienated from each other. We don’t have to “suffer in silence.” We don’t have to say nothing when we want most to speak. We don’t have to treat others with contempt. We don’t have to turn our backs on others. Ultimately, isolation is death. Reaching out to others is life. I know covid complicates this equation for the moment, but we don’t have to be so alone and estranged from each other. We have dozens of forms of social media. We don’t have to cut ourselves or others off over things as banal as politics or quarrels that happened decades ago. For your sake or theirs, stop treating other people as if they were already dead. There is nothing wrong with caring about others. A society in which people refuse to care about others will not function as a society for very long.