The Coronavirus Took My Aunt, but It Can’t Take My Good Memories of the Time I Lived Under Her Roof

This past weekend, my Aunt Jeanette passed away. She was 88 and living in a nursing facility near Boston. My cousins — the six surviving of her seven children — believe it was a coronavirus-related death as the pathogen was present in the building where she spent the last two and half years of her life in failing health.

My Aunt Jeanette (far left) and my mom (far right) with my father and uncles partying in the back. Together in the “good ole days” in the late 1950s.

It’s sad, but I take solace in the possibility that she didn’t suffer much. I’m going to miss her. Like most of the memorable people in my life, she was a “character.”

And she was like a second mother to me when I lived with her, my Uncle Tom (my father’s older brother), and her youngest daughter (a teenager at the time, also named Jeanette) in the mid-1980s when I was in my 20s.

It was an extremely difficult time for me as I had just moved from San Diego to New England in the Spring of 1985, with plans of eventually landing in New York City to pursue my Theatre career, when my brother Kevin committed suicide near Dubuque, Iowa. I had just visited him there six weeks prior. It was a stop on my drive across the country.

Kevin’s death was quite a shock and left me psychologically unmoored for more than a year. I was extremely fragile and any plans that I had of making it big on Broadway…