My aunt Betty died yesterday. Actually, my great-aunt: my father’s mother’s sister. I feel sad, not really that she died, but that she never seemed to have lived. For my entire life, Aunt Betty was a semi-tragic figure on the periphery of our family, an Eleanor Rigby whose hobbies were saying the rosary, going to mass, and watching syndicated sitcoms. She never got married or was ever even in love, for all I know. I’ve heard a rumor that at one point her decision to become a nun was blocked by various family members; I don’t know the details surrounding that, but I find it unusual, as that was the career that best suited her skills and interests.

If you looked closely, you would see that Aunt Betty had the most startling blue-grey eyes. They didn’t even look like eyes at all, but like smoky, faceted jewels. I want to paint that color on a wall. If you hugged Aunt Betty, you got an imprint of her makeup on your shirt. She called herself my best girl. “Tell everyone I’m your best girl,” she would say. She thought everything was “swell.” She called every so often on the phone but wouldn’t want to talk for more than a minute. “Come see me when you can,” she would end each conversation. If I told her I’d been traveling, she said, “I don’t know how you can do that. I just like to stay home.” When my grandmother was dying of lung cancer, Aunt Betty moved in to take care of her. She had been living in a rooming house in Baltimore and didn’t have much to pack. When my grandmother died, she took over her apartment and possessions.

Last night, I had a dream that I went to that apartment, and my grandmother was there. “Help me with something in my storage space,” she asked me. The storage room in the basement was filled with her stuff, but there was evidence also that a homeless person was sleeping in there among it. We quickly retreated, about to call the police, when Michael Scott, the boss from “The Office” came in. “That’s Aunt Betty’s stuff,” he said. He started rolling around on the floor, prostrate with genuine grief, crying, “Be sad for Aunt Betty. It’s okay to mourn Aunt Betty.”

I do mourn her. But I didn’t see her often or know her well. For me, the world without her in it is much the same as the world with her in it.

But it is a world with one fewer gentle soul signaling her unconditional love and endless devotion through the soft clacking of rosary beads.