When I exit the elevator into the hotel lobby, the urgency of my own voice startles me. “Are there any bodies of water nearby that I can access on foot?” The front desk receptionist gestures to the door and says I’ll meet Indian Creek within a few blocks.

I see sadness wash across my 73-year-old mother’s face. She’s holding the plastic bag containing her younger sister Carol’s cremains, and we’ve just learned we need permission from the U.S. Consulate to fly them back to my mother’s home in Spain for a proper memorial. Our flight leaves in a few hours, and a quick online search reveals that scattering ashes within 3 nautical miles of Florida’s shore is illegal. We have to be discreet.

“Carol loved Miami,” my mother whispers to soften the reality of what we are about to do: Leave Carol behind.

My aunt’s death at 69 had taken us by surprise. My mother’s weekly voice message, left on a Thursday, went unreturned. By Sunday, my aunt’s neighbour, who lives on the other side of the adjoining patio wall, smelled something off. He heard Chelsea, my aunt’s rescue dog, barking for days before he called 911.

The autopsy report attributes acute peritonitis caused by untreated (treatable) rectal carcinoma as the cause of my aunt’s death. The medical examiner surmised that she sat down in her rocking chair while preparing Chelsea’s food and never got back up to serve it.

The dog sat vigil by my aunt’s side for four days before they were discovered.

The Miami-Dade homicide detective explained that, because my aunt died alone in her home, the law required a forensic account of the scene. After they removed her body, I requested the property remain untouched. I wanted to piece together her final days to better understand her life, but I was not prepared for the chaotic state of her final months.

Perhaps my journalistic approach to her death is a way of coping with guilt and loss, but my investigation has revealed a heartbreaking reality.

My aunt, an educated, politically passionate, older gay woman, died isolated, financially destitute and alone. What could I have done to prevent it?

I had never asked Carol questions about her health or well-being. I was always caught up in my career and relationships, assuming deaths like this didn’t happen in a family like mine. I also believed my aunt was part of a system that took care of its aging population, and that I didn’t have to worry about her. I was terribly wrong, and I wanted to understand why.

My aunt knew she was gay at 13, in 1955, but coming out wasn’t the custom in 1950s America. Instead, Carol excelled in sports, was known as a class comedian and had a boyfriend, despite being in love with her best friend, according to my mother.

The comments under her yearbook photo describe her as a “pistol-packing mistress of ceremonies… always ready with a joke… athletic… psychology major in college.” Compared to the other female students on the same page, with descriptions like “knee-length sweaters” and “future Miss Private Secretary,” it’s clear Carol was already defining herself by her choices.

A man who introduced himself as Carol’s high school boyfriend contacted me after reading my aunt’s obituary. He said they were going steady until she suddenly cut off contact right before his senior prom. When he drove by her house to speak with her about what had happened, she ran inside. He was heartbroken and confused by her behaviour.

Years later, he bumped into my aunt when they were studying for their master’s degrees at Temple University. She pointed to his Eldridge Cleaver “If you’re not part of the solution, you are part of the problem” pin and let him know that she was now open about her sexuality and that he should accept it or else remain part of the problem.

Surprisingly, between the dreaded 1959 high school prom and the empowered run-in with her high school ex at Temple in 1970, my aunt married a young man from the neighbourhood. He was a friend, my mother told me, who agreed to a “sham” marriage to ward off scrutiny from her parents.

I can imagine how difficult it may have been for Carol to come out to them. My grandparents were first-generation Americans who owned a successful beauty salon known for styling young Grace Kelly’s hair before she left for Hollywood. They raised their family with the understanding that public appearance was social currency, and heteronormative relationships were the gold standard.

Still, Carol was 25 when she got married in 1967. Couldn’t she have escaped her parents’ middle-class aspirations without the charade of a marriage? And what happened during the three years between her wedding and 1970, when she was fully out of the closet? What had changed? Was there some specific catalyst for her coming out and accepting who she truly was, or had she simply grown tired of hiding? I wish I’d asked her.

Later, when I was growing up in the ’70s, I had two aunts: Aunt Carol and Aunt Patty. There was never talk of lesbians or girlfriends or homosexuality; there was simply Carol and Patty as a couple until something changed in their relationship in the ’80s.

According to my mother, Carol didn’t want Patty, who was younger, to see Carol’s body aging. Vanity is another byproduct of growing up in the beauty business, but I think their breakup had more to do with my aunt’s codependent relationship with my grandmother.

When my grandparents retired to Miami, my aunt followed and was single for another 40 years. She did have one longtime friend, also named Pat, but Pat swore in a conversation with me that she and my aunt were never romantically together. She said they went to the same “women’s parties” in Coral Gables in the ’80s and lived with or close to each other for decades.

Pat said she felt she had met a “veteran lesbian” in my aunt, someone who knew who she was and wasn’t struggling with her truth. Carol was liberating to young Pat. Pat was also the last person to see my aunt alive.

Pat agrees that Carol didn’t invite anyone into her life after the relationship with Patty ended. She had no long-term romantic relationships, just her rescue dogs and exotic birds, public television, and football.

She was a frequent caller on sports talk radio shows and taught English composition to the football players at the University of Miami to make sure they kept up their grades to play. I remember her saying The Rock was one of her favourite students.

My aunt was also known for her sharp humour and open critique of politics, according to reviews on RateMyProfessor.com. One of her Florida International University colleagues told me Carol was “always upbeat and eager to discuss books, teaching, and travel.”

The challenges of being an underpaid adjunct lecturer without benefits gradually wore her down, he explained, though her dedication to students remained clear. It was around this time that her contract at FIU wasn’t renewed, and she left her house less and less.

The whole experience of going through Carol’s few remaining belongings in her foreclosed, gated-community condo shook me. I sobbed in the parking lot after seeing my mother break down for not successfully convincing Carol to move to Spain with her. It reminded me that I’d made no real effort to check in beyond email. Carol never extended an invitation to visit, and I never thought to just show up.

Suddenly flooded with memories, I quickly jotted them down before they disappeared — like one Christmas holiday in Miami Beach when Carol, dressed in black, made me laugh uncontrollably with an inspired version of Placido Domingo & John Denver’s 1981 song “Perhaps Love.”

Perhaps Love…

Is like a sweater

That fits into a box.

It shouldn’t smell like herring.

It shouldn’t taste like lox.

Carol had a way of poking fun at tradition even though she never felt at home with family gatherings or holidays, as she shared with me in an email the year before her death.

On June 26, 2015, 19 years after President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act into law, marriage equality became a right for millions of Americans. On that historic day, friends coloured my newsfeed with celebratory rainbow filters and messages.

Some had no intention of marrying, some were already traditionally or symbolically married, but they were all in agreement that discrimination has no place in our society.

I thought of Aunt Carol’s formative years as part of what I discovered SAGE and the Movement Advancement Project call the Silenced Generation. Born in the 1930s and 1940s, they came of age during a time of public shaming of LGBTQ+ people, as well as the pathologisation of homosexuality, which was listed in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” until 1973.

I wondered if my aunt’s distrust of institutions, doctors and the public in general was an underlying contributor to her heightened level of self-preservation and loneliness.

I dug out a black and white photograph of Aunt Carol in her late 30s. After studying her for a few moments, contemplating her life as an intelligent animal lover and activist with a wicked sense of humour — a real political firecracker — I decided to put a rainbow filter on the photo and share it on Facebook.

If Carol were a 13-year-old today, however, there’s no guarantee she would feel any safer than she did in 1955. Basic civil rights, like marriage, family and financial planning, and hate crime prevention, have been argued and advanced in courtrooms, capitol buildings and the media, but these freedoms are perennially under attack.

According to the FBI, hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people rose in 2023, even as the rate of violent hate crimes dropped overall. The ACLU is actively monitoring over 550 anti-LGBTQ+ bills in U.S. state legislatures across the country, and things could get much, much worse for the LGBTQ+ community when the Trump administration reenters the White House in just a few months.

I do believe Carol would still be fighting this fight if she were alive. I found her listed as a signatory in a 1993 pro-choice ad in the Miami Herald published in protest of the murder of Dr. David Gunn at a women’s medical clinic in Pensacola.

In another folder she kept of her achievements, I found letters from the head of her public television chapter, and in a 1997 volunteer profile, Carol is quoted as saying, “By contributing what I can… I am taking a stand and declaring, ‘You will not quiet this voice.’”

Still, her voice was ultimately quieted — and I know she’s not the only one.

I wonder how many other Aunt Carols will die alone. There are an estimated 1.1 million LGBTQ+ identifying adults aged 65 and older. One study found 7 in 10 LGBTQ+ older adults live by themselves compared to 3 in 10 non-queer adults, and many queer elders don’t have children to help them.

LGBTQ+ retirement communities and care facilities are on the rise, but not everyone — including Aunt Carol — wants to live their day-to-day life with other people or has the funds to support that level of care. Organisations like SAGE, founded in 1978 by queer activists, further advocacy, services and support to older members of the LGBTQ+ community, but these groups do not exist in many areas and, where they do, there is still much work to be done to prevent queer elders from facing an end like my aunt.

I cannot change what happened in my family, but I will continue to tell Aunt Carol’s story whenever and however I can. I miss her voice, her humor, and her chutzpah. She was navigating an era of deep adversity and left a lasting impact on the people and organisations she touched.

At the same time, I’m beginning to understand the tragic truth of her last days and why she closed herself off from a world in which she felt unvalued, invisible, and at risk.

I often think of the day Aunt Carol talked me into water skiing for the first time when she was working with the Miccosukee tribe in the Everglades. I was 12 and terrified to go out of my comfort zone, but as the engine revved, Aunt Carol sang out Elton John’s biggest hit at the time from the back of the boat: “I’m still standing better than I ever did… Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid!”

And as the boat pulled away, my arms extended at the end of the rope. Thanks to her inspiring confidence in me, I found my footing, stood up tall, and overcame my fear.

Michelle Tamara Cutler is an award-winning screenwriter and storytelling coach who specialises in true story adaptations. Her reported and personal essays have appeared in HuffPost, Business Insider, Trail Runner Magazine, Under the Gum Tree, Longridge Review, Brevity Blog and elsewhere. She is writing a memoir that examines the circumstances of her Aunt Carol’s death to illuminate LGBTQ+ elder isolation, the rewards of family caregiving, and the influence of the beauty business on identity and mental health. Learn more at michellecutler.com and connect on Instagram.