Man As An Island

I just read a column by a young man afflicted with terminal cancer who is spending his last days alone in coronavirus quarantine. Maybe it is not a good idea to read stories about death and dying when you are self-isolating in a pandemic, but I feel drawn to them. This morning, I went to the GoFundMe page of a 13-year-old healthy boy who died of Covid-19 in London, becoming the UK's youngest victim. The donation target was 4,000 pounds, and when I checked about 70,000 pounds had been raised already.
Coming back to the column by the dying man, I felt a strange connection to him. He also seemed to be single, he was also close to his sister (who lived with him but was temporarily staying away as she worked for the NHS). And he said that before the disease he was very independent, seeing himself as an island. The disease changed all that very quickly.
Yes, independence and self-sufficiency are less a virtue and more a result of good luck. But, I don't strive to be independent to pat myself on the back. Being an island feels like a good way to live my life and particularly well-suited to my personality. A part of the process of becoming more comfortable with myself is accepting that I am a loner with a rich inner life. So, I could either bemoan my loner tendencies or try to cultivate a rich inner life which I am very open to sharing with the right people.