Read: Italy’s coronavirus response is a warning from the future

I see something else in Mattia’s experience—a story of pathos, in which life and death, pain and resilience are intertwined. Italy is a place of intricate family and community ties. Two and three generations often live in the same city, the same neighborhood, or even the same apartment building. People commute by train to other cities for work, while keeping their residence, and their family, in their hometowns, where a network of relatives can help raise their children. Without the extensive state-supported child care of France and other European countries, many Italian grandparents are the primary babysitters, allowing parents to work and keep the gears of the economy turning. These ties are strong in Italy, where reliance on the family is typically greater than on the state.

They are also part of what put the country, with the second-oldest population in the world, after Japan, at such mortal risk, as contagion spread among relatives. It’s a pattern that is now being repeated around the world—especially in countries and cultures where large extended families are the rule, not the exception, and in lower-income communities in which people live in close quarters, where social distancing is fine in theory but nearly impossible in practice. All of this bears a strange irony—in the recognition that for those of us able to look after ourselves, being alone, away from other humans, from our kin, is probably safer than being together. Controlling the pandemic will reshape family life for a long time to come.

Bruno told me that knowing whether Mattia infected his own father, or any of his other relatives, is “impossible.” Still, the sense of guilt that particular possibility might involve—or the generalized survivor guilt of weathering the pandemic when other family members or friends don’t—is something that will likely grow. “There’s a strong sense of shame and guilt that’s been underestimated,” David Lazzari, the president of Italy’s National Council of Psychologists, told me. “It often compels people to hide their symptoms, because maybe they’re afraid of identifying themselves as a carrier of the virus and then as someone who infects others.” Imagine, he continued, how people will live in the aftermath “with the idea that they infected half the town.” A lot of post-traumatic stress will ensue, he said. Now the pain is more immediate: a sense of powerlessness. Mourning without funerals. And being separated from the people we love. “We need to show our closeness, but from a distance,” Lazzari said.

For weeks now, I’ve been thinking about Patient One, from my apartment in Paris, where I live alone. All of us living far away from loved ones, especially older and more vulnerable relatives, have had to think long and hard about how best to offer support. Our immediate instinct is to want to gather together, to show closeness. Yet that is now the worst thing we could possibly do. Governments in France and Israel, where generations of families also tend to live in close proximity, have ordered older people to stay home, and told grandchildren to steer clear. In Germany, some health experts have suggested that children not see their grandparents until well into the fall, or even after Christmas. In Britain, where the government has told citizens to save lives by staying home, a cabinet minister was criticized for visiting his own parents.