Two years ago Sunday, I lost my first best friend. My brother Corey, four years older, was the closest to my age, and I spent probably the first two years of my life being his shadow until he went to school. Wherever he was, I was too.

My mom’s and my favorite picture of the two of us is on a shelf in my office, and is the profile picture on my Facebook account, as it has been since shortly before Corey died. I’m probably less than a year old in the picture, which would make Corey about 4½. We’re sitting together, legs splayed, on the front porch of my grandparents’ house when they lived “down on the corner” (really, a 90-degree curve in the road) next door to Neal and Ernestine Ferguson, two of the sweetest people ever. The first thing you notice is the contrast of my little shoes with his much larger ones.

His feet would be bigger than mine for the rest of his life. The hole in my heart now is even bigger.

I still feel guilt from the last conversation I had with him, being that it was about vaccinations and staying safe with covid still in full gallop. I had implored him for months to get the vaccination, or at the very least, to be more careful and wear a mask, but to no avail.

Corey was stubborn (just like Mama, who let her flu go on too long for doctors to be able to do much for her, considering how taxed her body already was by renal cancer) and believed he was immune since for so long he’d been around so many unmasked people, some of whom were carrying covid. He also would throw around data he’d found—or worse, something from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), on which anyone can submit a report that, according to the site, “may contain information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable”—without understanding it.

Then he got covid, and tried to self-treat as if it were a cold; he only started getting actual treatment when his life partner Carletta called an ambulance for him because he wasn’t getting better and it scared her. He improved a little in the hospital, enough where the doctors decided to send him to rehab so his lungs could get stronger. Unfortunately, in the elevator on the way there, he had a stroke when a blood clot broke free as a side effect of the infection. He died about a week later, never having really woken up. Even if he had, he would have been unable to speak or do much of anything because most of the left side of his brain was dead.

At his memorial service a couple of weeks after that, I was one of only a handful of people there wearing a mask, and there were at least two people with active infections attending (one died not long afterwards).

I managed to go almost three years without catching covid, until my birthday week this year. I always knew it was a possibility, and I’d been less careful about masking than I should have been in the time when I probably caught it. No vaccination is 100 percent effective, and never will be, but because I’d been vaccinated and boosted, my infection was less severe than it could have been, and I never needed to go to the hospital. I mostly just isolated myself, ate chicken soup and monitored my pulse-ox while staying at friend Sarah’s house and working (sorry for keeping you from decompressing by yourself from your trip, but thank you for making the week, and our birthday, not so horrible).

Taking precautions so that others don’t become sick is part of being human and the social contract. I can deal with minor inconvenience for the safety of others. Taking a vaccine or wearing a mask in a hospital, doctor’s office, pharmacy or other places where you may run into people with low immunity or who care for someone with low immunity is nothing compared to someone being on a ventilator.

Yet for some people, it’s too much to ask. Those people are some of the jerks I’ve been decrying lately. I mean, seriously, why do you have to be a jackhole? That person you’re harassing because they’re wearing a mask may have a loved one fighting cancer or they may be immunocompromised themselves. How is them being cautious hurting you?

Sorry, I tend to get a bit exercised by jerkish behavior. Mask-wearers can be jerky as well, but I haven’t seen any try to physically put a mask on someone else who refuses to wear one, but more than a few non-mask-wearers who rip off people’s masks and sometimes cough on them.

Spreading misinformation is at least as dangerous as not exercising caution. “Vaccine” redefined? No, the definition was broadened to take into account how mRNA vaccines—something new—work, but it still means something that provokes an immune response to teach your body how to react to infection. Language and science evolve.

Ivermectin a miracle cure? For parasitic infections, maybe, but covid is viral, not parasitic. Hydroxychloroquine another miracle cure? Not really; though it was authorized for emergency use, testing showed it to not be very effective. Plus there’s the fact that people were using veterinary-grade ivermectin and fish-tank cleaner, neither of which are meant for human ingestion.

Vaccines untested? Seriously? Because of the emergency status, human tests were run concurrently rather than consecutively to shorten the time to possible approval (heck, the guy who mows my yard was one of the test subjects in Arkansas). All approved vaccines, no matter the disease, are continually monitored for adverse reactions, which is why the J&J vaccine was pulled in the U.S.

While blood clots in the lungs appear to be a somewhat common side effect of covid infections, the risk of getting them from a vaccine is far less; the J&J shot, though, carried a higher risk than mRNA vaccines, as did the AstraZeneca vaccine never approved in the U.S. Its use was first paused shortly after release for investigation of the clotting disorder associated with it, and by the time emergency use resumed, demand had fallen. The FDA changed guidance on J&J twice before the vaccine was no longer available here, first downgrading it and placing mRNA vaccines as the preferred choice, and then approving it only for people over 18 unable or unwilling to get an mRNA vaccine.

Taking something said early on when very little was known and pointing to that as proof of something shady is more than a little shady itself. Covid was a novel virus, so we were learning about it just after medical researchers did. Masking does help limit spread, but you can’t convince some otherwise because Dr. Anthony Fauci said early on that masks weren’t needed for general use. A personal protective equipment shortage at the time meant that front-line medical personnel needed to be prioritized for masks; once manufacturing caught up, the guidance changed.

(You can find more covid myths debunked here.)

There are those who will never agree with me on the need for precautions, but let me hit you with the 2-by-4 of reality: Unless you are completely cut off from every other living person, your actions will affect someone else. Remaining unvaccinated gives the virus even more of a chance to mutate and spread. Flitting around crowds unmasked when you’re sick or have been exposed to someone with an active infection endangers others. Actively coughing on someone … what are you—12? Wait, sorry, that something a kindergartener would do.

We don’t live in a vacuum; it’s high time some people realized that and exercised consideration for others. Using caution is not the same as living in fear. (I’d argue that those who feel the need to strap on a gun just to go outside, or who build up an arsenal of high-powered guns, are the ones living in fear; guns are their security blanket. Never mind the anxiety it may cause others when they show up like that at Walmart if they don’t all know you.) It’s realistic, especially in a world where too many people have decided that only they and those who think as they do deserve the courtesy of common decency. They’ve shown themselves to be untrustworthy, even vengeful at times, so those using caution are protecting themselves by masking, vaccinating, social distancing, etc., because they don’t want to get sick and/or carry the infection to family or friends.

If you won’t take precautions for yourself, at least take them for those you love. Losing someone to something that could be ameliorated is a pain you don’t want.

What I wouldn’t give for one more story from Corey …