EDITOR’S NOTE: Suzy Welch is a columnist for BusinessWeek and O, the Oprah Magazine.

It was a week of screaming headlines — Spitzer, Ferraro, Recession. In my house, like millions of others, we lived them all; the TV blaring non-stop, the web surfing compulsive, the dinner conversation feverish. We heard calamity words tossed around like fly balls at Spring Training: Spitzer was a shock, Ferraro a disaster, the stock market a nightmare.

We couldn’t believe the combined hugeness of events — or the gut-twisting lessons embedded within. No man is truly knowable. Politics trump friendship. All booming economies implode. It was like the most mordant messages of Dostoevsky, Updike, Wolfe, and Le Carre coming at you all at once.

And through it all — beneath it all — in my house, like millions of others last week, we also silently lived our own little tragedy. Lulu died last Sunday.

She was my mother’s older sister — her full name was Lucille, but we never used it — and for many years when I was a teenager and a young woman, she was like a second mother to me, and in that role, of course, she was funnier, more understanding, and way more cool than my own mother. Childless herself, she had no concept of how to treat us as children, and so she treated us like adults. A world traveler because of her husband’s job, she brought home stories of China and Japan that promised a life beyond our numbing suburban sprawl. Battling manic depression — I now realize — she was frantically funny and startlingly candid, persistently making comments that left us thinking both, “She’s nuts,” and, “She’s brilliant.” I remember, for instance, one family gathering in the 70s, when my own mother, terrified of losing control over her three teenaged daughters, was raging against the “Free Love” movement, calling it a cover-up for promiscuity. Aunt Lucille threw my sisters and me a wry smile, took a long drag on her cigarette, and cooed, “Thank God a new generation of women won’t have to be frigid.” We adored her.

College came and went, then husbands and babies and jobs and houses arrived and took our lives away. My sisters and I grew up and older and moved away from Boston and Lulu. And then Lulu, struggling with her husband’s Parkinson’s disease, moved too, to California. Two decades passed, then three, the gulf between us inexorably widened. I called her twice a year, maybe three times, ignoring the fact with each contact, she sounded increasingly loopy. Her husband had died, leaving her housebound because she didn’t drive. And yet, she spoke of friends I knew she couldn’t have. She insisted no one visit — she was too busy.

By the time my husband and I flew out to California last year to bring her home, she was living alone in a tiny bungalow, desolate, hungry, feeble. When she cracked open the door in her nightgown, peering out in terror, and I said, “Lulu, it’s Suzy, we’re taking you away with us,” she fell to her knees and sobbed, “Thank you, God.” She tried hugging my ankles, but I lifted her up — she was infinitely tiny, maybe 85 pounds — and sat her in a chair, where she sat weeping, as we packed her life’s contents into two small suitcases.

We were, in the end, too late. Her dementia had grown severe, her body weak beyond repair. She lasted a year with us, then my mother, then a nursing home with hospice. Her death itself was fast, quiet, and we’re told, painless. Her last words were, “Air, air.”

I thought of Lulu’s off-stage life all week long, as Spitzer, Ferraro, and the recession played at center stage. I wondered how it was that strangers on TV could feel so important to me; I wondered about the meaning of a life that never made headlines and ended without a trace.

Lulu, of course, mattered more.