I visited Dr. Albright yesterday. In hospice, now. The facility is surprisingly upscale, almost resort-like, which feels... incongruous. They had fresh flowers everywhere, a water feature in the lobby. I made sure my car was clean before I left, you know, just in case a neighbor saw me pulling out of the driveway, heading somewhere that obviously isn't work or the grocery store. Appearances are, always. He was mostly lucid, which was a relief in a way, but also… hard. His cognitive function is clearly deteriorating. He kept drifting in and out, repeating things, but there were moments, brief windows, where the old Dr. Albright was there. Sharp, challenging. I almost tried to engage him in a debate about Foucault’s late work, just out of habit. It’s a reflex. We used to spend hours, days even, dissecting texts, tearing apart arguments, rebuilding them. That intellectual sparring was—it was everything. Now, he just lies there, tubes, monitors, the faint smell of antiseptic and something sweet, like lilies. I held his hand for a while. It felt fragile, almost translucent. I kept observing my own reaction. There was a distinct lack of the overwhelming sadness I'd anticipated. Instead, it was this hollow sensation, a kind of absence of a specific stimulus. Like when you expect a certain input, a specific intellectual challenge, and it just… isn’t there. The grief feels less like the crushing weight of loss and more like a phantom limb sensation for a part of my brain. That part that used to light up, to *engage*. It’s a deficit, not an emotion, almost. I’m examining it like a case study, frankly. And then I got back in my car, drove through rush hour traffic, and picked up dinner from the drive-thru. The usual suburban tableau. I remember thinking, during the drive, about how he used to push me, intellectually, academically. He was the one who said my early research lacked "rigor," that I needed to excavate the underlying assumptions, not just report findings. And now that voice is fading, that specific form of guidance is… gone. I don't feel sad, not in the way you're supposed to feel sad. I feel… unmoored. Like a critical component has been removed from a complex system, and the system is still running, but the output is fundamentally altered. And I don’t know what the new output is supposed to be. I just don't know what I'm supposed to feel. Or do.