I’m just… wondering if anyone else has ever felt this particular kind of ache, this pre-grief almost, for someone who isn't gone yet but feels like they’re slipping away, and it’s just so hard to explain the specific gravity of it, you know, because it’s not even about me really, not directly, but it hits you right in your core all the same. My granddaughter, bless her heart, she just started her first real job out of university, way out in Denver of all places, so far from home, and she calls me every Sunday, without fail, and she was telling me about her new apartment and how the mountain air is so different and how she’s trying to learn to cook something besides instant ramen, and then she sort of trails off and she says, "Oh, Grandma, Mom just called me again, and she said Great-Grandma fell again, and she’s using that walker more and more, and she hates it, Grandma, she REALLY hates it." And my heart just sank right through the floor because my mother, you see, she’s always been so fiercely independent, not a fragile bone in her body, or so I always thought, and this loss of mobility, it’s just crushing her spirit, I can feel it from here, even through the telephone wires and all those miles. And my granddaughter, she's so worried, and she’s so far away, and I keep thinking about how she’s just starting out, building her life, and now she's got this weight on her shoulders, this constant worry about her great-grandmother, and it's just not fair for her to feel this burden when she should be out experiencing everything new and wonderful. And it brings back so much, too, doesn't it, these little things, these moments of change, because I remember when my own marriage dissolved, after thirty years, and suddenly I was fifty-two and completely untethered, and half my friends, the ones who were 'his' friends, they just evaporated, and the other half didn't know what to say or do, and it was like a sudden amputation, you know? And I had to learn to stand on my own two feet all over again, literally and figuratively, and it took YEARS to rebuild, to find my equilibrium, and it feels like that sort of recalibration, but for someone else, for my mother, and I see it in her now, this sort of learned helplessness creeping in, and the despair, the absolute despair of someone who has always been so, so capable. And the doctor called it "age-related decline," a perfectly sterile, clinical term for something that feels anything BUT sterile, and it's so much more than just a physical thing, it’s cognitive too, just little lapses, nothing major yet, but you see the pattern, don't you? And it just makes me want to scream sometimes. Is it wrong to feel this profound sense of anticipatory grief for someone who is still here, still very much present, but is losing parts of herself piece by agonizing piece? Because I look at my mother, and I see the woman who taught me to knit, who always had a perfectly timed sarcastic remark, who built a garden from nothing but weeds, and now… now it’s just different, and my granddaughter, she's seeing it too, and it’s like she’s caught between two worlds, the exciting new one she’s building and the fading old one that she’s connected to by blood, and it just feels so overwhelmingly sad and unfair for all of us, but especially for them. Does anyone else get what I'm trying to say, this particular weight of it all?