They’re asleep on the sofa in front of you, and you already miss them.
If that sentence makes uncomfortable sense, this is the right room. Anticipatory grief — mourning that starts before the loss — is real grief, and it’s exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t done it. You’re living in two timelines at once. Part of you is here scratching their ears. Part of you is already in the house afterwards.
There’s no socially recognised space for this. You can’t take time off. Nobody sends a card. You’re expected to carry on normally while quietly falling apart in the car park.
So this is that space.
Things people talk about here: the exhaustion of caregiving, the guilt of wanting it to be over, quality-of-life decisions, what to say to people who ask how they’re doing, and how to be present when every good day means the bad day is still coming.
If you’re in this stretch, tell us about them. Not about the illness — about them. What they were like before, what they still do that makes you laugh, what the routine looks like now.
Nobody here will tell you it’s too early to be sad.
