Some mornings start with coffee, some with tears. Lately, it’s a two-for-one situation
The day started with poorly-hidden tears, as it sometimes does lately.
It wasn’t even 9 in the morning yet. The sky outside was doing that soft, indecisive thing where it can’t quite figure out if it wants to be grey or blue. I sat at the dining table, staring blankly at my coffee, trying to convince my face to calm down before my mom notices.
She was telling me about the past couple of weeks with my dad while I was away. he stepped out for a morning walk and we took this moment to talk about the things we can’t talk about when he’s around. Mostly our fears.
Lately, the little things have been getting to me more than I expected. My dad forgetting how to use the TV remote. Losing the thread of the conversation. Getting confused about which medicines to take.
It’s the small cracks that shake you.
You brace yourself for the big things. For forgetting names, places, whole stretches of time. But no one really warns you about the smaller losses. The way they chip away at you, quietly, until one morning you’re sitting at the table wondering when simple breakfast conversations started feeling like landmines.
For a while, I thought I was just exhausted. Running on autopilot, juggling work, family, all of it. My colleagues assumed I was stressed. My friend, in classic blunt fashion, suggested maybe I just needed to get laid more. But my therapist gave it a name that sat heavy in my chest: anticipatory grief.
The mourning that starts early. The ache that creeps in before the real loss arrives. It shows up in forgotten remotes and misplaced words. In the frustration that bubbles up when your brain wants to correct them, but your heart just wants to let them be.
It’s watching the man I have always relied on, who once ran boardrooms and navigated life with terrifying efficiency, get distressed because he’s not sure what day it is. It’s holding space for his confusion without letting my own frustration spill over.
There’s no manual for this. Most mornings we hold it together. We drink our coffee, we swap stories, we brace ourselves for the next little thing he’ll forget.
Most mornings I handle it with grace.
Other mornings, like today, it starts with tears and ends with that familiar, quiet ache you carry into the rest of the day.
But we keep going through the forgotten stories, the repeated questions, Because there’s no neat way to live with this.
Because there are still moments to hold onto. Shared jokes, small victories, the warmth of knowing we’re not alone in it, even when everything else feels like it’s slipping through the cracks.
We hold on. Even when love feels like holding sand in your hands.
We hold on to the fragments. We find new ways to laugh. And we learn — painfully, beautifully — that sometimes love looks like patience beyond what believe you’re capable of.
in transit, intentionally,
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