n.Grief for someone who is gone but not gone — missing, estranged, or changed beyond recognition.
Pauline Boss, 1999Established psychological concept
The Visiting Hour
The forms are the worst of it, which nobody tells you.
Relationship to patient. Daughter. Easy.
Next of kin. Also her. Easy.
And then, on a different form in a different office, a woman with a kind face asks whether Priya has considered bereavement counselling, and Priya says her mother is alive, and the woman says of course, sorry, and neither of them knows what to do with the next four seconds.
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Her mother has been going for six years and has, by the reckoning of the neurologist, about two left.