Radha's Question: 'How Do I Love the Absent?'

Mirabai identified deeply with Radha, Krishna's beloved, who loved across unbridgeable distance. The central question of that love is: how do I remain connected to one who is withdrawing, changing, becoming less available? In anticipatory grief, this is your question. The person is still here, but already partly gone—cognitively, emotionally, or simply because illness or age is altering them. Radha's answer, as Mirabai lived it, was to love the eternal essence, not the temporal form. To see Krishna in absence. To find presence in memory and imagination. Applied here: can you love the person they are becoming? Can you find them in what remains? This is not resignation but the deepest practice of seeing. The examined heart learns to love across the widening distance.