You're grieving your parent while they're still alive

Come, sit close, for this is a heavy thing and you should not hold it by yourself. This grief is real, though it has no name and no ritual — the world has rites for grief after death but almost none for mourning someone whose person has gone ahead of their body, so you may doubt your own sorrow or feel you have no right to it; but it is real grief, harder in some ways for having no ending, so name it plainly: I am grieving my parent, though they are not yet gone, and I am allowed to. The grief and the love are not in conflict; they flow from one place — you may feel that mourning who they were betrays who they are, but the grief IS the love meeting a loss it cannot stop, and you can mourn the parent who knew you while tending the one who does not, in the same heart, the same hour. And let yourself grieve now, and find someone to carry it with — do not wait for the death, for the loss is happening now and postponing it only lets it press unacknowledged; feel it in pieces as it rises, and above all do not carry it alone, for this is too heavy for silence — find one person who has walked it, and say the unsayable things. Who, if anyone, knows what you are carrying?