India, Jan. 9 -- What happens when a parent is gone? What happens when the relentless responsibility of caregiving suddenly ends? For the "sandwich generation", it feels as though one end of the tightrope you've been walking has snapped.

You fall. You fall hard. You had woven caregiving into the very rubric of your existence, or perhaps you wove your life around the caregiving. It is hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Now, suddenly, you are left bereft.

In the aftermath, you find yourself curling into a ball, sleeping for hours on end. Are you sleeping off the years of fatigue that came with the duty of keeping them alive? Or are you trying to escape the cascade of grief and the guilt of having failed to keep them here fo...