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 forever? No one can really say. Yet, amid this turmoil, you realise you are still the "in-between" generation. Your children still need you. That realisation compels you to camouflage your tears and begin picking up the pieces. Tempted as you are to lean on them, you choose not to unburden yourself. Their time to steady you will inevitably come, but for now, you want them to simply live. You have learned first hand that, over time, parents become "home". You have experienced the numbing loss of your own home, dismantled brick by brick as a parent declined, physically or mentally or both. Now, you want to shield your children from that reality. You wish to be a sanctuary for them as they roam faraway shores. You want them to explore the world and find themselves, moving forward without fretting about the anchor that holds them afloat. Homes don't lean, you see. They stand steady and strong. So, you rise again. You resolve to focus on your health, to gather your strength, and to channel your grief. You linger in the room left inexplicably empty, waiting for a raspy voice to call your name, only to realise with a gut-wrenching clarity that those days are gone. You think you are drowning, but surprisingly, you find the strength to tread water. The years of caregiving seem to have welded acceptance and a certain resolve into you. You learned to steal fleeting moments of connection and joy while chaos swirled around you; so you carry on. Your parents taught you well. Their life lessons now help you redraw the blueprint of your own. You limp toward a new normal, still clutching onto random voice notes, photographs, and even the pile of medical records. You gather loved ones and try to live in the moment, just as your parents once did. The circle of life continues, and in the end, we all eventually become the home we once leaned on....