The fear before the grief: When goodbye begins long before it actually happens

We are in Ruchi's childhood home in Mumbai. It is low-ceilinged, cheerless and badly in need of repair. The walls carry the sour stench of rainwater and the windows look like they haven't been cracked open in months. It's not the kind of place one would invite a stranger to but none of that seems to register with Ruchi. In the hour that we spend together, her eyes flit to a door that's slightly ajar. Every few minutes, we hear low grunting sounds from within. They punctuate the topic that has brought us together that afternoon: death. And the ominous, soul-crushing expectation of it.

Ruchi's father is fading fast. His oncologist no longer uses the vocabulary of months. I send a silent prayer heavenward when I hear that: "Please, god, not while I'm here." Shamefully self-absorbed? Without a doubt. I do not want to witness the moment a person becomes an orphan.

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What strikes me about Ruchi is how preternaturally calm she is. She describes the last six months of her life: quitting her job to take care of her father, his decision to stop treatment, their methodical transfer of assets. Her clinical approach to death is puzzling, even for her. "You know the people who have embarrassing public meltdowns at the thought of a parent dying? I was that person. But when it's actually happening, I have a checklist. It feels anticlimactic and wrong. Like I'm a bad daughter."

At 40, Ruchi can't pinpoint why the fear of her father's mortality has colonised her life for over three decades. An only child of divorced parents, she has no memory of her mother. Both her grandparents were healthy and lived well into their 80s. If anything, she's among the lucky ones, never having confronted prolonged suffering until now. And yet, she remembers feeling her chest tighten like it was going to explode while watching Mufasa die in The Lion King on her eighth birthday. "I'm fairly certain it was my first panic attack," she tells me. "I was convinced that my father, too, would die suddenly one day and I'd be all alone. That feeling has never really left me."

Are they okay?

Swagatika Sarangi, 30, from Bengaluru and 26-year-old Pratik Goel (name changed) from Delhi can relate, but for wildly different reasons.

In 2016, Sarangi was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) due to her relentless and entirely unfounded fear that her parents would suddenly drop dead. "I'd start spiralling if they missed my calls for any reason," she admits. "We've now installed cameras in the common areas of our home, so I can see they are okay instead of panicking immediately."

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On the other end of the spectrum is Goel, haunted by financial ambiguity. He is the middle child, sandwiched between two sisters. He joined his father's business when he was 19. It's the only employment he's ever known. "Everything I've ever earned has gone back into the business. But the firm itself is in my father's name. And our houses are in my mother's name," he tells me. Death is a taboo subject in the Goel family, and it is unlikely that his parents have drawn up any wills, let alone registered ones. "If they were to die tomorrow, my sisters can claim 'equal share', despite never having earned a rupee for the business or contributing a rupee towards my parents' expenses. How is that fair?" The one time he tried to broach the topic, he was accused of "waiting for them to die". He claims that the family dynamic has changed irrevocably since this catastrophic fight three years ago. "All I wanted was clarity." Bracing for a long and bitter legal battle in the future, Goel has retained legal counsel and maintains extensive documentation to support his eventual claims.

Morbid preoccupation

For all its attendant terror, death is maddeningly mundane. All the breathless carpe diem-ing life advice we have ever been assaulted with is triaged around the certainty that someday we and everyone we know and love (or despise) is going to be dead. Death, one might argue, is a load-bearing conviction. Without it, life collapses. We strive to achieve immortality through our work, words and deeds because there is no denying death. It is compulsory for physical forms.

Why, then, does thinking of it in relation to our own parents terrorise us so? And is every generation cursed with this harrowing fixation on parental death when they reach middle age? Or, are today's grown-up 'kids' more morbidly consumed by it than their predecessors?

Seema Hingorani, a clinical psychologist from Mumbai, believes it is the latter. According to her, while the idea of a parent dying is "unsettling, no matter what", the anxiety that millennials and Gen Z are feeling is worrisome. "They've thought about it so obsessively that they expect to completely fall apart when it happens." Hingorani attributes this dread to a volatile mix of emotions, existential angst and the extremely disorienting economic landscape we are being forced to navigate.

"Family is the primary social unit and source of identity in India, at least for now," says Hingorani. "The thought of parents dying is immediately followed by, 'Who will be in my corner now? Who will prioritise me? How will I manage alone?'" It's not hard to see how these can be destabilising questions in an increasingly lonely world. This is compounded by the reality of rapidly shrinking families. "For previous generations, aunts and uncles would step in to fill the 'elderly influence' vacuum." Marriage doesn't guarantee partnership. People choose not to marry or opt out of unhappy ones all the time. "When you don't have a partner, it's natural to be more emotionally dependent on parents."

And, finally, making everything infinitely worse is the longevity industrial complex, where success often depends on the vicious exploitation of our most primal vulnerabilities. Pills, potions, proteins, peptides, drugs, diagnostics, dubious 'discoveries', therapies, treatments, tools, technologies.... Billions and billions of dollars dedicated to the pursuit of beating biology. In January, the Consumer Electronics Show 2026 saw big and small names in health tech hawking devices focused on complex metabolic markers. No longer satisfied with just tracking heart rate, blood pressure and glucose levels, they now want to drown us with insights gleaned from hormones, blood, pee, saliva, sperm and even foot sweat, it seems. Another burgeoning-and even more pricey-category at the show was at-home elderly care bots to keep ageing and (ostensibly lonely) parents company, dispense precise combinations of pills, remind them to take medicines and alert you when they don't.

Care from Afar

London-based Nihal KG, 43, acknowledges that he's trapped and unlikely to escape. He has outfitted his parents' home in Noida with AI-enabled motion sensors that analyse movement patterns to detect and even predict imbalance or falls. This is in addition to the powders and supplements he sends them every few weeks, which is in addition to their Ultrahuman rings, Apple Watches and a battery of blood tests they have to get done every month.

"It costs me '18-20 lakh a year," Nihal admits. "It's probably excessive, but it's a small price to pay for peace of mind since they won't move to London and I can't be there to take care of them."

"We keep finding ways to do more to keep our parents alive so we don't regret anything later," says Hingorani. "We have instant access to information, constant guilt that we have not been 'good enough' children to our parents and the ability to afford the interventions that suddenly seem crucial. We do more but are still always miserable. What's the point?"

Almost everyone I spoke to had stories about silently making radical life changes so they could be closer to their parents in their twilight years. Many had given up dream jobs, promotions, or lucrative opportunities away from home. Some had ended relationships. A few had become default caregivers so their siblings would never have to make the same compromises.

Us & Them

Juxtaposed against these decisions are some thorny questions: What does it mean to live authentically and honour our own selves while building healthy relationships with our parents? How do we show up for them without being tormented by resentment while they are alive and regret once they are gone? Perhaps the point is simply to buy ourselves some time while we figure out the answers.

And maybe the point is that once we strip away the guilt, the checklists, the cameras and monitors and powders, what we are left with is this: our parents are the ultimate wall. The thing standing between us and the front of the line. As long as they are alive, however frail, however diminished, however infuriating, death is still happening to someone else's generation. The day they go, that wall comes crashing down, and there's nothing standing between us and the terrifying void except our own bodies, marching towards entropy.

There's a second aching isolation that nothing can truly prepare you for: when you lose a parent, you lose the person who has been narrating all the different versions of you back to yourself. Who you were as a child before you could remember, what makes you light up from the inside, why you flinch at certain things.

Parents, quite simply, are our personal living archives. When they go, we grieve them, yes, but we are also grieving the child that has lost its most faithful alibi. It's not just about missing them. It's about, at least at first, missing all the different versions of you who will now only exist in photographs and the unreliable narrations of people who weren't ever wholly there. And all the versions that you are still to become, but might never have witnesses.

Maybe that's why Ruchi has a checklist instead of a meltdown. Maybe the calm is simply dread in age-appropriate clothing, helping her be a good daughter- one last time.