I could not make out the words.

I could only hear that I was the subject.

There is a particular loneliness in standing in a doorway and hearing your own name in the mouths of your children, lowered, careful, discussed.

I did not need to hear the words to feel the shape of the conversation, and the shape was this: that something had happened that concerned me, and that they had decided, in the span of a morning, that it was a thing to be handled around me rather than with me.

It is how we treat the very old, even those of us who love them.