What makes old age so sad is not that our joys but our hopes cease.

The joys tend to stay. A good meal, a familiar face, a quiet morning keep their taste for a long time. What can go quiet is the sense that something is still ahead of you, and that absence is harder to name than any loss of pleasure. Hope is what gave the days a direction, and without it the good hours arrive as things that simply happen.

You cannot manufacture a large hope on demand, and pretending otherwise would be no kindness. What you can do is keep one thing open: a plan for next spring, a person you intend to see, something unfinished you mean to return to.