Ask your grandparent about the hardest year of their life. Then look at your own week again.

Somebody at your dinner table has already come through a year they were not sure they would get out of. Asking about it is not a way of ranking your problems underneath theirs, which helps nobody. It is a way of seeing, from a real person rather than a poster, that a stretch can be genuinely terrible and still end and still be followed by decades of ordinary life.

Ask, then stay quiet for longer than feels natural. Let them take the detours, because the detours are usually the part worth having.