When she was a soon-to-be empty nester mother of two, Mary Laura Philpott wrote her belated reflections on what it must have been like for her father, who worked high up in the federal government during the Cold War preparing for how to protect the president during a nuclear attack on the Capitol. She tried to imagine how he must have carried on with his work knowing that he was, in fact, preparing for the very end of the world and almost certainly of his own DC-based family.
This paragraph is worth reproducing in full: What do we do, then, if we cannot stop time or prevent every loss? We carry on with ordinary acts of everyday caretaking. I cannot shield my beloveds forever, but I can make them lunch today. I can teach a teenager to drive. I can take someone to a doctor appointment, fix the big crack in the ceiling when it begins to leak, and tuck everyone in at night until I can’t anymore. I can do small acts of nurturing that stand in for big, impossible acts of permanent protection, because the closest thing to lasting shelter we can offer one another is love, as deep and wide and in as many forms as we can give it. We take care of who we can and what we can.
All you can do is keep on keeping on. Love. Try to be present. Do your best. Protect them. Take care of them. Ignore everything else.