My age has me plumb in the middle of the"squashed generation"; those of us around our forties and fifties sandwiched between anxieties of ailing parents and the boisterous, sometimes surly demands of young adults creeping up behind. Pressure here, pressure there. It's a much remarked cultural observation. And most will segue through the three stages.

It's being in it, the filling in the generational sandwich, that I think, and I say this purely from observation (I'll clarify exactly why later), is potentially the most poignant because people are leaving. Kids become autonomous. they become people in other words; angry, passionate, excitable, effervescent, hopeful, invincible, moody, everything that goes with the great state of being human.

We also start to lose those who brought us here: our parents. Someone I know, a fine, happy spirited, deeply amiable person who carries an aura with her wherever she goes, a woman of great and sincere sensitivity, and a "squashed generation" member too, quite unexpectedly, lost her mother a few weeks ago.

Her heart aches. In an e-mail she wrote the simplest, tenderest sentences on how she felt. Her mum died on the final day of her holiday in a country several thousand miles away. Her words are few, unadorned and of the heart,  plain yet so pure, and they express unequivocally the depth of love she had for her mother: "...she died, away from me.."

I know exactly what weight these words carry, just what they symbolise: that she wanted to hold her mum, see her, laugh with her, chatter with her, see her again. And she can't. These five words have n't left me since I read them this morning. They echo with inexplicable feeling.

Bereavement is a room you never want to enter. I know: both of my parents passed away and to this day I still feel their absence.