Fade

Once someone can reliably do the thing on their own, take the help away, keeping only a small safety net where a slip would be costly.

Your father had a hip replaced in March. Since then you have driven over three mornings a week to walk the pond loop with him, count his exercises, and hand him the cane at the door. It is August. He now walks the loop faster than you do, has done the exercises before you arrive, and last Tuesday said, gently, that he could manage. You keep coming anyway. Some of that is love. Some of it is that stopping feels like a demotion.

Fade is a repair move: you withdraw a support once the person it was propping up can do the work reliably alone. The cue is help that keeps running while the thing it helps has already succeeded without it. First, name what the support was actually for. Second, look for unaided evidence, three separate times he did it with nobody there. Third, remove the support, not the relationship. Fourth, keep one thin backstop where a slip would be costly, like icy mornings in January. What changes is that he gets his competence back and the visits become chosen rather than clinical. The false alarm: strong performance while you are standing there is not evidence he can do it when you are not, and where a fall would be serious, or the need is permanent, fading is abandonment.