For over a month now, my mother has been pestering me about her missing passport. It was in her closet, she said, and suddenly it was gone. It was expired, and renewing would be easier if she had the old one. She had no immediate travel plans, just a vague desire to visit Ethiopia, the country where she was born and raised, at some point in the future. As we often do with our elders, I gently brushed off her increasingly insistent requests for help. She lives in Maryland; I live in New York. It hardly felt urgent. She is...