WRITING

One Mom, Two Kids and a Chronically Ill Husband: The Hidden Burden of Multigenerational Caregivers (book excerpt)

Ms. Magazine

“When her husband contracted long COVID, Lizzie’s world was turned upside down and hasn’t recovered. She wrestles with the idea of considering herself a single parent to their two small children, but that’s how she feels… Lizzie is daunted by the prospect that his illness, and their current family situation, is indefinite.”

Millennials caring for their parents face a new challenge — the coronavirus pandemic

“In 2014, Poole’s father suffered his second stroke. Two days after he returned home from rehab, the unimaginable happened again: His mother suffered a massive stroke and underwent emergency neurosurgery. Until that point, Poole's mother was her husband's primary caregiver; now she was completely paralyzed. “Your life is changed,” Poole said. “I never imagined anything like this. My worst nightmare couldn't have been as bad as everything I had to watch them go through.””

“I was twenty-nine. It was the year I moved into my first solo apartment, the year I wrote my first episode of television… it was also the year my father was diagnosed with a degenerative neurological disease. My dad had always been healthy and brazenly independent; needing to help him manage a chronic disease was not something I anticipated happening ever, let alone before I was thirty.”

Why Caretaking is the Loneliest Job in the World

“Comparisons of the cities are obvious and, I think, overblown: both are open 24 hours; residents are misconstrued as rude for no–nonsense attitudes; natives consider themselves Berliners or New Yorkers first, before claiming national identities we often feel like outliers to. Our similarities make us likeminded in ways, we have an understanding, but to oversimplify our cultural fabrics is superficial bullshit. This year I've locked down in both cities. The experience made we wonder if we'd ever understand each other again.”

Tale of two cities: My corona quarantine in New York City and Berlin

I was my dad’s caregiver through his fatal illness. I had no idea I’d be at risk for PTSD.

“As I approached the recovery room, panic crept in. My breathing thinned, my vision clouded, a deep fog settled over my brain. I stepped through the curtain to her bed, and the rhythmic heart monitor beeps triggered acute sensory flashbacks to a few years earlier. Woozy, I grabbed for a chair. I was having, I would learn later from my therapist, symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder.”

I Became My Father’s Parent at 32

“We believe living in L.A. violates who we are as New Yorkers and so we arrive saying it’s temporary, aware we might hate it, then find ourselves deep in endless summer, happily drinking cold-pressed juice, comparing sunset yoga classes and psychic healers. We come to admit, first to ourselves and then aloud: Life as an Angeleno is nice. Still, so many transplanted New Yorkers wax poetic on the grit found in the streets of the City. We fantasize about one day returning to the “realness” of our hometown. After almost 12 years in L.A., I answered my internal call and did.

Holy shit.”

LA Weekly