I was on the subway headed to a friend’s comedy show on the Lower East Side when I received a call that changed every plan I had for myself. I answered and stepped off the train, and from that moment on, everything moved like lightning. Within a couple of days, I was home, back in Los Angeles. My mother’s and grandmother’s need for my care was so sudden and so vast that I didn’t comprehend that the move would be permanent.

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Caregiving means being trusted with the culmination of someone else’s life. It’s a gift to be allowed to support someone who is approaching the end of their life, but it also takes an emotional toll. At 29, I became the caregiver to both my mother and grandmother. My grandmother Joyce, then 78, had been diagnosed with dementia four years earlier, and my mom had started showing signs of it at 59.

Read more in the Los Angeles Times.