To break up with someone is to lose the imagined future you would create together, but you would always share the landscape of your collective past. If Sam could not remember, I would be alone in that landscape. His doctor said we had a window of opportunity to...
Grief doesn’t just come with sadness and loss. Grief can also come fully-loaded with guilt, anger, uncertainty, denial, regret, and so much more. Yet many companies lack norms or policies for dealing with grief — or “bereavement,” in HR-speak. Those that do have...
Donald was proud of his caregiving role. His mom had raised him and his siblings on her own, while battling a chronic illness. Now he saw his turn to step up for her. “My mom’s a trooper,” he told me, “and we be troopin’ with her.” Donald was enrolled in a training...
One of my brothers is moderately schizophrenic; he does well on his medication but is increasingly unable to live alone. He and I are not close and are very different people, but when our mother went into a nursing home several years ago, he came to live with my wife...
Benefits exist to support people in times of need. But for some disabled people, household means-testing has led to benefits being taken away making them uncomfortably reliant on their partner and in debt due to the extra living expenses disabled people incur. Rachel...
Because of his cerebral palsy, the 40-year-old, who works at an environmental engineering firm and loves attending sports games of nearly any type, depends on his home care support person for assistance with things most people take for granted, like meals and bathing....
It’s actually very difficult to end the conservatorship or guardianship under any circumstances. There’s a case of a young man named Ryan King. He’s not a young man anymore. It’s been years. So Ryan King finished high school and has an intellectual disability. And his...
Under conservatorship, disabled adults face restrictions on a wide variety of rights: Where they live, when and where they work, money management, and healthcare decisions. Conservatorships are often thought of as something that only happens to elderly people who can...
On March 31, 2021, Biden proposed a $2 trillion American Jobs Plan—$400 billion of which would be allocated to the care economy to expand access to quality, affordable home- or community-based care for aging relatives and people with disabilities. The Biden...
In September 2020, I watched from afar as Andrew and his wife, Rachel, announced that their infant daughter, Francesca was diagnosed with an atypical teratoid rhabdoid tumor in her brain. Via his Twitter account, Andrew shared the experience during her treatment and...
Eve turned 14, had a growth spurt, began to feel tired often, talk to us less, and took longer to do her chores. Pretty age-appropriate behavior—or so we thought. On a routine visit with a physical therapist, he noticed Eve didn’t respond properly to basic reflex...
Two-thirds of survey respondents who identified as unpaid caregivers said they experienced mental health challenges during the pandemic, such as symptoms of anxiety or depression, or suicidal thoughts. Only one-third of people with no caregiving responsibilities...
Roughly 7 million children in the U.S. receive special education services under a decades-old federal law — or did, until the pandemic began. Many of those services slowed or stopped when schools physically shut down in spring 2020. Modified instruction, behavioral...
I’m in my 30s and live about a three-hour drive from my 60-year-old parents—we once used to live in the same town. Each time I return home to see them, I am increasingly concerned by how shabby and dirty their space is. Read more in Slate. Photo: Shutterstock / Joseph...
I’ve seen people with difficult-to-manage physical and mental health conditions (or hard-to-break bad health habits) who suffer in silence, without the support of some key people in their lives. They’ve stopped sharing their physical and mental health struggles with...
The only time Taylor has ever felt her mother withheld information from her was when doctors found a lump in Vernona’s breast last year. Vernona admitted she was trying to protect her three children—to shield them from the burden of worry, but also to prevent them...
The diagnosis stalked us for two years before it stepped into the light one warm March morning. “Dads, I hate calling it cerebral palsy,” our daughter’s pediatric neurologist told us on the phone, “because it sends parents down a spiral, picturing the most severe...
After Angelena Taylor’s father survived a stroke in late 2015, she snapped into crisis mode. A month into a master’s program for educational psychology, Taylor, now 33, took unpaid leave from her job. She didn’t want to send her dad to a facility, and his private...
Kara Ward started her life as a caregiver earlier than most people do. She was only 29 when her mother was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2006. Ward had two young children of her own at the time—a toddler and an infant—and still she found herself caring for her mom,...
When industrial employment dominated the nation’s economy, such worlds were formed around the lives of the industrial working class. And when industry left, the social worlds that it sustained began to crumble. What emerged in its place was a recomposition not only...
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, there was a very rapid expansion in all kinds of service-sector work. Healthcare was the leader within that. The people being drawn into this new labor market were overwhelmingly women, and the jobs in which they wound up were...
Gabe Winant is the author of The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. The book "traces the transformation of Pittsburgh, the archetypal industrial steel town, into a city powered by the labor of hospital workers. It offers...
Infrastructure “of a country, society, or organization,” according to the Collins Dictionary, “consists of the basic facilities … which enable it to function.” I’ve inserted an ellipsis in place of the clause “such as transportation, communications, power supplies,...
When we imagine a caregiver, we often picture a woman: a mother caring for young children, spouse, and the daily household chores, a daughter nursing a father with disabilities, or a female child care provider. Historically, women have been expected to serve as...