I went back to caregiving this week. Except this time, I was the patient.

I recently had minor surgery. It required a care plan for when I returned home to recover. Wound care, medication schedule and absolutely no physical exertion - all rest. That last was, I must say, the hardest to maintain.

I worked very hard to be a good caregiver to myself - and be a good patient at the same time. The long hours of sitting, resting, ice packs first, then warm compresses. This medicine twice a day, that medicine three times a day. When did I clean the sutures? Creating and maintaining a schedule, both out of medical necessity and for my own sanity, so that I could heal in the most complete way possible.

I created a routine so that my care was consistent and reliable. There was no question - I understood the body needs this time to rest, recover and renew.

As I settled into the quiet of recovery, it felt very familiar.

It took me back to the caregiving years for my husband. As he progressed through his journey with Alzheimer’s, I learned that routine is everything. His world became smaller, and predictable, easy routines were the way to make him feel safe.

But maintaining a routine when the patient is losing their ability to navigate the world becomes increasingly difficult. As much as he tried to hold on, Lee’s grasp on everyday tasks was slipping. It was up to me to not only establish the routine, but to initiate and help him execute every task and activity, no matter how small.

I answered questions asked dozens of times. Helped with daily tasks of hygiene. Monitored moods and behaviors, and learned the warning signs of escalating agitation. Sunset no longer evoked images of the peaceful end of the day - it became a potential landmine of distress and fear.

Without knowing it, I was honing skills I already possessed - organizing and prioritizing tasks and schedules. Investigating and researching - searching, really - for any nugget of information that would help me help him.

I already knew how to love the man Lee was, and I learned how to love him through the disease.

But I was also learning new skills. Patience, empathy, awareness of the changes my husband was going through. I became a stronger communicator and was no longer afraid to challenge the wisdom of accepted health system practices.

I learned, the hard way, that it didn’t matter anymore if I answered a question 1 time or 20 times, he was going to repeat it. I couldn’t reason my way through the conversation anymore. All I could do was stay with him, in the present.

Caregiver was one of the many roles I took on - as one does in life. After best friend, after spouse, after helpmate and “buddy”, caregiver became the most important role. Helping him move through this world that he couldn’t manage anymore. Quietly. Over and over again. Behind the door.

As anyone who cares - or cared - for their spouse knows, this experience is lonely, isolating and singular in the pain one feels losing the love of their life. At times we fight to retain our identity, our sense of self, as caregiving takes everything from us. We grieve, during and after. For the loss of our loved one, sometimes for the loss of us.

But the skills and techniques and practices we learn - about caregiving, about our spouses, about ourselves - are still there. They are there when we need them - to take care of someone else, and especially when we need to take care of ourselves.

The memories from the lived experience don’t go away, even as the grief diminishes and passes. We carry forward with us memories of the time with our spouses and it informs our next chapter. Not fully, not overwhelmingly, but subtly integrated into the next moves we make, people we seek and experiences we find. And in the ways we show up when someone needs steadiness and care.

The caregiver I became during those years didn’t disappear when the caregiving ended.

She showed up this week.

What did caregiving teach you about yourself that you didn’t expect? What skills do you carry forward — into your work, your relationships, your own self-care? I’d love to hear in the comments.

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Stuff just keeps piling up.

These past weeks — between clients, a week at an in-depth retreat, writing, and a social calendar that has quietly expanded, happily — the to-do list has accumulated into something that feels less like a list and more like a presence. Household projects. Appointments to schedule. Daily errands. Personal planning. Work to coordinate.

I am completely capable of handling all of it. Prioritize, plan, execute — I know how to do this. I ran a man’s Alzheimer’s care like a project manager for four years.

And still, I find myself stuck. Not in the list itself, but in the space between the list and the things that actually matter. The significant work. The experiences I want to build this year. The habits I want to grow into. The version of myself I am still becoming.

It reminded me of another time I was stuck. A different kind — but the same feeling underneath.

In 2024, after Lee moved to memory care, I downshifted suddenly from constant demands on my time, attention, and focus — to nothing. The care and love and energy I had directed toward him for years had nowhere to go. I was relieved he was finally receiving the support he needed. And I also, strangely, missed being needed. (As it turned out, my caregiving skills were still needed, but that’s an essay for another time.)

My body was still in full-speed caregiver mode — tuned to schedules, routines, medications, rest — while my life had quietly moved somewhere else. Like Newton’s First Law of Motion: an object in motion stays in motion. I had been moving in one direction for four years. The direction changed. I hadn’t.

That is the thing about identity inertia. It happens on the inside, invisible.

Research describes Identity Inertia as the psychological resistance to changing one’s self-concept — the hidden force that causes people to hold on to old roles, behaviors, and narratives even when those things no longer serve them. We end up fighting against the very story we most need to write.

I couldn’t move forward. I wouldn’t move backward.

Because going backward is not a strategy.

But somewhere underneath the stuckness, something better was available. I could feel it. I just couldn’t see it yet.

What moved me forward was not a dramatic realization. It was smaller than that, and slower. Clearing the clutter at home and completing one thing at a time, methodically, instead of staring at the whole impossible pile. Returning my attention to my clients and their needs rather than my own spinning wheels. Organizing the scattered inspirations into essays — into something that meant something, to me and to the people reading it. Showing up in my community, consistently and intentionally, even when I didn’t feel ready.

Getting out of my own head. And back into my life.

There is a place — Gabrielle Dubois calls it The Threshold in her Substack Le Secret Club — where you imagine a different, better life, and slowly, without forcing it, it begins to feel not just imagined but almost familiar. Almost real. A life you architect from the ground up, not a reinvention but a construction. Something new, built from everything that came before.

I crossed that threshold. I don’t know exactly when. But I know I’m on the other side of it now, because the stuckness feels different. Less like paralysis, more like the natural friction of forward motion.

You don’t have to have lived the caregiver life to know this territory. Loss, career change, divorce, retirement, even success — any significant life change can trigger an identity shift, large or small. The point is to recognize it not as failure but as motion. The threshold is not the end. It is the beginning of something that doesn’t have a name yet.

Because that is how you move forward. Not all at once. While you are just living life — in quiet and subtle ways, in the things you notice, what you’re drawn to, the conversations you have, the experiences you say yes to.

And sometimes, in finally tackling the list.

You begin to feel it.

Movement again.

Out of inertia.

Back into life.

Back into yourself.

Have you ever been stuck at the threshold — able to feel something better ahead but not quite able to reach it? What moved you forward? I’d love to hear in the comments, or send me a message directly.

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The week was spent in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at about 6,500 feet — clear sky, expansive views that extended forever. Maybe showing me the limitless possibilities ahead. Maybe just reminding me how much space there is, when you step outside the noise of ordinary life and let yourself look.

On the final morning, I am sitting with coffee, taking in the last moments of silence before heading back to the real world. A hummingbird arrives — floating over the flowering bushes just outside, hovering with an incredible stillness that belies the work it takes to stay in the air. There and then gone. Present and then not.

Something tugged at me. I looked up the symbolism.

Hummingbirds, across many traditions, represent joy, resilience, hope, and emotional healing. In Native American and Mexican cultures, they are sacred messengers of good fortune, courage, and love. And across many traditions, a hummingbird sighting is understood as a sign that a departed loved one is near, and at peace.

It was this last interpretation that stayed with me — the belief that a hummingbird’s appearance signals the end of a difficult time, and the beginning of healing.

I sat with that for a long moment.

The retreat brought together a group of people all inside the same search — smart, supportive, honest people asking the same essential question: Who am I now, after everything that has changed? We did the work that question demands. The kind that doesn’t happen quickly or comfortably, but that opens something when it’s done.

I came in carrying what I always carry — the grief of losing Lee and the person he was before the disease, the grief of losing the person I was before the caregiver took over, the grief of the self I misplaced somewhere in those years and am still in the process of finding. And with the space and the people and the silence finally available, I did something I hadn’t fully done before: I looked at it directly. I said it out loud. I let other people witness it — and witnessed theirs in return.

That was its own hummingbird moment. Feelings and realizations hovering briefly, crystallizing in my mind and heart — clarifying the direction I need to face. It did its work and then was gone, leaving me changed by having seen it.

Somewhere in that week, I understood how much work I’ve already been doing. Reaching inside myself to nurture what the caregiving years depleted. Reaching outward to build a new life — integrating a new community with a trusted and cherished former one. Writing. Traveling. Showing up, even on the days when showing up takes everything. And now this: four days in a vast and open terrain, surrounded by strangers who became my people just when I needed them. We listened to each other and supported each other and cheered each other on. For those four days, we were each other’s people.

And I began to see it clearly — not for the first time, but perhaps for the first time without flinching.

Grief and healing are not opposites. They are not a sequence, with grief first and healing after, a clean handoff from one to the other. They coexist. They always have. You can be in the deepest part of your grief and also, in the same moment, beginning to heal. You can miss someone with your whole heart and also feel, unmistakably, that you are going to be okay.

The hummingbird doesn’t wait until the hard part is over to arrive. It arrives in the middle of things — on a final morning in Santa Fe, over the flowering bushes, while you are still sitting with everything you haven’t yet resolved.

That, I think, is the message. Not that the hard part is finished. Not that the grief is done. But that something in you has shifted enough to receive a small, floating, impossible gift — and recognize it for what it is.

Healing doesn’t announce itself. It hovers. And then, if you are paying attention, you see it.

Have you had a moment — a sign, a symbol, a small unexpected thing — that told you something was shifting? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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There was a woman who had spent years woven into the fabric of her family’s life — especially during the holidays. In the kitchen at Thanksgiving with the grandkids, roasting the turkey, making cookies, soaking in their stories of school and camp. She was embedded in their lives in a way that feels permanent, until it doesn’t.

Because she had lost her husband five years earlier, those celebrations were essential to her sense of belonging. And as the children and grandchildren slowly created their own ways of celebrating — ways that didn’t include her — she felt pushed aside. She was no longer included.

But her story stopped there. And I kept thinking: what if it hadn’t?

What if she had written: And that’s when I asked myself — what am I going to do now? Could she create her own story? Build her own experiences, her own traditions, as she becomes someone new?

Could I?

Lee passed away in March. The rituals that community provides have been performed — the service, the celebration of life, all lovely and heartfelt and just right. And now the question — what am I going to do now — feels both urgent and incomplete. Because before full healing can begin, the grief needs to be understood. And this grief, I am learning, is not one thing. It is many.

The Exit No One Talks About

Role Exit Theory, developed by sociologist Helen Rose Fuchs Ebaugh, describes what happens when people leave a life-defining role — spouse, professional, parent, caregiver. The framework is useful. But the living of it is something else entirely — messier, slower, and more humbling than any research model prepares you for.

When your loved one declines to the point where they can no longer be supported at home and moves to assisted living, you essentially become a widow before you actually are one. Not married, not single — suspended somewhere in between. Many caregivers know this feeling. The word for it still doesn’t exist.

And the grief that comes with it is unlike any grief the world has a script for.

When a spouse dies suddenly, the grief arrives all at once. It is devastating and disorienting, a rupture in the fabric of a life that felt whole the day before. The world recognizes that grief. It has rituals for it, language for it, a loose cultural script that tells people how to show up and what to say.

Caregiving grief is different. It begins long before the death — sometimes years before — and it accumulates quietly, in layers, before you even recognize it as grief. The first time he couldn’t remember your name. The last trip you took together that ended nothing like you hoped. The day the doctors said it was better if you stayed away. Each of those moments was a loss. Each one asked you to grieve something while still showing up for the living person in front of you — which means the grieving often happened in stolen moments, incompletely, without witness. There were no rituals to mark each loss as it occurred. No one brought flowers. No one called to check in. The grief was invisible, and so you carried it that way.

And alongside that grief, something else was happening: the slow erosion of self.

The Other Loss We Don’t Name

Caregiving doesn’t take your identity all at once. It happens gradually, in the same incremental way the disease progresses. First you stop making plans too far in advance, because you can’t predict what the day will bring. Then you stop reaching out to friends as often, because explaining the situation takes more energy than you have. Then you stop doing the things that were once yours — the hobbies, the routines, the small pleasures that reminded you who you were outside of this role — because there isn’t time, or you feel guilty for wanting them, or both. And one day you look in the mirror and realize the person looking back has been so focused on someone else’s survival that she has quietly disappeared from her own life.

That is the loss that doesn’t get named. Not the loss of the person you were caring for — that loss is visible, mournable, recognized. But the loss of yourself, accumulated quietly over years, without ceremony and without acknowledgment.

What many caregivers navigate after loss is not one grief, but several arriving at once. The grief of losing the person — which is real and present and not finished. The grief of losing the version of yourself that existed before the diagnosis entered your lives. The version that existed during the caregiving years. The version that existed inside the role itself — the one who showed up every day and held everything together. These are distinct losses, arriving in no particular order, with no clear timeline and no cultural script to follow.

You may find yourself grieving several selves simultaneously. That is not confusion. That is the accurate, appropriate response to everything caregiving asked of you — and everything it quietly took.

That grief has its own shape. It deserves its own name. And it deserves — from the people around us and from ourselves — the same patience and recognition we extend to the more visible losses that come after a death.

So what does it look like to begin giving yourself that recognition? To stop waiting for the world to name what you’ve lost, and start belonging to yourself again in the middle of it?

It starts small. Smaller than you think it should, and that is okay.

Put on the sweater you love. Take the walk, even a short one. Tend to the garden for fifteen minutes. Text the friend you’ve been putting off: I’m sorry I haven’t been available. Life is so hard right now. Learn to tell the people around you how to support and love you in this season — and when that support shows up, learn to accept it.

These are not small acts. They are the beginning of coming back to yourself. They are the practice of belonging to your own life again, one ordinary moment at a time.

This life is a journey filled with incredible sorrow and total joy. We live somewhere in between most of the time. That somewhere in between is where we get to decide who we are becoming.

If you are in a role transition right now — whether you are still caregiving, newly out of it, or somewhere in the disorienting space between — I want you to hear this: the disorientation is not a sign that something is wrong. It is a sign that something real is happening.

The grief nobody sees is still grief. It counts. You count.

What has helped you name — or simply acknowledge — the grief that caregiving carries? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Where are you in your own role exit? I’d love to hear what stage feels most true to where you are right now — and what has helped you move through it.

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Six words saved my week: I know exactly what you mean.

I had a really bad day. To cap off a really bad week.

Real estate is emotional work — for clients and, on the hard weeks, for the people who do it. There are a million details in every transaction, and when things go sideways the frustration has to go somewhere. This week it came my way: accusations, …

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The New York Times piece — When Lifelong Runners Are Forced to Quit — describes the sharp and painful grief runners feel when their bodies can no longer do what they have done for decades. The loss of predictability. The loss of identity. T…

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On finding home in a group of strangers — and then finding it again in your own four walls

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Recently I went out to dinner with good friends. The ones who know everything.

It was raining — no, pouring. And without skipping a beat, D looked at his wife and me and said: I’ll be back with the car to pick you up.

That’s what I miss most days. Not the grand gestures. Not the anniversaries or the milestone moments. The ordinary ones. The person who not…

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I left on a trip last Wednesday. To France. Alone.

To meet a group of women I had never met, for a tour of the gardens of Normandy.

Nine solo travelers — from different states, different backgrounds, different backstories — joined by a single shared desire: adventure, discovery, and the particular kind of company that forms when women who travel alone cho…

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Lee and I were in line to get on a plane. A long line, winding down a long hallway. I discovered I didn’t have my suitcase — I’d left it at home. Go find it, he told me. I’ll be waiting for you.

I couldn’t find the suitcase. What I found instead was chaos — a room that looked ransacked, clothes and papers and furniture thrown everywhere. I asked a few wo…

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One of the hardest decisions a caregiver makes — if not the single hardest — is if and when to move your loved one into memory care.

No one prepares you for it. Not really. There is conflicting input from family, from medical professionals, from your own conscience. There is the to…

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A really smart woman asked me this perfectly innocent question, back when I was still sitting by Lee’s bed in those last days.

It’s a simple question, really.

And I gave her the formula answer — “I’m good, I’ll be ok.”

It didn’t begin to scratch the surface. I had spent four years caring for my husband, who had Alzheimer’s. It had become a deeply painful s…

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You cannot disappear in order to care well for someone else.

When Lee moved into Assisted Living, I felt adrift. There was relief in it — quiet, uninterrupted sleep, a body finally allowed to rest. But underneath the relief was something I couldn’t yet name. Unsettled. Untethered.

I had lost myself in caregiving. And now I wasn’t even in that role anymore…

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“It’s your dear old Dad.”

The phone would ring once a week — back when I still had a landline — and there he was, same greeting every time. I was in my twenties, newly out of college and in my first apartment. Then in my thirties, owning my own home, advancing through my career. Then in my forties, married to Lee and settled into the life that, Dad made …

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I used to stand, in the middle of the living room, which also happened to be the exact center of the house. I could see the rooms, the dining room to my right, the kitchen in front of me, and our bedroom behind. The sun was usually shining — this is Florida — and I could witness the brilliance of the blue sky through the windows. This house was the firs…

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Something settles — in your soul, in your bones, in the part of you that has been quietly searching without quite knowing what it was looking for. And you know with certainty that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.

Until, somehow, some way, that place turns upside down.

When slow, lazy Su…

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Dearest Tender Warriors,

I leave tomorrow for the town where Lee and I met, where we fell in love, where we created our life together. The service for him will be small — graveside, where he will rest with his parents — which feels right. On Friday, there will be a Celebration of Life.

They are coming from every stage of his life — childhood, college, wor…

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Tie our shoes. Pick up a fork and eat. Brush our teeth. The brain internalized the pattern long ago — and without thinking, we do it.

Same with feelings. I’m married, Vicki’s my wife. The ease of Hey buddy, how are you? The automatic I feel good at the doctor’s office. Conditioned responses to …

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Alzheimer’s could take me before it took Lee.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had taken care of my own health.

Not an annual physical. Not vaccines. Not the preventive care that had once been second nature to both of us. Those things had simply disappeared, crowded out by everything the disease required, and I hadn’t really thought about it until that…

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What does it feel like to care for a spo…

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