Adrienne
Selena Hildebrand

There are 63 million family caregivers in the United States. That is roughly one in four adults, and it is a 45 percent increase in just ten years. More than half of them, 56 percent, say caregiving makes it difficult to care for their own mental health. Forty-one percent report being lonely. And women providing care consistently report higher levels of stress and worry than men do.

Almost every resource built for these people is logistical. Meal trains, medication schedules, shared calendars. Almost nothing exists for the part that actually breaks people: the guilt, the rage nobody admits to, the grief that starts long before anyone dies, and the specific loneliness of being the person everyone asks about someone else.

I was the caregiver for my partner Chris through cancer. Before that, my mother. Before that, my sister. And before any of it, I worked at a nonprofit veteran’s service organization, surrounded every day by families holding someone together.

What I remember most is not the hospitals. It is the drive home. Sitting in the car in the driveway, needing to walk in and make dinner and act like a person, with no idea where to put any of what had just happened. Everyone asked how Chris was doing. Almost nobody asked how I was.

I looked for something. There were support groups that met at times I could not make, therapists with six-week waitlists, and apps that wanted to help me organize a meal train. Nothing that would just sit with me at 11pm and let me say the thing I could not say out loud to anyone who loved him.

That thing, for a lot of caregivers, is something like: I am so tired that part of me wants this to be over. And then hating yourself for thinking it.

I have spent this year reading hundreds of posts in caregiver communities online, and that exact sentence comes up again and again, always followed by an apology. Nobody has anywhere to put it. That is what Alanna is for.

I am a Certified Physical Health and Mental Wellness Coach and a Somatic Healing Practitioner, so I understand the frameworks. But the reason I can build this is simpler than my credentials. I know what the drive home feels like.