My Story

 For 29 years, I was a caregiver. Not just any caregiver I was a daughter, pouring every part of myself into loving and caring for my mother through multiple strokes and a diagnosis of vascular dementia.

I didn't expect the hardest part of that journey to be the moment I wanted to disappear.

As her dementia progressed, I noticed something shifting in me a quiet pull toward distance. I found myself anxious before visits. Interactions that used to bring me joy started to feel heavy, even painful. I didn't understand what was happening to me, and for a long time, I didn't tell anyone.

That moment became the turning point. I sought out a therapist who specialized in geriatric care, and through that work, I learned something that changed everything: if I let the pain push me toward distance, I wouldn't just be protecting myself from hurt I'd be giving up the chance to show my mother love, to create memories with her, in the time we still had. And that loss, I realized, would become a regret far heavier and longer-lasting than the pain I was trying to avoid.

On October 31, 2020, my mother passed away after a fall that broke her femur and a four-hour surgery. The woman I had devoted nearly three decades of my life to was gone.

I'm endlessly grateful I chose closeness over distance in the time I had left with her.

And still I was left standing there, wondering: who am I now?

"I gave everything I had for 29 years. When she passed, I realized I had forgotten how to live for myself. I had to find me again."

That journey the anxiety, the guilt, the unexpected grief for someone still alive, the loss itself, and the long, sacred process of finding myself again is exactly what led me to become a certified Grief Life Coach.

If you cared for a loved one with dementia or Alzheimer’s, you know that the grieving began long before they were gone. You mourned the mother who forgot your name. The spouse who no longer recognized your face. You said goodbye a thousand times before the final one.

There is a name for this. It’s called anticipatory grief: mourning someone while they are still here. With dementia, it doesn’t come once. It comes again with every memory that fades and every piece of them that slips away.

That is why it’s called the long goodbye. And it leaves a very particular kind of wound that most people around you simply do not understand.

But I do. Because I lived it too.

Today, I help women over 50 who've walked this same road: caregivers navigating dementia and Alzheimer's, learning to name what they feel, stay present despite the pain, and eventually reclaim who they are once caregiving ends.

This isn't theoretical work for me. It's the long goodbye I lived through myself.