caregiver perspective – After years of tending to her mother, Lorraine Duffy Merkl finds perspective by guiding others through the same exhausting, selfless journey.
The phone calls are constant, a revolving door of crisis and coordination that feels like running a private eldercare hotline. For Lorraine Duffy Merkl. the rhythm is hauntingly familiar: the endless healthcare negotiations. the frantic game of telephone with providers. the power of attorney paperwork. and the quiet. crushing reality of managing “sundowning” for a relative who can no longer navigate the world alone.
Her younger cousins are now living the life she navigated for a decade. They are standing where she stood in 2013, when she first began caring for her mother, Angelina. Merkl doesn’t just offer them the logistical blueprints; she offers them the validation she spent years denying herself.
She tells them to breathe. She reminds them of the oxygen mask analogy—that one cannot assist others while suffocating themselves—and she tells them. with total sincerity. that they are doing a profound. selfless work. She calls them good sons. daughters. nieces. and nephews. handing out the credit she once viewed as a potential boast. a vanity she couldn’t allow herself to claim.
For Merkl, the exhaustion was once masked by the necessity of the task. Her mother. a proud. independent woman born and raised in Italian Harlem. had lived in a studio apartment across from Merkl in Manhattan since 2001. She had moved there from the Bronx to help raise Merkl’s children. Luke and Meg. taking over the nanny duties when the commute became too much. But at age 90, the shift began. It started with simple interventions—delivering meals because the stove had become a danger—and eventually grew into a full-time. domestic mission.
By 2020. as the pandemic forced a lockdown. Angelina became a permanent resident in a house already occupied by Merkl. her husband of 38 years. Neil. and their children. During the final three years of her mother’s life. the intensity of the care reached a new. unrelenting level as the children moved out and the house grew quiet. leaving Merkl to manage the complex. professional-grade requirements of end-of-life care in a domestic setting.
Intellectually, she understood the weight of the job. Emotionally, she chose a protective, stoic denial. To fully confront the toll of caregiving, she feared, would be to shatter under the pressure. So. she performed the duties of a trained nurse and a social worker. all while telling herself it was simply what needed to be done.
In late winter of 2023, Angelina passed away in her own bed, surrounded by family, at 100 years and four months old.
It has taken three years to reconcile that experience with the woman she is today. Now, looking at her cousins, she finally sees the truth of her own labor. She recognizes that she did not merely endure; she performed a task of immense skill and sacrifice. setting aside her own life to hold the end of another’s. It has taken the perspective of time to finally look in the mirror and offer herself the same grace she so freely gives to her cousins: that she was. and is. a deeply dedicated caregiver who carried the weight with quiet. invisible strength.
caregiving family aging personal essay Lorraine Duffy Merkl