I will never forget the day I watched my wife, Kay, pull on a pair of blue surgical gloves and guide my father into the bathroom to catheterize him.
Or the evening she sat on the floor and gently lifted his swollen feet into a tub of warm water, scrubbing his heels with a pumice stone and trimming his thickened toenails.
For six years, she also managed my dad’s 22 daily pills, his seven medical specialists and countless other tasks. But doing this while maintaining any semblance of balance in her own life meant giving up a well-paying job as a health care professional. She joined a legion of more than 60 million family caregivers in the United States, 40% of whom care for aging parents.
My father, the son of a coal miner, went to work in the Ohio steel mills at 18, served two years in the Army and later spent three decades on a Ford assembly line. Even in retirement he couldn’t quite stop working. He was a real estate agent when, at 82, he suffered a heart attack at an office Christmas party. Seventy-one days later − after emergency brain surgery and a host of other complications − he left the hospital unable to live on his own and was released into my care.
It is appropriate we celebrate workers like my dad and grandfather this Labor Day. It was on the backs of people like them that the United States of America was transformed into the greatest economic powerhouse on the planet.
But the nation’s largest workforce − caregivers like my wife − remains invisible. Not because their work lacks value, but because we’ve mistaken love for labor.
Caregiving is hard work
Caregiving for an aging parent is not sentimental. It is heavy and repetitive, frustrating and exhausting. It reschedules your life and rearranges your priorities. It asks more of you than feels reasonable to give, then asks again.
Our society doesn’t see caregivers because we pretend their work is a private problem. Without a reliable social safety net, we count on them to do what family members always do: Step up.
Initially, they don’t call themselves caregivers. They say they’re just “checking in” or “helping out.” Then they start attending appointments. They rearrange their calendars.
Before they realize it, caregiving transitions from what they do, to who they are.
People who have never done it liken elder caregiving to raising a child. They’re wrong. It is the opposite. You don’t help an aging parent grow stronger, but watch them become weaker. You don’t teach them independence, but manage its disappearance. Your responsibility doesn’t end when they mature, but when they die.
This reality comes with a cost − both emotionally and literally − most caregivers silently accept. According to AARP, family caregivers provide more than $1 trillion in unpaid labor each year. They don’t get paid vacation or sick days. They don’t qualify for medical benefits or participate in 401(k) programs. Their daily tasks are learned through trial and error, not by training. Many watch their own physical health deteriorate. Their own retirement dreams are often postponed as they dip into their savings to manage what caregiving demands.
‘Caregiving exacted a toll we never saw coming’
Compared to other family caregivers we know, Kay and I were lucky. We could afford for her to walk away from her job to care for my dad. I later left my career, too, and joined her in a relentless tag team effort to give him the dignity he deserved in his final years. And when his care became too much to handle on our own, we could afford help.
We also never had to deal with the grueling around-the-clock challenges of caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s or terminal cancer. We never had to worry about my dad wandering through the neighborhood. He was able to use the toilet on his own. He was able to eat. He could engage in conversation.
Still, caregiving exacted a toll we never saw coming. Our health was impacted, our marriage was stressed and we struggled with the emotional anguish of wanting the best for my dad while resenting his intrusion on our lives.
My father would have turned 90 this week. For most of my life we celebrated his birthday over Labor Day weekend. This year, I’ll sit in his empty recliner and wish he was here to blow out his candles. And I’ll honor him, as I always do. He earned every bit of the recognition this country gives working men and women.
But I’ll also think about my wife, and the millions of Americans who tonight will sort medications, clean wounds, calm fears and help an aging parent settle into bed.
Tomorrow morning, they’ll wake up and do it again.
They are workers, too.
This Labor Day, America should finally start treating them that way.
Jim King is a former award-winning journalist and Fortune 500 communications executive. For six years, beginning in 2019, he was he and his wife were caregivers for his aging father, who died in January 2025. This essay stems from a memoir he has written that chronicles his lessons as a caregiver and the father he discovered along the way.