You don’t need us to tell you the road caregivers travel can be long and lonely. We wanted to change the scenery and so we did. Last week, we hosted our first in-person event in New York. Below are the resources we took along for the ride.

📝 Journalist Beth Pinsker is writing an upcoming MarketWatch piece on sibling dynamics in caregiving and she wants to hear from you. Complete a short survey and let her know how your family handles things.

🎂 Sir David Attenborough turned 100 and King Charles enlisted the help of animals to celebrate. 

🎙️ A college student was too scared to talk to his grandparents about his grandmother's dementia so he made a podcast and won NPR's College Podcast Challenge.

📺 Valerie Bertinelli is back on screen playing a woman navigating her husband's early-onset Alzheimer's. Love, Again premiered on Lifetime on Saturday, May 8th. 

📊 The Cleveland Clinic reports nearly half of women say they're more worried about affording healthcare than developing cancer or Alzheimer's.

A theme hates to see us coming. In case the name didn’t tip you off, Gray Monster’s in-person event series hit Brooklyn last week. Enter careavan.

We loaded the car room full of caregivers, advocates, journalists, technologists, therapists, good neighbors, exhausted daughters, dutiful sons, and even a lawyer in case things got weird. 

The idea behind careavan was simple: caregiving is a long road, and most families are driving it without a map. Gray Monster wants folks to have directions and know where to go for help.

Jackee de Lagarde, host of the podcast Who Cares About Me? was there to keep the caretaker at the center of the conversation. Her work asks the question often overlooked: while everyone is focused on the person who needs care, who is paying attention to the person giving it?

Laura House from How’s Your Boomer? kept the convo going with humor and honesty. She also made a helluva playlist. Vanessa Grigoriadis from So Your Parents Are Old brought a sharp eye to the family machinery behind aging: money, power, siblings, guilt, decline, denial, and the familiar roles everyone falls back into the minute a parent needs help. 

Care Out Loud and The Sandwich Club brought conversation cards to encourage the talks often avoided. Think the license plate game but more serious yet somehow still fun. Caring Across Generations showed up to remind the room that caregiving is a policy issue, a workforce issue, an economic issue, and a national infrastructure problem. 

Senior Care Authority NY was there to guide the "where do I even start?" conversation. Baba was invited because your mom may already have insurance-covered access to a healthcare advocate and she doesn’t know it. An advocate is an actual human who can help manage appointments, questions, paperwork, and provider maze with less heartburn for everyone involved. Lucille, a healthier nutrition drink for seniors, was packed in the cooler.

Dr. Julie Von was there to remind us that caregiving lives in the body, the nervous system, and is rooted in your family history. Filmmaker Katie Prentiss shared Wake Up Maggie because stories take us places spreadsheets can't.  

The administrative work that comes with end-of-life isn’t a popular topic but shouldn’t be ignored either, so we asked Ripple to join. Also invited was tendercare, digital infrastructure for the 47 open tabs, three portals, two medication lists, and your cousin who "didn't see the text." 

Goodlabs, the bloodwork team joined to help blood donors ask better questions before the situation requires worse ones. Jane Slater of NFL Network and elder law attorney Candace Dellacona discussed grief and the legal parts of caring for aging parents.

Hospice is heavy so Embers Health was invited to cover caregiver mental health. And in the spirit of support, acupuncture experts from WTHN joined because caregivers carry stress in their jaws, necks, shoulders, and anywhere their body lets them. 

Like all good roadtrips, we packed a lot into a short amount of time. Got a suggestion on where we should head next? Reply to this email and drop a pin with GPS coordinates.

Here’s last week’s results. Another quiz drops next week.

You said it. This week’s submissions.

"Dad got in the car and said 'let it rip kid' when I was taking him to the dentist."

"I felt guilty for having a sense of relief when my aunt I was caring for passed."

"No idea the level of paperwork required to start helping my parents."

"I'm not sure I like the feeling of being an only child anymore."

"My grandpa used to be the family doctor in town, now my dad is taking care of him."