I am one of my 86-year-old mom’s caregivers. For a long time, I stayed a little emotionally removed from the situation, not because I didn’t care, but because I felt like somebody needed to look at things clearly and steadily. While my brother handles the physical side of things, like the groceries, the errands, and the mechanics of daily life, my role somehow became the emotional one.
I sit with my mom while she says, in so many words, that she is scared.
Not always directly. Sometimes it comes out sideways, with questions about getting older, about what happens at the end, and about whether any of this meant something. Even when she tries to hide it, I can hear the existential dread underneath.
I listen. I try to comfort her, to reassure her, and to help carry some of the weight.
The strange part is that if you have read my writing before, you know I wrestle with many of those same questions myself. What now? What is the point of all this? How do you live knowing life is temporary? In a lot of ways, I have become the unofficial therapist in the family. I don’t mind that part. I love my mom, and I am grateful I can still be here. But it is often difficult because I identify so deeply with her struggle. There is something uniquely hard about trying to guide someone through fears you are still trying to understand yourself.
Sometimes, hearing her talk feels less like listening to another person and more like hearing an older version of my own thoughts spoken out loud.
I think that is the part of caregiving people rarely discuss: empathy is not always observational. Sometimes, it is recognition. You aren’t just imagining another person’s pain; you already know the terrain. Perhaps that is why I can sit with her in it, not because I have answers, but because I understand the gravity of the questions.
When the silence gets too heavy, I offer what I have: “You know, everybody thinks about this sometimes. You aren’t alone. I think about it too. Nobody really has the answers, and that’s okay.”
It sounds small, I know. But I suspect what people really want in those moments is not a perfect explanation. They want companionship inside the uncertainty. They want to know they aren’t standing in the fear by themselves.
Every time I leave her, I feel a familiar pang of guilt. It isn’t that I think I am failing her; it is that I hate the idea of her sitting there alone with those thoughts, trying to make sense of things none of us can fully grasp. I cannot be there 24 hours a day. Rationally, I know that. Emotionally, it is harder to accept. Once you truly love someone, it becomes painful to realize you cannot protect them from the human condition, from aging, from loneliness, and from the reality that every person eventually faces these questions alone.
Seeing myself in her is the hardest part. I can already imagine myself thirty years from now, still wrestling with these same questions, still wanting a reassurance that no one can fully give.
Looking through that window into my own future is what makes this kind of caregiving so complex.
The other day, I was at her place updating her phone and organizing her electronics, which are all the little tech details that start becoming overwhelming at 86. She kept nodding off while I worked. To try to break the tension, I said, “Wow, this is really exciting, isn’t it?”
She opened her eyes and said quietly: “No. It’s good. I have you here.”
That hit me harder than she likely realized. To me, I was just untangling charging cables and fixing settings. To her, it was less about the devices and more about not being alone for a while.
It’s a lesson that keeps reappearing: presence is often the only thing that actually registers. We spend so much time hunting for the right words, something wise enough to quiet the fear, something certain enough to make everything feel less frightening. But maybe that is not what people need at the end of life, or even in the middle of it.
Maybe we are just meant to be witnesses.
We answer the phone. We organize the cables. We listen to the same worries again. We stay a little longer before walking out the door.
I cannot give my mom certainty. I cannot promise her the answers that human beings have been searching for since the beginning of time.
But I can offer her the next best thing: I can sit with her while she asks the questions, so she never has to ask them alone.
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