Amy Goyer is AARP’s National Family and Caregiving Expert. She has forty-plus years of professional experience in this field. She literally wrote the book — Juggling Life, Work and Caregiving — on managing the impossible demands of caring for someone you love while maintaining your own life.
She depleted her entire retirement savings caring for her parents.
I keep returning to this fact because it says something important. If the person with the most resources, the most knowledge, the most professional tools for navigating the system — if she couldn’t protect herself from financial devastation, what does that say about everyone else? What does that say about the family member who has none of those resources, who is figuring it out as they go, who has no professional context for understanding what’s happening to them?
The Atlantic has reported that unpaid caregivers provide approximately $470 billion worth of care annually — more than the entire Medicaid budget. AARP data shows caregivers spend roughly 26% of their annual income on care costs. These numbers describe a system that is functionally offloading an enormous public health burden onto private individuals without compensation, without infrastructure, and without acknowledgment.
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s 2023 advisory on loneliness documented that caregivers are among the most isolated populations in America — surrounded by need, invisible in their own. I experienced this personally, caring for my father as his emphysema worsened and for my stepmother Judy as dementia slowly dismantled who she was. Everyone asked about them. Almost nobody asked about me. That invisibility is its own particular kind of depletion.
Tara Brach writes: “Radical self-acceptance is the willingness to experience ourselves and our lives as is.” Not as they should be, not as we wish they were, but as they actually are. For caregivers, that sometimes means acknowledging: I am running out. Not because I’m not strong enough. Because the load is genuinely too heavy and I haven’t built in anything to sustain me.
You matter too. Not just the person you’re caring for. That isn’t selfishness. It’s the basic condition for being able to continue.
