Cheating death
If you knew you only had six months left to live. What would you do with your remaining time you have left? In recent years, I've went through that hypothetical a number of times. I'm sure you have too. If I were to guess, I'd imagine most of our answers would be the same. That is, to spend as much time with our loved ones before we leave this earth. In February 2025, this scenario came true. Except it wasn't me knocking on deaths door, it was my grandma when she was admitted to hospice care. Given my unhealthy relationship with work, too often at the expense of personal relationships, I took this as a sign to book a one-way trip to Florida in March of 2025 and prioritize what ultimately matters in life. Our relationships.
Hospice is a special kind of care that focuses on a person's quality of life and dignity as they near their end of life. Typically six months or less. August 31, 2025, represents the six month mark for my grandma, but somewhat poetically, was the date she was officially discharged from hospice given how much she has improved since March. In this article, I want to share my experience of what the last few months have been like.
The best problems to solve are your own
One of the hardest parts of being a caregiver isn’t the care itself. Rather, it’s the coordination and communication involved. In 2023, my grandma lived with my sister in Florida, I was in Virginia, my brother was serving overseas, and my parents were five hours south of my sister. Coordinating something as basic as a doctor’s visit became a logistical nightmare. Language barriers and continuity of information added to the challenge. As I step into a full-time caregiving role, I’m realizing the best problems to solve are your own.
In this article, I'd like to share a bit more into my experience, notably the challenges, in hopes that we create better solutions for other caregivers and their loved ones. As a bonus, I recently launched a caregivers app (link) for myself and my family to use to mitigate some of the problems we've identified as a nod to Paul Graham's 2012 essay: How to Get Startup Ideas.
No Regrets
October 2023. A tumultuous month that will be forever engraved into my memory. It'd become the impetus for writing To Philosophize is to Learn to Die and the infancy of pondering what life would look like if I stepped into a caregiver role. Albeit, one that was much less demanding. You see, my caregiving journey didn't start the day I resigned from Verily, it actually started on October 8, 2023, when I skipped my flight from MCO to BWI and rented a car to Tampa to temporarily alleviate the burden of caregiving that my sister has played for so many years.