Our story
One morning she was herself. By that night, nothing looked the same.
- 2019Mom falls and breaks her hip. Three surgeries, an infection, and a deepening dementia follow.
- I move inA sixty-to-eighty-hour career comes to a halt. I become her full-time caregiver.
- The system, from the insideHospitals, rehabs, nursing homes, the 100-day Medicare cliff, and an emergency Medicaid application pulled together in days.
- Five years of loveI fed her, advocated for her, and sat with her at the end. She went peacefully.
- Kirsten's WayEverything I learned the hard way, turned into a map for you.
My mother fell and broke her hip, and our whole world changed in a single day. No one prepared us for any of it — not the anesthesia confusion, not the surgeries that followed, not the bill that arrived when Medicare's days ran out.
I learned the system as the person standing in the hospital hallway at 2 a.m., trying to figure out what to do next. I fought for her medications when facilities quietly dropped them. I learned to make the hard calls, and I learned that advocating for her wasn't being difficult — it was being present.
It was the hardest thing I have ever done. And it was the most rewarding. It filled my heart with a love for my mother deeper than I knew was in me. Knowing everything it would cost, I would do every bit of it again.
In the quiet after she passed, I kept thinking about how alone we felt at the start — and how much heartache we might have been spared if someone had simply handed us a map. Kirsten's Way is that map, named for her.
— Joel Tisch
You can love someone all the way through. And there can be peace on the other side of it, for them and for you.