My parents have been experiencing a precipitous decline in health since last summer. Surely, some of it was decline that I missed during time apart before Covid vaccines allowed us to begin visiting again. But in recent months I’ve become the point person for managing their care, their bills, and transforming into whatever the equivalent of Mama Bear is when advocating for one’s own parents.

I charm nursing home staff when I think it will help. I coax or demand, depending upon the seriousness of a need. I slap a power of attorney (POA) around multiple times a week right now for all manner of issues — updating insurance, filling out forms, trying to get the electric company to talk to me. And in a time of nursing home care shortages, I have a near-daily responsibility to call, text, email, or stand in front of the staff who are there, insisting my parents receive the help they were promised.

It’s exhausting.

I feel like that jerk, always asking for the manager. Some days though, it’s the only way to get things done.

If the emotional toll of watching your own parents age and suffer illness were not enough, I find myself in constant confrontation with a system that is not well-built for this transition: neither a child having to figure out how to stand up for (and in for) her parents, nor the caregiving system for the elderly itself.

My own kids just grew old enough that I’m no longer juggling the also-broken childcare system, and now here I am, confronting how our system is not easily equipped to care for people at the other end of their lives.

I have a Google spreadsheet that I started keeping when I became my parents’ POA. At first, I figured I’d need a document to show them that I was taking the job seriously. At this point, I’m not sure how well they’d even grasp my lengthy sheet of notes.

It’s a hodgepodge of calls on their behalf, notes on how many times my father called me, anxious about one thing or another. I track the bills I had to pay for them over the months it took for the bank to accept my power of attorney. I note the times I’ve had to ask again and again for the same services at their nursing facility.

Reading back, I can see my own growing frustration with people I know are trying their best but do not seem to have the systems in place to execute the care plans they make. I feel for them — I know, like many nursing homes, they are short-staffed. My patience and empathy can only go so far. I also have a higher responsibility to my parents.

I’ve fallen desperately behind on work in the past month, and I can see why by looking at my spreadsheet. Sometimes, the field for tasks done for my parents in a single day more than fills my computer monitor. Some days I worry that given just how much there is to do, I’ve started to see my parents’ care as less a series of benefits I want to give them and more as this sea of tasks. They are my perpetual to-do list.

Maintaining the list does give me a moment to detach from the difficulty of the moment — a hospitalization, missed medications. I type it in. Maybe that helps me compartmentalize.

I do know it’s just one more thing to do. I also wonder sometimes, who else this spreadsheet might be for.

By nature, I’m the sort who never feels as if I’ve done enough. So, to some degree, keeping the list is a form of evidence I’m creating for my future self, a document showing exactly how much the effort to care for my parents has consumed me over this time.

I scroll through and see a mountain of words, of attempts. I see the Sisyphean effort of single tasks that can take a dozen phone calls or a cross-state drive to nearly accomplish. I see how small some of what I’ve been able to do actually is. But I also know even the small steps make my parents safer, more comfortable — even if at this point, they don’t know they have bills to pay or appointments to attend. I remember for all of us. I write it down, so one day, I’ll be able to remember what they needed and that I was there.