Caring from afar

May 20, 2026

Hi there!

I’m Erna, the author of Care Fully.

Care Fully is a play on words. The questions I am asked and the ones I still have drive each issue of this newsletter.

We “care fully” by balancing our needs as caregivers with those we provide care for. My goal is to offer up experiences and information to support your caregiving journey.

Have you ever spoken with a loved one from afar, noticing a hitch in their voice? Perhaps they’re a bit hesitant, more quiet than usual, or even slightly confused. You know something is different, but you are hours away, heading into a meeting for work. What do you do?

This week’s Care Fully: discusses caring from afar, shares an approach to long-distance caregiving, and spotlights a few resources and caregiving news.

If this edition was forwarded to you, please sign up for your own copy here. To spotlight or support caregiving in your company, email [email protected].

📍PROXIMITY MATTERS

Caregivers across the country (and the globe) provide care for aging parents, relatives, and family friends. Sometimes care happens from hundreds of miles away.

Living in a different state or country from the person you care for intensifies the difficulty of caregiving. The logistics become a complex puzzle and the guilt of being “away” feels constant. This is even more the case when something goes wrong.

Many care from afar. According to the National Institute on Aging, long-distance caregivers live an hour or more away from the person needing care.

One physician captures feeling of long-distance caregiving succinctly. “What makes it so difficult is you have this responsibility without proximity, and then you have authority without visibility.”

🧭 FINDING MY WAY

I spent seven years living in a different state during my caregiving journey. In terms of distance, I was:

  • an hour plane ride (not counting the hour or so it took to get to the airport),

  • a four hour drive or bus ride on a good day, that bus ride was awful

  • or a three and half hour train ride (if there were no delays) away.

Each month, I would visit my Mother. Even though we spoke every morning, seeing her with my own two eyes, offered a measure of relief. Well, at least for a few minutes before reality set into place.

My visits were packed. I took her to the doctor, ran errands, made sure she had her medications, cleaned the house, read her mail, checked her bills, and a host of other things. I condensed a month’s worth of activity into two or three days.

When possible, my brother came by to help or take my Mother to the doctor. However, there were specific things my Mother needed which had to be done in particular ways. I carried the lion’s share of work.

I learned very quickly, staying with my Mother during these extremely full visits, did not offer much space for me. I couldn’t fully process everything happening to her. My focus was on getting her what she needed, not relaxing, or having much down time with her.

My good friends Mikael and Georgia kindly let me stay with them during the majority of these visits. Being with them gave me a sense of normalcy. They gave me space to share some of the challenges and an opportunity to take a few minutes for myself. These close friends became a vital part of my caregiving support infrastructure. I’ll forever be grateful.

🧩PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

I moved back to care for my Mom after a particularly distressing phone call. As we spoke, she casually mentioned that she could not figure out how to get home!

The level of fear I had and the feeling of helplessness I carried were heavy. As I write these words, I’m right back there speaking with her and hearing her tell me these things.

To this day, I couldn’t even tell you how she managed to get home, or how I did. That experience set in motion the holding pattern of my career aspirations. I packed up my life and decided I needed to be closer to home.

No one asked me to make that decision, it was what I felt I needed to do. It was the right one for my family. My Mother had not received a complete diagnosis about her condition.

Being in closer proximity meant I could take my Mother to several physicians to better understand whether she was being misdiagnosed, which turned out to be the case.

Whether caregivers move to be closer to the person receiving care or consideration is given to having the care recipient move closer to the caregiver, consider all the possibles before making a decision.

🗒️ MAKING IT WORK

As soon as I became clear my Mom’s health was a challenge, I created a plan to help keep me in the loop. Below is a visual of it.

This plan gave me several things.

  • A routine communication cadence: I knew I needed to hear my Mother’s voice everyday. My days started early, but she was also an early bird. I called once in the morning and then again in the evening. This worked for both of us.

  • Access to information: When her health challenges presented themselves and HIPAA became a law, I completed paper work to make me her health proxy. This allowed me to see her medical information and advocate for her.

  • Paperwork is crucial: The other piece of advocating is making certain you have accurate information. It could be insurance, financial, and so on. Knowing where her information lived made things a bit easier.

  • Support, the most challenging for me: When my Mother’s hearing became further affected by stroke, she had trouble hearing the phone. If I couldn’t get in touch with her, I had two people I could call to physically make sure she was ok.

Build a plan that works best for you and the person you care for.

📧 POLL FOR THOSE CARING FROM AFAR

What's the hardest part of providing long-distance caregiving?

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🔖 A FEW HELPFUL RESOURCES

The following links may help you along your caregiving journey, especially if you are a long-distance caregiver living in the US. Similar resources may exist in other geographies as well.

Reply to this issue to let me know if any of these resources are helpful.

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🗞️ NEWS TO NOTE

This week’s resources and news to know affect caregivers of all stripes. Please pay particular note to the awareness topics for May as they help caregivers and those we care for.

 🫶 BEFORE YOU GO . . .

Long-distance caregiving is still caregiving. It comes with a layer of additional challenges, phone calls, urgent, last minute travel, and constant worry.

There isn’t a version of caregiving that doesn’t ask something hard of us.

Millions of people are providing care. We figure it out as we go, building systems and processes that help us keep showing up for those we love.

We do hard things.

Share this issue with someone who might be heading into this moment. They could be a fellow caregiver, colleague in HR, policymaker in your network, or someone who wants to know more about caregivers. The more folks who understand what is at stake and what is possible, the faster we can make change happen.

Until next time,