Caring for a parent gets talked about as devotion. Niecy Nash talks about it as a job with a price list, and she is 56 and could afford the bill.
Her father had fallen. His twin brother, her uncle, was in worse shape than he was. She was carrying both. “I couldn’t even cry in the moment because it was so jarring to see,” she said. “And I knew that if I didn’t hold it together, I was not going to make it through.”
She is blunt about what it took out of her. “I had so much anxiety and so much emotional turmoil within myself,” she said of stepping into the role. “It is not for the weak.”
The part she keeps returning to is the money. “It’s expensive. And the better the care, the more expensive it is,” she said.
That is not an unusual place to be standing. The University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging found that nearly a third of Americans over 50 provide regular care for an adult or a relative with health or disability needs, and that one in five of those caregivers has no support at all from family or close friends.
Nash also describes the reversal inside it, the point where the person who raised you needs everything from you. “And now everything that you need, I have to supply,” she said. “So there is a part of you that has to accept it for what it is.” Refuse that, she said, and “you automatically are going to be out of order with yourself.”
What she asks for is not sympathy. “And I wish that the world had more grace and more financial resources for people who step into these situations,” she said. “So I pray for anyone who steps into that place.”
She is not the only one saying it. The actress Brandee Evans, whose mother has multiple sclerosis, and the actress Yvette Nicole Brown have both spoken about the same work. What Nash adds is the ledger.
