The Reality of Caregiving: When Aging, Illness, Family and Work Collide

BIÂN Co-Founder & Chief Wellness Officer, Mar Soraparu, shares her insight into the honesty and shared responsibility of how caregiving affects not only the patient, but those around them.

I have been thinking a great deal about caregiving lately...not as a distant concept, but as something unfolding very close to home. People I love are facing a second round of cancer, heart failure and the uncertainty that lives between appointments, test results and decisions no one ever feels prepared to make. Club members are sharing the heartbreak that they and their families are going through in this realm, and beyond. It feels uncertain and disorienting. These experiences have shown me how little we speak about what illness truly asks of a family. Probably, because it is so uncomfortable and quite distressing.

We focus on the diagnosis and the person whose name appears on the medical chart. We need a roadmap that often feels impossible to create. We also, fail to talk about ourselves, the people quietly rearranging their lives, absorbing the fear and trying to hold everything together while the world continues moving.

Caregiving rarely arrives gently. It enters through a phone call, an unexpected hospitalization or a few words spoken in a physician’s office that divide life into before and after. From that moment forward, it weaves itself into everyday life. It lives beside school drop-offs and bedtime routines, meetings and deadlines, businesses that still need to be led and relationships that still need our presence. Life does not pause because someone we love is sick. Yet beneath everything runs another current: What happens next? Are we asking the right questions? Are we doing enough? Who else is struggling?

Serious illness never belongs only to the person who receives the diagnosis. The spouse sitting beside the patient needs care. The adult child coordinating appointments needs care. The sibling carrying everyone’s fear needs care. There is the visible work—medications, transportation, physicians, insurance and schedules—and then there is the invisible work: anticipating what may happen, protecting one person without frightening another and remaining hopeful without denying reality. Family history enters the room, too. Old patterns, differing opinions and uneven responsibilities become sharper when everyone is already depleted. Caregiving is less a role than a web, and every movement touches someone else.

It follows us into work as well: into distracted mornings, interrupted meetings and days when we are physically present but mentally sitting in a hospital room. The person accompanying a loved one to cancer treatment may still care deeply about their career. The leader managing a parent’s heart failure may still feel enormous responsibility to the team. What they may no longer possess is complete control over their time, energy or emotional capacity. That is not diminished commitment. It is the reality of being human during a season that asks for more than one person can sustainably carry.

For those of us who lead people and organizations, caregiving must become part of the conversation about culture and human sustainability. Nearly everyone will eventually need care or become responsible for providing it. Organizations often speak about supporting the whole person, but caregiving is where that promise is tested. We need cultures in which someone can say, “My family needs me right now,” without fearing they will be seen as less capable or invested. Flexibility and compassion do not remove expectations; they often allow talented people to remain connected to their work during the hardest chapters of their lives.

We must also acknowledge the enormous business surrounding aging and illness. Families are expected to navigate specialists, insurance, home care, rehabilitation, legal planning and financial decisions while frightened and exhausted. Even when wonderful resources exist, finding and coordinating them can become a full-time job. There is an entire economy built around care, yet the family member at its center is often learning as they go, under pressure and with little margin for error.

I do not believe there is a perfect balance to be found in these seasons. Often, we will feel as though we are falling short everywhere, even while giving everything we have. Perhaps the goal is not balance at all, but honesty, shared responsibility and a wider understanding of who needs care. We care for the patient, but also the spouse beside them, the child making the calls, the sibling researching options and the person quietly holding everyone together. We must remember to care for ourselves as well—not because our needs are more important, but because we are part of this fragile ecosystem, too.

Caregiving may be invisible from the outside, but its impact reaches everyone and everything. It changes families, relationships, careers and our understanding of what it means to truly show up for another person. This is not a niche conversation or someone else’s reality. It will touch nearly every one of us, and for many, it already has. The more openly we speak about it, the better prepared we can become to meet these chapters with compassion, dignity and grace—and to ensure that no one, whether receiving the care or carrying its weight, has to move through them unseen.

I am thrilled to have a resource that will be presenting to us at BIÂN this fall. Sun-Hee Yoon, of Sage Lifestyle Concierge, has navigated the complex, often fragmented world of aging services — with intention, dignity, and a trusted guide by their side. Her path to this work was personal. As a caregiver, she experienced firsthand the weight of insurance bureaucracy, endless appointment coordination, and the emotional toll of managing multiple service providers — all while trying to ensure her loved one was treated with respect. That experience became the foundation of everything Sage does. She founded Sage Lifestyle Concierge in 2022, and in nearly three years has delivered programming that has reached over 500 participants across her education series, engaging more than 77 experts across legal, financial, healthcare, real estate, and insurance domains. Her knowledge and guidance is incredibly valuable and I am grateful to have been introduced, which has resulted in these presentations coming forward.