From the Editor’s Desk

As I was working on this issue of Caregiving, a car struck my friend Lisa and fled the scene. She was walking across Franklin Boulevard in Humboldt Park. First responders took her to Mount Sinai Hospital, which we learned after another friend tracked her phone there. In those first few days, we knew little about how she was; I kept thinking about how ABC7 had described her: “critically injured.”

What does “critically injured” mean? I tried to wrap my mind around this new reality and worried about the long recovery Lisa would have ahead. Would she be able to talk or eat? Would she be transferred to a rehabilitation facility and need to learn to walk again? I thought about the challenging future and ways our book club might help.

Lisa, who was 45, lived alone. She had family out of state, but here, her friends were her family. I pictured us rallying around her, taking turns to be with her in the hospital, making meals, and finding ways to meet her wherever she was.

But after two weeks in intensive care, Lisa’s family transferred her to hospice. 

The damage from the hit-and-run was more than her body could bear. “She’s gone. Peacefully and surrounded by friends,” one of our book club members texted.

None of us saw this coming — unbelievable, we kept saying, in various ways. I thought about the stories we’ve covered over the past six years in Caregiving. This seems to be how life happens sometimes: abruptly, unexpectedly, and with no way of going back. People might find themselves caring for an aging loved one after a difficult diagnosis, a fall, or a sudden shift in abilities. The caregiver often meets the moment feeling woefully unprepared, but stumbles and loves their way through.

When I imagined Lisa’s recovery, I felt a pit in my stomach for the slog that lay ahead, for how much caregiving she might need. I never questioned that her own fortitude would get her through it, along with our book club, her childhood friends, her coworkers, and others by her side. Lisa had so much love in her life. She was such a strong, hilarious, and open person. I truly believed she would someday tell me the story of what happened, that she would somehow make it funny.

Of course, I’ll never hear her story. Lisa won’t need caregiving. To care for her, for her to recover, would’ve been a blessing, even though it would’ve taken a lot of work. She endured a sped-up version of what so many care recipients and their loved ones go through: the unknowns, the difficult decisions, and, eventually, the end. It feels like forever when you’re in it and like a blink once it’s over.

“We are 30 in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be,” writes the aging narrator in Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. “But then again, it has also been magic.”

These painful times offer deep lessons, but the magic has to keep us going. It’s out there. And I hope wherever you are in life or in your own caregiving journey, you find the magic, too.

 

Katie Scarlett Brandt

Editor-in-Chief

katieb@chicagohealthonline.com

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Originally published in the Summer/Fall 2026 print issue.