🧭 Care Across Generations: A Personal Timeline of What We Lost and What We Carried

This post is a personal reflection on care work across generations, home support history in BC, and how systems and families have carried (and struggled with) long-term care needs over time.

My mother, born in 1930, worked as a Home Support Worker in the Fraser Valley from roughly the mid-1970s through the late 1980s. She spent many years supporting people in their homes—helping with daily care, dignity, and companionship long before home support became highly structured and regulated.

In the late 1980s, she became ill and went on disability around 1990. Before that, when I was about 14, she had her first heart issue. That was when we first experienced home support services directly in our own home.

A Home Support Worker came in to help stabilize care, and that experience shaped my understanding of what care work really is.

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🌿 My own experience in care work

I later worked in home support myself during the summers of 1993, 1994, and 1995.

At that time, care work was very hands-on and deeply human. We went into people’s homes and helped them stay there safely and with dignity.

• Helping people eat when they were lonely or grieving
• Supporting people with chronic illness like emphysema
• Assisting elders who rarely left their homes
• Shopping, cleaning, and daily support tasks
• Spending time so people were not alone

It wasn’t just tasks—it was presence, dignity, and care.

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💔 2002: A turning point

In 2002, I had a baby at 40. My child was only a few months old when my mother had her second heart attack.

At that time, I was living in Nelson, and she was in Abbotsford.

I was nursing a newborn and trying to manage everything at once. I remember taking a 12-hour bus just to visit her.

We could not access enough support at that time, and eventually my mother had to move into my brother’s care in Kelowna.

That experience still feels deeply unfair—not because my family didn’t care, but because the system didn’t hold what was happening.

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🧭 What this shows

Looking back, I can see a pattern across generations:

• Care work has always existed, but support systems have shifted over time
• Home support was once more community-based and flexible
• Over time, care became more regulated and credentialed
• Families have increasingly carried gaps in the system
• Care crises often happen when support is not available early enough

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🌱 Why this matters now

When we talk about dementia, aging, or home care today, it is important to understand that these pressures did not suddenly appear.

They have been building for decades.

Many people who worked in care, or relied on care, are still here—still remembering, still carrying those experiences, and still seeing where systems have not fully caught up.

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💬 Final reflection

Care is not abstract.

It is bus rides across provinces, sleepless nights, hospital visits, home visits, and everyday acts of holding people together when systems are not enough.

Understanding this timeline helps us understand where we are now—and why so many families are still struggling today.