Dugan Meredith never planned to become a caregiver advocate. He just started talking. His mother-in-law, Granny, lives with frontotemporal dementia, and the signs came gradually: getting lost, forgetting school pickups, once trying to cook soup in a baking pan. As he and his wife balanced raising children with Granny’s care, Meredith began posting about it from his kitchen table. What he found online was a community of people living the same story, and what started as a way to fight isolation became a nonprofit called Taking Care of Granny.
The numbers behind his story are bigger than it looks. AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving estimate about 21 million men in the U.S. are caregivers for aging or ill loved ones, and many local families are part of the sandwich generation, caring for parents while raising kids. Then there’s the financial squeeze: memory care facilities in our area can run $10,000 to $15,000 a month, a price that pushes many households toward private care at home.
Meredith’s advice is refreshingly free of fixes. You can’t cure dementia, he says, so swallow your pride and learn to meet them where they are. For Suncoast families navigating the same road, his nonprofit exists to make that road less lonely.
Have you cared for a parent or loved one? What’s one thing you wish someone had told you first?
