When Karen was seventeen, her grandmother Dorothy held her face in both hands and made her a promise. “I won’t die, baby.”
Eighty years separated those two women. Dorothy had cleaned her way out of an orphanage as a child, raised her own family through the Depression, and then raised Karen too. She was, in Karen’s words, her constant. “No matter where I was,” Karen told us, “I talked to her multipletimes a day.”
Dorothy is ninety-seven now. And she has, remarkably, kept her promise. But the woman who spent a lifetime taking care of everyone else needs care herself now, and Karen, who once received that promise as a teenager, is the one keeping watch.
“It was very apparent we were not prepared for anything,” Karen told us. “We all wait. We all say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But doing it…”
Most families don’t finish that sentence. They live it.
For months, Karen carried it alone. The medications stacked on the kitchen counter, more
arriving each week, none of them quite explained. The questions she didn’t know how to ask Dorothy’s doctors, and the questions she did ask that no one had time to answer. The middle-of- the-night worry that something was wrong, but she couldn’t tell what. The slow, loneliness of loving someone fiercely and feeling, every single day, that you are failing them in ways you can’t name.
And then Karen made a phone call to Helios Care.
This is where we come in.
You may know us for hospice. But long before hospice, when a serious illness first enters a family’s life, there is a stretch of time that is bewildering, exhausting, and lonely. The medical system is not built to support that stretch. Insurance pays for procedures. It pays for hospital visits. It does not pay for the conversation a frightened family needs at their kitchen table about what comes next.
Our Choices program does. Within days of Karen’s call, a Helios nurse and our Choices
Coordinator, Rebekah Brooke, came to the house. They didn’t arrive with a clipboard and a list of services. They sat down. They asked Dorothy what hurt, what helped, what she was afraid of, and what she still wanted from her days. They asked Karen the same questions, separately, because the answers a caregiver gives in front of the person they love are not always the answers they need to give.
They went through every medication on the counter and sorted out which ones were working, which ones weren’t, and which ones were quietly fighting each other. They called Dorothy’s providers with recommendations. They connected the family to community resources Karen hadn’t known existed. And they came back, again and again, because that’s the part the system never funds. The follow-up. The staying.
Rebekah describes her work this way: “It is my privilege to bear witness to someone’s story of life, illness, death, and everything in between.”
For Karen, that witness has made all the difference. “The biggest thing for me,” she said, “is just not feeling alone. I felt isolated, even while caring. But everyone at Helios Care, anyone I get on the phone, just wants to help.”
She told us about Rebekah specifically. “Just when I feel like no one is there, she is. That’s really been the thing.”
And Dorothy? Dorothy is exactly who you would expect a woman who survived an orphanage and a Depression to be. Not long ago, when the nurse adjusted her oxygen, Dorothy looked up and said, gently, “Save it for somebody else.”
Ninety-seven years old. On oxygen. Still trying to give it away.
“She never kept anything for herself,” Karen said. “Everything was for somebody else.”
This is who your gift is for.
Why your support matters this spring.
Choices is one of several services Helios Care provides across our region, alongside hospice care, grief support for families after a loss, and education for the community on how to face serious illness with clarity instead of panic. It serves families like Karen’s, and it serves neighbors facing far harder circumstances: chronic illness compounded by isolation, transportation barriers, food insecurity, the loneliness of growing seriously ill without family nearby. People often ask us how Choices works, because nothing else in the healthcare system works quite like it. Karen and Dorothy’s story is the clearest answer we know.
But here is the part that matters for this letter: Medicare and private insurance do not
pay for this kind of care. They pay for procedures and visits, not for the slow, attentive,
deeply human work of helping a family through the hardest passage of their lives. That work exists in our community because donors like you make it exist.
Your gift to Helios Care goes to all of it: the home visits, the after-hours phone calls, the
bereavement groups, the nurse who arrives when no one else will, the social worker who picks up when a granddaughter is at the end of her rope at two in the morning. It is general support, which is to say, it is everything.
Karen and Dorothy’s story is one of thousands we are honored to be part of each year. Most of those stories don’t make it into a letter, but every one of them depends on neighbors who believe that no family in our region should face serious illness alone.
Please consider a gift today. Whatever you can give will go directly to the work in our three
counties, and to the next family making the call Karen made.
With deep gratitude,
Joan MacDonald
Chief Executive Officer
Helios Care
Names and identifying details of the family in this story have been changed to protect privacy. The granddaughter graciously gave her permission for it to be shared.
