For ten years, Andrew Rahal was the full-time caregiver for his grandmother Elo through vascular dementia and advanced Alzheimer's disease — showering her, feeding her spoon by spoon, reading her face for pain she could no longer say out loud.
He was a college student when it began. At Cal State Northridge he received a D in a 9 a.m. class — not for lack of ability, but because he had already fed, bathed, and safeguarded his grandmother before running out the door. The Chronicle of Higher Education opened its reporting on student-caregiver dropout risk with that story. He left CSUN, returned at The New School in a program built for adults with real lives, and finished his degree while coordinating her care from across the country.
Over the following decade he became her advocate in every hospital room, trained through UCLA's caregiving program, studied the Montessori approach to dementia care, and learned to read pain in a face that could no longer speak. The Guardian documented that decade in a four-year photo essay. His words from that piece — "It's a job, and it's a tough one" — have become a rallying cry for the 12 million millennials providing family care in America.
Somewhere in those years he saw something he can't un-see: caregiving isn't a private family problem. It's a hidden institutional crisis — in workplaces, in universities, in a system that pretends millions of caregivers don't exist.
Today he is the founder of The Caregiver Lens™, helping organizations and campuses see the caregivers they serve and employ, and the host of Reflections of a Millennial Caregiver.
