About

My Story

I Lost My Mother Twice

My mom was a force. An ESL teacher who believed every student deserved a chance. A woman who'd give the grocery money to someone who needed it more. The kind of person who made everyone around her feel seen.

The first signs were easy to dismiss. Fatigue, we blamed on age. Getting lost on familiar routes. Then she fainted at school, and the slow unraveling began.

What followed was four years of misdiagnoses — vascular dementia, bipolar disorder, early-onset Alzheimer's — before we finally landed on frontotemporal dementia. Four years of watching my mother disappear while doctors guessed.

I became her caregiver, her advocate, her protector. And I lost myself in the process.

I stopped socializing. My marriage strained under the weight. I resented my siblings for not showing up the way I needed them to. When my father passed, I didn't speak to one of my siblings for eight years.

I thought I was holding it all together. I wasn't. I was drowning in slow motion while pretending I could swim.

The Moment Everything Changed

After my mom passed, I was left with grief, guilt, and a question I couldn't shake: Why was this so hard? Why didn’t anyone help us see what was coming?

So I started researching. I attended conferences, read every study, and talked to every expert I could find. And I got angry.

Not at the disease — at the system.

I watched families who had done everything "right" get financially gutted by predatory facilities and preventable mistakes. I saw caregivers lose their health, their careers, their marriages. I saw siblings stop speaking over money that could have been protected if someone had just shown them how.

The resources existed. The strategies existed. But no one was connecting the dots for families while they still had time.

So I got certified. I became a Certified Dementia Practitioner. And I built The Proactive Caregiver to be the guide I wish my family had.

This Is My Mission Now

I no longer do support groups. I don't do sympathy. I do strategy.

Every client I sit with — the exhausted daughter Googling at 2 am, the sandwiched professional trying to manage a career and a crisis, the family fighting over what to do next — I see my own family in them.

And I help them build what we never had: a plan that protects their loved one, their assets, their relationships, and themselves.

I watched families who had done everything "right" — worked hard, saved money, raised good kids — get financially gutted by a system that isn't designed to help them. I saw the guilt and the grief compounded by money stress that didn't have to exist. I saw siblings stop speaking. I saw caregivers lose their careers, their marriages, their health.

And I saw that almost all of it was preventable — if someone had helped them build a plan before the crisis hit.

So I got certified. I became a Certified Dementia Practitioner and committed to 40 hours of continuing education every two years to stay current. Not because credentials look good on a wall, but because families deserve someone who understands both the spreadsheet AND the deterioration of the body and brain.

I built The Proactive Caregiver to be the guide I wish those families had. The guide I wish my family had.