TOAST ON A NAPKIN, a cluster of pill bottles, extra reading glasses, a candy bowl full of cough drops. These are the traces of life found in the dwelling of someone in their senior years. Someone’s parents are cooking less, going to the doctor more and avoiding talk of the future. Gatherings of grown children start to feel more like meetings. They share fears about everything that might happen if mom and dad go on living in the old house with increasing disabilities. They brainstorm, they argue, they research options, which are few.

Residential assisted living facilities can cost around $7,000 a month. In-home health care providers are in extreme short supply. How can grown daughters and sons possibly manage to care for ailing parents in the same home where they are raising babies, building careers and searching for fleeting intimate moments?

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.