This week I wrote about my mother Rose.
About the glasses in the microwave. The coats migrating between closets. The car registration that surfaced six weeks after it arrived. The question she asks on the days the disease has the upper hand - standing in the hallway of the house she has lived in for a decade - "When are you taking me home?"
And about my wife, who answers it. Every time. With patience that costs something every time it is spent.
"You're having dinner with us tonight, Rose. Come sit down."
My wife is the primary caregiver for my mother. I step in on weekends and when the opportunity comes - taking Rose out so my wife can have a nap, an afternoon, a reprieve she has earned. This is the relay that makes multigenerational caregiving sustainable. Two people handing it back and forth. Neither of us named in Colorado law. Neither of us protected.
We call people like my wife "uncredentialed." That word implies a deficit. It isn't one. What she has built across years of caring for Rose - and as part of the relay for my mother, who has lived with us since 2016 - is irreplaceable competency that no nursing school teaches and no credential confers. Two people. Two progressive conditions. Two maps being learned and relearned simultaneously, each changing on its own schedule, neither pausing for the other.
That is not untrained labor. That is expertise. Multiplied. Simultaneous. Never finished.
And when she goes to work, she says none of it. Not by choice. By calculation. Because there is no protected class in Colorado that covers what she is. No accommodation framework. No statute that says: you cannot pass this person over, manage them out, or quietly erase her for being visibly responsible for someone else's survival.
The absence of that statute is itself a policy. It says: this work is not real enough to protect.
The Colorado CARE Act would change that.
Proposed for the 2027 legislative session - zero general fund cost, $9 to $18 million in annual Medicaid savings, if passed -effective July 1, 2028 - it would add family caregiver status as a protected class under Colorado law for the first time. It would protect the primary caregiver. It would protect the relay. It would protect the neighbor who took in the person next door, and the friend who reorganized her career around someone who had no one else.
It would put her in the statute.
We are at 755 signatures and 675 supporters. We need 245 more to reach 1,000.
Read this week's full piece - "The Black Hole of Rose" - and share it with someone who needs to see it:
Every name on this petition is evidence that someone is counting. That the work is real. That the expertise is real. That Colorado can build what the law has not yet built.
Sign here: https://chng.it/DLWncS9wtT
Share with one person today. That's all. One person.
Thank you for being here!
Kindly and Gratefully,
- Mark Fukae Director of Advocacy, Professionals Who Care Founder, CASI - Caregiver Advocacy Support Initiative mark_fukae@casiadvocacy.org | casiadvocacy.org