She pulled $30,000 from her retirement savings and was planning to give herself all of 2022 to expand the small catering business she had always dreamed about. Then, that month, she received the news that medics were pulling her father out of his car. The collision splintered the bone in his left thigh down to his knee; three days later, a metal rod held the broken pieces together. In hindsight, there were warning signs that her father’s health could upend Schofield’s life. The social-work scholar Dorothy A. Miller once described this as the “peculiar position” in the modern American nuclear family, between the care people give to their aging parents and to their children.

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