Laureen's mom went into the hospital over a month ago. Then a few weeks of rehab after that. She's home now, and (amazingly) doing well.
Laureen's taking this week off from the newsletter. Not because there's nothing to say, but because after a month and change like that, she's earned a moment to catch her breath and get her mom settled in.
Here's a detail she'd probably want you to know, though: even Laureen — the person who writes the cybersecurity newsletter — had cleanup to do. Remember the spam situation from earlier in this series? That wasn't hypothetical. She was the one wading through her mom's inbox at the hospital, doing the exact unsubscribe-and-block routine she told you to do. The expert still had a mess to deal with. She just also had a system for dealing with it.
That's the part worth sitting with: the panic was manageable, because the accounts were already sorted. The passwords were already found. She wasn't searching "how do I get into Mom's email" at 2am, because she'd already done that work months before anyone needed her to.
Having that squared away didn't make any of the hospital stuff easier. What it did was make it possible for her to actually be there, present with her mom, instead of frantically reverse-engineering a digital life from a waiting room chair. The system she'd already built gave her the space to handle everything new that showed up, because everything old was already accounted for.
That's the whole idea. Not that you'll never be overwhelmed. You will. Caregiving is overwhelming, full stop, no newsletter fixes that. But you get to choose what you're overwhelmed by. The scheduling and the symptoms and the sitting with someone you love while they heal — that's going to take everything you've got. "Wait, does Dad even have a password manager?" shouldn't be competing for the same bandwidth.
Introducing Digital Caregiving, from Laureen & J.B.
You didn't sign up to be tech support for your whole family. But if you're anything like Laureen, or me, or most of the people who read this newsletter — you probably already are.
Digital Caregiving is the course we built for exactly this. Five live sessions, step by step, to get your parents' accounts, passwords, and devices in order — before you're doing it from a hospital waiting room instead of your home office.
Laureen's experience is proof it works. We'd like it to work for your family too.
Save your spot on the list — and thank you, genuinely, for being part of this newsletter's community. We built it because more people needed a Laureen. This is us trying to give you one.
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