Your father calls to ask when the game starts. An hour later he calls again, and asks when the game starts.
Your mother comes home with a dent in the bumper and no story to go with it. The refrigerator has food in it that should have gone out last week. She has stopped going to the Thursday night thing she went to for twenty years, and when you ask, she says she just did not feel like it.
None of these is an emergency. That is what makes them hard to talk about.
Sarah Princehorn, founder of SarahCares, spent a half hour with Ginger Jones on the In Good Company podcast in September, and the part of the conversation families will want to hear is about exactly these moments. The episode is on YouTube and Spotify. Ginger hosts the show for Next Mile Network, where Sarah is a founding member.
The signs are not big. That is the point.
Ginger asked Sarah the question every adult child eventually asks someone: what are the yellow flags, the ones that mean it is time to call somebody?
Sarah's list was short and ordinary. The fender bender with no story. The food that is not getting eaten. A fall nobody can explain. The phone call that repeats itself. "They're not big," she said. "They're really not big."
Then she named the one she sees most, and it is the one that is easiest to miss: withdrawing from the things you love. Her own mother went to church every Sunday, met friends every Thursday night, had a knitting club, read voraciously, and went dancing at Centennial Park. One by one those things went away. "Her world got smaller and smaller and smaller."
Sarah's reading of that moment is the reason SarahCares exists. It is not a reason to call a traditional home care agency. It is not a reason to change anything about your mother's life. In her words: "Let's just have a conversation."
The conversation goes better when it is about you.
Bringing up help with a parent who has been independent for eighty years does not go well when it arrives as a verdict. I do not think you should drive. I do not think you should cook. Sarah's advice on the episode is to turn it around and make it about the child.
"Mom, it's going to help me sleep better at night if I know somebody's just checking in on you." Or: my kids need me, I cannot do everything, and I really want to be able to do the fun things with you.
She also shared the line families use most often to introduce a Care Partner. "I have a friend, and it would make me feel better if she pokes her head in on you."
It works because it is true. A Care Partner arrives in street clothes, calls your mother by her first name, and can start with ninety minutes a week. Nothing about the house, the car, or the routine has to change on day one.
Her first client taught her what the work is.
Sarah's mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2017. Sarah left a corporate sales job and went to work at a traditional home care agency, she told Ginger, mostly for the training. She expected to learn the skills she would need for her own family. She did not expect to fall in love with the work.
Her first client was a woman named Gladys, 97, who could not hear. They talked on a dry erase board. The card game Uno became "You Know," because that is what it looks like written down. They had six months together, and Sarah was there for the hard part at the end.
"I'd found my purpose," she said. "My entire premise is to give our clients the very best last season of their life."
Gladys is on a wall at Sarah's house that she calls her why wall. The sentence about the best last season is on everything SarahCares does.
The company grew the way the care does, one person at a time.
Sarah does not step around the early years, and the episode's title comes from her. She started SarahCares in 2019 while raising three children and caring for her mother at home, and she was on food stamps and TennCare as recently as 2021. "I had nothing to lose," she said. "There was nowhere to go but up, which is a great place to start." Every bit of growth since has come through word of mouth.
What she looks for in a Care Partner follows from that. Not a long history in traditional caregiving. "I'm looking for the human being who loves other human beings," she told Ginger. The skills can be taught. The word matters too. The team are Care Partners, not caregivers, because they are partners in the journey with the family and with the client. Or, as Sarah put it, "When you hire SarahCares, you're getting an extra family member who would do anything a daughter would do."
Something to try this week.
If one of the small signs has been sitting with you, make the next conversation about you, not about her. Say what would help you sleep. Then stop talking and let her answer.
Then listen to the episode. It runs about 36 minutes, and the part about the signs and the conversation starts around seven minutes in.
When you are ready, we are here.
Listen: "From Food Stamps to a Million-Dollar Business: The Sarah Cares Story" on YouTube and Spotify.
About this article: This is original commentary from SarahCares. It summarizes and links to an episode of the In Good Company podcast, hosted by Ginger Jones and produced by Next Mile Network. Podcast artwork courtesy of Next Mile Network. Listen to the full episode on YouTube or Spotify.