A Daughter's Love
Citing a 2020 report by AARP and the National Alliance for Caregiving, the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America states that millennials account for nearly a quarter of all family caregivers in the U.S. (23%). Specifically, these individuals care for a parent or grandparent with a long-term physical condition such as a dementia-related illness.
This statistic hits close to home for Sidney Kimmel Medical College third-year student Hannah Clarke, who in December 2024 was featured in Philadelphia PBS station WHYY’s news story, “How one Philadelphia medical student is learning to be a young caregiver to a parent with dementia.”
Hannah’s mother, Claudine Clarke, MD, was a geriatrician when, at age 56, she was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a rare progressive brain disorder primarily affecting behavior, language, personality, and communication. Symptoms of this disease characteristically strike before age 65.
Claudine is no longer able to practice medicine. Suddenly, Hannah and her older brother, both only in their 20s, became the sole caregivers for their mother. “You’re slowly watching someone you love deteriorate, and that is just gutwrenching,” Hannah told WHYY.
Hannah remembers her mother, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Bahamas many years ago, as extremely intelligent, with a gift for words. “It was impossible to beat her at Scrabble,” she shared in the story. “She would play every night, and her friends would be like, ‘Claudine, you’re still playing Scrabble?!’ And she’d be like, ‘It’s so I don’t get dementia when I’m older.’ And now I look back, and I’m like, oh my gosh, the universe is so cruel.”
When her mother began to stumble over her words and to mismanage her money and make extravagant purchases, Hannah and her brother suspected that something was wrong. After they helped to sell her house, Claudine lived with both Hannah’s brother and his wife in Philadelphia, and with Hannah and her roommates in an apartment for her first two years of medical school at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.
As she shared with WHYY, while this experience was complex, stressful, and obviously very different from what her classmates were going through, Hannah could only look back on those two years with love. “I got to spend time with my mom, which was all I wanted,” she said.
Hannah Clarke and her mother, Claudine Clarke, MD
Transferring medical schools is challenging, to say the least. But as her mother’s disease progressed and she went to live in a nursing home in Philadelphia, Hannah enrolled at Jefferson, moving to be closer to home and to her beloved mother.
Today, while Hannah’s brother handles the legal and financial aspects of their mother’s care, when she isn’t studying or going through her clinical rounds, Hannah spends 10 to 20 hours a week with her, “making sure her laundry is done, making sure her hygiene is taken care of, all those sorts of things.”
The siblings not only had to learn to be caregivers at such young ages, they also had to combat their ever-present feelings of grief. As Hannah told WHYY, “There are so many things I haven’t been able to do to take care of my mom just because I’m in school, I don’t have an income. My brother, too. This has been his whole post-college life.”
While she has been able to locate resources and programs specifically geared to young adult caregivers and to forge connections with others in similar circumstances both online and at national conferences, Hannah and her brother must still figure out how to plan for a future for themselves even as the next few years of their mother’s life still feel so uncertain.
Her mother’s diagnosis has changed the way Hannah wants to live her life. “I’m going to live my life with an intentionality that maybe I wouldn’t have had before,” she shared with WHYY. “I am not going to spend a whole lot of time in spaces or doing things that I don’t necessarily want to do long term.”
Hannah carries two employee ID badges as she moves through the halls of Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital. One is her own. The second, slightly worn and faded, displays her mother’s name and picture. “I found this in her things when my brother and I were moving her out of her home, and I kept it because it’s very special to me,” Hannah told WHYY. “As I’m going around the halls in the hospital, I’m like, oh my goodness, she was literally doing rounds on these same floors.”
