The caregiver list was already out of date the day Ronna Larsen got it.
A caseworker had handed her a photocopied sheet of local caregivers, and one by one, the numbers on it led nowhere: offices that had closed, agencies no longer taking clients. Larsen’s mother had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and Larsen, along with her father, had suddenly become her caregivers.
“All the doctors would tell us is it will get worse,” Larsen says of those first, disorienting weeks. “I felt hopeless and didn’t know where to turn.”
Larsen’s family, of Wood Dale, Illinois, is one of more than 13 million Americans across the country now providing unpaid care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s or another dementia. Families provided an estimated 19.6 billion hours of care in 2025, according to the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2026 Alzheimer’s Disease Facts and Figures report. More than 7 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s, a number projected to keep climbing as the population ages…