Next, my wonderful, imperfect parents began escalating minor logistical messes into major crises. They had a nasty fight with a company they’d hired to paint their kitchen cabinets. They got embroiled in a permitting problem with the city they were moving to. When my father caused a scene over whether lunch menu prices at a local pizza parlor were still valid after 3 p.m. and was told never to return, my mother became more concerned than ever that he’d definitively lost it.

Each incident sparked an endless round of phone calls. I’d shut the door to my office and try to talk my mom off one ledge or another. In extreme cases, I’d find myself on yet another very expensive last-minute flight. To minimize the impact on my colleagues I always did my best to work from my parents’ home. Unfortunately, many of these episodes occurred during the days of dial-up, when the notion of working remotely simply didn’t compute the way it does today. One evening I broke down sobbing as I banged on my eight-pound laptop in the confines of my mother’s quilting studio. The three-megabyte file I needed to deliver to a client that evening repeatedly brought my Internet to its knees. It took no less than 23 dial-up attempts and four hours to get the file through, well after the deadline had passed.

Fast-forward 10 years, to 2008. By then I was the co-founder of a successful technology marketing firm, and was fortunate to have a supportive business partner. As an added bonus, high-speed internet had arrived, and I had a fully-functioning office installed permanently in my parents’ home. Sadly though, my mom, who had been my father’s primary caregiver, was now terminally ill herself. With little warning, my two brothers and I had to scramble to find a caregiving solution that would work for the entire family.

While managing two terminally ill parents, I did my best to juggle their needs with my company’s. On multiple occasions I drove from Boston to New Jersey for a single dinner meeting just to reassure a client that I was “on top of things.” Perhaps most frustrating was that the professional caregivers we’d hired created a host of new issues to deal with, from negligence to flagrant stealing. My attention was constantly torn between the office and my parents’ home.

When I returned home after a two-week hiatus following my mother’s death—during which I’d organized the funeral, rearranged the house for my father and found five minutes to grieve—my colleagues welcomed me with cards, gifts, condolences and a new job description that left me with nothing challenging to do. My business partner had delegated my most interesting work to our three top performing women, all under the age of 30 and without attachments. What they couldn’t handle, he took on himself. There I was, 42 years old, the co-founder and COO of the company and I felt irrelevant. The slow creep of my parents’ aging into my career, which had begun with my father’s congestive heart failure a decade earlier, had now risen to a big-boom finale that took an immeasurable toll.