There were many days when Molly Landerkin would stick her face into the piles of laundry she was folding in her basement and sob. That way, no one would hear.

Landerkin took care of her 85-year-old father, Jack Goodwin, in her Marcellus home for three and a half years.

He suffers from dementia and psychosis, and has trouble getting around without help. The stress of taking care of him while watching his decline became unbearable - even for Landerkin, who is a nurse.

When Landerkin and her husband read the story of Earl and Mary Myatt's murder-suicide on the train tracks in Verona, they could understand how it might come to that. "My husband and I looked at each other and said, 'That makes perfect sense to us,'" Landerkin said.

She and other family caregivers said they could see how the stress and isolation of their role could lead to such a desperate act.

Mary Myatt, 59, suffered an aneurysm in January. It left her with the mental capacity of a 5-year-old. She needed help with the most basic of daily tasks. She was in a rehabilitation facility but Earl Myatt, her husband of 42 years, was always with her. His family said he was overwhelmed and depressed before he took his wife to the train tracks instead of to see the couple's grandchildren April 27.

The slim collection of data on murder-suicide, which is not tracked by law enforcement, shows that a quarter of the crimes have a perpetrator over the age of 55. Researchers say this is, in part, because the elderly are increasingly taking care of someone who is sick.

There are roughly 2 million New Yorkers who are caregivers for an ill or aging family member, according to numbers from the Caregiver Action Network. They give up their jobs or cut back their hours. They give up sleep to listen for cries in the night. They take away the car keys, often from the very person who taught them how to drive a lifetime before.

Family caregivers often end up overwhelmed and depressed, with few places to turn for help, said Neal Lane, president of the New York AARP. Their ranks have grown by 25 percent over the past decade because of the country's aging population.

It is a quiet crisis that is only going to get worse, Lane said.

"Unless things change, we will continue to see more and more of the murder-suicides and other things that are so sad," said Lane, who was the head of the state Office for the Aging under Gov. George Pataki.

The high cost of nursing homes and home health care, concerns about substandard nursing home care, and emotion all factor into the decision for family members to provide the care themselves.

The exponential growth of family caregivers has overwhelmed the resources available to help them. There's a 7,000 person waitlist across the state for respite care and other help. AARP has been pushing for more state resources to eliminate that wait. It also wants the state to fund community care navigators - people who would help caregivers find the resources they need.

That help could reduce physical and emotional damage exacted by caregiving.

A study by Penn State University researchers found that more than 40 percent of family caregivers have symptoms of depression. Of those, half met the criteria of major clinical depression. Another study found that caregivers' sacrifices cut their own lives short by as much as a decade because their health suffers under the burden of extra stress and lost sleep.

Nothing prepares you to watch someone you love slip backward into a second childhood that ends in death. Especially, Landerkin said, when the person has moments of clarity where they realize what's happening.

"The humiliation is just tremendous," Landerkin said.

She had to take her father's car keys. She slept as if she had a baby in the house - always waiting for a call for help. She had to tell him he needed adult diapers.

"He'd say 'no,' and then stand up and he's wet," Landerkin said. "You need to think long and hard about taking your parent in to live with you. I don't care who you are - a doctor, a nurse, anybody."

After having her father live more than three years at her house, Landerkin asked her sister to step in. The stress was too much for her and her family. Her father is now living with her sister on Long Island; he is in hospice care.

Landerkin is helping other families like hers: She now works as a hospice nurse.

'I want to die in a nursing home'

Tara Renner moved into her parents' Skaneateles home last year to take care of her father, Dr. Robert Renner. The retired radiologist had terminal brain cancer.

Renner slept three hours a night. She set up a baby monitor near her bed so she could always hear her dad breathing.

"Every day, you saw changes for the worse," Renner said. "It's stressful. It's extremely stressful."

She could see, she said, how that stress might drive someone to do what Earl Myatt did.

Renner and the rest of her family wanted to honor her father's wish to die at home. He died in September.

But Renner said the experience changed her mother's wish to do the same. "She said, 'I want to die in a nursing home,'" Renner said.

A rowboat with no oars

Tracy Murphy understands what happened to the Myatts. There are few places to turn for help when you're a caregiver. It's easy, she said, to feel alone.

Murphy said that in the worst moments, being a caregiver can feel like being out on the ocean in a rowboat with no oars.

"You get exhausted. You don't think clearly," said Tracy Murphy. Her mother, Barbara Conway, will be 86 this month.

An oxygen tank hums and hisses in Conway's Jamesville apartment. It is her constant companion.

Conway's heart and lungs are failing. Her mind is sharp, but she can no longer do many of the things she loved: traveling, cooking, gardening, grocery shopping. Conway still lives alone, but her daughter must now do all of those things for her.

Murphy is as much her mother's helper as she is her stand-in. Conway sits in a chair while Murphy gardens for her. She dictates recipes as Murphy cooks.

"It's very frustrating to think of the things you used to do and can't anymore," Conway said, sitting in her small apartment surrounded by pictures of her favorite moments: on the set of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" when it stopped in Geneva; in Atlantic City with actor Patrick Dempsey of "Grey's Anatomy."

Murphy quit her job with a nonprofit and became a consultant because it was too hard to work around her mother's health emergencies and appointments. Conway has five doctors. She relies on 12 pills a day to stay alive. Her daughter has an entire file box full of her mother's medical records.

"I thank God every day that I have her," Conway said as her daughter held her hand. "I don't really know what I'd do without her."

Contact Marnie Eisenstadt at meisenstadt@syracuse.com or 315-470-2246.