I can vividly remember the day I decided to quit my job. It was the height of August 2025. I’d just come home to Bristol after spending three days looking after my mum, who was 81 and had vascular dementia. I was exhausted, frazzled, emotionally drained. I poured myself a glass of red wine and said to my partner, “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t look after mum and work. Work has to go.”

The decision probably didn’t come as too much of a shock. By then, mum had been suffering from dementia for the best part of three years, diagnosed after a series of ministrokes in 2022. 

A feisty northerner, she lived with my step dad an hour’s drive away. But the disease was slowly taking more of her – not just causing memory loss but making her terribly anxious, at times angry, often unmanageable and desperately vulnerable. 

It was hugely stressful, but just about manageable. But by August last year, this had begun to change. My step dad was poorly from exhaustion, so I went to stay for three days to be with mum and oversee her care while he recovered. 

She was very agitated, making the most basic tasks impossible. She would refuse to get dressed – “Why do I need to put f**king socks on?” – or refuse to eat. Believing her long-dead parents still lived at home, she would spend afternoons searching the house for them. She would also hide things, such as the house keys, in cupboards or slippers, and began acting strangely when we went out into town, such as crumbling biscuits into her shopping bag.

At certain points, mum knew what was happening. “My mind is just a big empty space,” she once told me. It was awful to see her suffer. 

I suppose people may ask why we didn’t get carers in or put mum in a care home. But for years she wasn’t ready. She could still be lucid; she still knew who we were. She attended memory classes and dementia daycare a few times a week. The rest of it had to come down to family. My step dad and sister, who also lived an hour’s drive away, did the bulk of it – getting her dressed in the morning, taking her out in the daytime, managing her anxiety, keeping her safe. In essence, it’s like looking after a toddler, but instead of them getting more independent over time, they get less. I was dubbed “carer number three”.

But still, the need was such that I decided to quit work to help more. “This won’t be forever,” I said to my partner after making the decision. I think I was mainly trying to reassure myself. Luckily, he was of the view that family came first, so he didn’t once question my decision and backed it wholeheartedly. He also covered all the responsibility for our daughter as I headed over to mum’s for much of the week.

But money, naturally, was a worry. My partner paid our mortgage and most of the bills. But still my personal outgoings – food, petrol, family necessities – came to £2,000 a month. 

There were months where money was incredibly tight, especially as it cost money to see mum, both in terms of petrol and taking her to cafes. Every time I wanted to buy something – a book, some vitamins – I just wrote it on a list and filed it away in a drawer. “I’ll buy them when I’m earning again,” I thought, trying not to panic. 

But I’m not alone in this situation. According to charity Carents, which offers practical tips to those looking after elderly relatives, in 2021/2022, 400,000 people quit their jobs to become unpaid carers. By 2030, it’s estimated more than a million people in the UK will have dementia. Currently, according to the Alzheimer’s Society, an estimated 982,000 people are suffering from the disease. You don’t need to be a mathematician to understand what future care requirements are going to be. 

I was extremely privileged. We had a spare room in our basement, so we got a lodger who paid us £1,000 a month. My partner was also able to take much of the financial load. I simply don’t know what other people do. How can you possibly earn money and pay for yourself when your entire day, and often night, is given over to the care of someone else?

Even though it was financially possible for me to stop work, it still felt strange. I had spent years rebuilding my career after having my child, and had finally got back to a good place. I was in my mid-forties and now giving it all up again. Even now, I sometimes wonder if the working side of my life will ever recover.

On a practical level, my new routine was also unsettling. Come Monday mornings, when most of the world was in the office, I was in a cafe with Mum, ordering us breakfast simply to get her out of the house. Days were spent in garden centres and coffee shops, and I can’t pretend I didn’t question what I was doing with my life. “And what do you do for a living?” a stranger might ask me. “Well, nothing much,” I’d reply, and change the subject. 

Of course, Mum’s dementia worsened. And by the spring of this year, a whole day passed without a single coherent sentence. Then another. We eventually found a suitable care home, with Mum moving in early June. It provided the most amazing care, and mum lived there for three months before dying at the end of August, aged 82. 

Now, a few months on from her death, life is settling down. I have time to see my friends again. I am not riddled with stress or constantly exhausted. The whole family is under less pressure and, most importantly, mum is no longer suffering.

My caring story is over, but an increasing number of people will face their own. Carents say roughly four million of us now have some sort of responsibility for our parents. Surely then, it’s time companies offered carers’ leave, similar to maternity leave? As the population continues to age – and more and more people like me have to leave the workforce to care for loved ones – it can’t be ignored for much longer.

I don’t regret a moment I spent with mum. In reality, all I lost was a year’s earnings. But not everyone will be able to say that. I don’t envy any of them.