Close to Home: Paurvi Bhatt on Immigrant Family Caregiving, the Loneliness Epidemic, and Why Gen X Has to Start Asking for Help

Paurvi Bhatt has spent her career responding to crises, from the HIV pandemic to global health financing, and has worked alongside former First Lady Rosalynn Carter on caregiving advocacy. But it wasn't until she became a caregiver herself that she understood what was missing.

Paurvi grew up watching her father navigate the unimaginable: a wife in her twenties with cervical cancer, a mother dying of cancer in India, no car, no phone, and no way to reach family except by aerogram - the folded blue paper airmail letters that took weeks to arrive. He did it through community, ingenuity, and a Gujarati song he sang for decades whose lyrics, his family now realizes, described everything he couldn't say out loud.

In this episode of The Bridges Between Us, Paurvi shares what three generations of caregiving - her father's, her own, and the generation coming next - have taught her about community, trust, silence, and what happens when you finally let people know you need help. She talks about caring for both of her parents (her mother through five cancers, her father through early-onset dementia), being a solo ager, and why she believes Gen X - the latchkey generation that raised itself - is at a critical inflection point when it comes to asking for and receiving support.

She also reflects on what CaringBridge gave her family that her father never had: a way to let people in.

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