Our Lives On Hold - Can You Help Me?

The loneliness epidemic, the caregiving skills gap, and why Colorado's summer interim is the window for the Universal Care Continuum.

The Universal Cycle: For May 16, 2026, we ask a foundational question: Can you help me? Care isn't a niche administrative problem or a line item to be audited away-it is the baseline of the human experience. We all start by receiving care, most of us will give it, and eventually, we will all need it again. If our legal and enforcement architectures aren't built with this universal cycle at their very center, then the system isn't just broken-it's blind.

By Mark Fukae - Director of Advocacy - Professionals Who Care

She asks it simply.

Can you help me with my shoes?

Rose has end-stage progressive dementia. She has lived with us for nine years. She cannot always remember what day it is. But she knows what she needs, and she knows who to ask. My wife carries the days. I carry the nights - shoes off, teeth brushed, PJs on, into bed.

Three words. The whole argument.

Can you help me?

The loneliness epidemic is a caregiving skills gap.

73% of Gen Z struggles with loneliness despite being hyper-connected. 72% of caregivers under 32 report loneliness - the highest rate of any caregiving cohort. The youngest people doing the most intimate relational work of their lives are doing it most alone, with the least preparation.

The skills required to answer "can you help me?" with grace - to be present with another person's physical vulnerability without flinching, to navigate the intimacy of a shoelace with care, to know when the request is about the shoes and when it is about something else - these are social skills. They are transmitted through sustained human presence. The loneliness epidemic, by definition, is the erosion of sustained human presence.

The caregiving crisis and the loneliness epidemic are the same structural failure. Both produced by a culture that treats the relational as invisible and economically irrelevant. Both landing on the same generation. Neither has a legal framework.

The Universal Care Continuum.

Every human being moves along this continuum. We receive care entirely and completely. We grow into giving and receiving in shifting ratios. We encounter the caregiving years. And we move toward needing care again.

Every person on the other side of every desk I sit at this summer will someday be on this continuum. The question I am bringing into every summer interim conversation is this: will Colorado law be built around that reality before the wave makes its absence undeniable?

By 2034, more seniors in America than children. 63 million Americans are family caregivers now - nearly one in four adults. 66% of them are Millennials. The wave is not coming. It is here.

The window.

The Colorado session closed May 13. The summer interim is open. The CARE Act coalition work begins now.

Zero general fund. $23-38M in projected net annual savings. TABOR-compliant. The class already named by the 2021 POWR Act. The CARE Act adds the interactive process, the Employment Detachment Event definition, the enforcement teeth.

Senator Mullica. Representative Taggart. The conversations begin this week.

The law should be built around the question. Every one of us will ask it someday.

Read and Listen to the full piece: https://therevenueneutralcaregiver.substack.com/p/our-lives-on-hold-7cb

Sign or share: https://c.org/WjGpN6TYnB  - 679 supporters, 758 signatures, 242 from 1,000 Contact: mark_fukae@casiadvocacy.org | (303) 817-6995