Our Lives on Hold: The Magazine With Her Name On It

What a Tuesday afternoon in our living room taught me about what it means to be seen — and what it costs when you're not.

The system addresses us eventually - usually 43 days too late

By Mark Fukae - Director of Advocacy - Professionals Who Care

She came to find me in the middle of the afternoon.

She had something in her hand - a magazine, US Weekly, held out toward me like she'd found something important. She had. The mailing label had her name on it. Her address.

This house.

"How do they know I'm here?" she asked.

She was delighted. Genuinely tickled - the brightness that comes over her when something breaks through the fog, when a thing lands and feels real. She has lived in this house for years, and still, each morning, it's slightly unfamiliar. She doesn't always know whose kitchen it is. But the magazine knew. Some database, some algorithm, had addressed something to her, at this place, by name.

"Isn't that great," I told her. "They know right where you are."

She smiled and sat down with it. Turned the pages slowly - looking at pictures, glancing at the cover every few minutes. Her name, still there.

I stood in the doorway and watched her.

She felt seen for one moment. That's rarer than it should be.

What We're Carrying Right Now

I want to name what was happening outside that living room while she sat with her magazine, because it's part of the same story.

Day 43 of the DHS shutdown. Day 28 of an unauthorized war. Gas at $3.88 a gallon - up 30% in 28 days because the Strait of Hormuz is closed and the International Energy Agency has declared the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

Sixty-one thousand TSA workers are missing their second paycheck. More than 3,400 didn't show up to work Thursday. Three-hour security lines at major airports during peak spring break travel. Southwest Airlines employees walking the queues handing out water.

The IEA issued emergency guidance this week: work from home, reduce highway speeds.

Caregiving households cannot work from home.

Our appointments don't reschedule because of geopolitical events. The pharmacy run happens regardless of what the Strait of Hormuz is doing. The specialist visit that took four months to book does not move.

And while all of this lands on caregiving families first - the gas spike, the missed paychecks among the workforce that includes caregivers, the scheduling that cannot flex - there is still no law in Colorado that acknowledges we exist.

Not as a class. Not as workers who need protection. Not by name.

The Name Problem

The Family and Medical Leave Act hasn't been substantively updated since 1993. It was designed for short-term medical events, not the daily reality of dementia care that runs for years. The ADA protects people with disabilities - not the family members caring for them. Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act mentions caregivers but doesn't protect them.

We are, legally, invisible.

When my own workplace accommodations were revoked in 2024 - two years of documented remote work arrangements, eliminated by a blanket return-to-office mandate - HR was consistent: "We all have family obligations, but we need to suck it up." Lawyers confirmed what I'd suspected. There was nothing in the law that protected me.

The TSA worker who is also caring for an aging parent, getting to the airport unpaid because the alternative is losing the job, doing the night shift at the care facility after the day shift at the terminal - that person doesn't appear in the statute, either.

One in five Coloradans provides unpaid family care. That's 1,032,000 people. None of them are named in the law as a protected class.

What Naming Changes

The Colorado CARE Act - proposed for the 2027 legislative session - would add family caregiver status as a protected class under Colorado's Anti-Discrimination Act. It would require reasonable workplace accommodations through an interactive process, using the POWR Act as its zero-cost precedent. It would prohibit what we now call "creative dismissal" - the pattern of restructuring, reassigning, or constructively terminating employees whose caregiving responsibilities become inconvenient.

The bill projects $9 to $18 million in annual Medicaid savings by preventing unnecessary institutionalizations. Zero general fund appropriation. TABOR-neutral.

It cannot pay the TSA workers. It cannot reopen the Strait of Hormuz. It cannot undo 43 days of a shutdown or 28 days of an unauthorized war.

But it can address a caregiver by name. It can say: we know you're here. We know what you're carrying. Your name is on this.

That is not a small thing. Ask anyone who has spent years being invisible to the law whether being named changes something.

It does. It quite a lot does.

What You Can Do

Read the full piece - "Her Name on the Cover" - at The Revenue Neutral Caregiver on

Substack: therevenueneutralcaregiver.substack.com

Sign the Colorado CARE Act petition: https://chng.it/DLWncS9wtT We are at 755 signatures and 675 supporters. The goal is 1,000 before the 2027 session.

Share this article with someone who is carrying something the law hasn't named yet.

Contact us: mark_fukae@casiadvocacy.org | (303) 817-6995

She put the magazine down at dinnertime. By dinner, the moment had passed - somewhere upstream, not retrievable. That's how it works.

The system, when it works at all, addresses us eventually.

We are working to make eventually arrive sooner.

Mark Fukae is the Director of Advocacy for Professionals Who Care and the founder of CASI - the Caregiver Advocacy Support Initiative. He is a registered Colorado volunteer lobbyist developing the Colorado CARE Act for the 2027 session.