One of the unexpected gifts of Meraki has been meeting extraordinary ordinary women I might not have encountered otherwise. Sometimes a single conversation reveals more than you expected.

Lisa and I finally found ourselves in the same place at the same time and carved out a rare weekday meetup. It felt indulgent in the best way. Two busy women, both balancing work, family, and our own quiet questions about what comes next, sitting down without an agenda.

Within minutes, the conversation slipped beneath the surface. We discovered we both have family members with Alzheimer’s, and the tone shifted to something more intimate, more careful. We spoke about what we have both come to understand, that it can run through families, that women so often carry more of it, both in their bodies and in the long arc of caregiving. How the role asks for a kind of vigilance that seeps into everything, until your own life begins to organize itself around someone else’s needs.

We talked about the particular tension of not knowing what to do with what you know. Whether to seek a test when there is no clear treatment, no proven way to change the outcome. Would certainty allow you to live more intentionally, or would it cast a long shadow over the years you still have? Would you make different choices, or would the worrying slowly take up more space than the living? 

It is a strange ethical math. How much knowledge is useful, and when does it become its own burden.

Around us, the restaurant carried on as usual. At our small table, time slowed. Two women trying to think clearly about something that resists clarity.

We left with no answers, only the quiet relief of having said the fears out loud to someone who understood them without explanation.

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by Stephanie Georges
Founder and CEO
The Meraki Dignity Project

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