NEW ORLEANS—Actress and podcast host Yvette Nicole Brown sat down with Elyssa Katz, senior director of marketing for the National Alliance for Care at Home, and Carla Davis, hospice and homecare advocate and executive leader, at the 2025 National Alliance for Care at Home Annual Meeting and Expo in New Orleans to share her personal experience as a caregiver.
Brown's father has been battling Alzheimer's for 12 years now, and in that time Brown said she has learned a lot about what it means to care for a loved one and has grown her respect and admiration for other caregivers. Her journey began while she was working on the hit NBC show "Community." Brown said she would talk to her father regularly on the phone and began to notice his steady cognitive decline. After a particularly concerning event where her father misplaced an important folder containing his retirement documents, Brown realized it was much more pressing an issue that needed her attention.
In 2014, "Community" was canceled by the network, and Brown took that as her exit to go take care of her father.
"The show got canceled on a Friday, I was in Cleveland by Sunday packing everything up and getting him ready to move him back," Brown told the audience.
Then maybe a month later it was announced "Community" would return for a final season. Brown asked to be released from the show so she could focus on being her father's caregiver. Brown said the experience was completely foreign to her as she had no children and had never been a caregiver for anyone before. Slipping into the role, however, she said she just reminded herself it's all about love.
As host of the podcast, Squeezed, Brown uses her platform to raise awareness of care at home issues and to highlight those who are carrying the weight of taking care of a loved one. Brown got emotional as she spoke of how many guests on her show express how heavily the caregiver role weighs on their life. Many, she said, express it's been a long time since someone asked them, "How are you doing?"
"We’ll either be a caregiver or a caregivee before we leave this Earth, and the more of us that accept that and learn that early the better off we’re all going to be," Brown said. "So what I tell people all the time is that caregiving is just love. It’s just showing love for another person...I just needed to understand that I don’t have to have all the answers. I just need to show up every day and make sure he’s fed, he’s comfortable, he’s housed and he’s loved. I can do that, and you can do that.”
Davis, who has been a caregiver herself for her father and mother, asked Brown how she handled the transition from a fast-paced acting career to being a full-time caregiver, to which Brown said spending time with her father is "invaluable" to her.
"Even now because he’s at the stage in his Alzheimer’s where he doesn’t always remember me, and that is very difficult, but now I get to remind him of who he is and who I am," Brown said. "I call myself the ‘caretaker of his memories’ and I hold that as an honor and a privilege. Every single day I’m able to remind him who he is, is a gift.
“The beauty of knowing that we are all going to leave is also the beauty of knowing we all get to live," Brown continued. "So if you are aware that this is going to come to an end at some point, that reminds you every day to celebrate and enjoy the time that you have with the people that you have, and there is a little bit of joy that you can get from every day.”
After her father had a bad fall a year ago, Brown had to come to terms with the fact she wasn’t capable of being her father’s full-time caregiver. She said when she was ready to walk away completely from her career, her social worker asked her two revealing questions.
“My social worker said, ‘No one is going to love your father as much as you love your father, but is it possible that someone could care for your father better than you care for your father?’ And I was like, ‘Yes,’ and then he said, ‘Let me ask you this: would your father you be his nurse or his daughter?’ And I knew he would rather me be his daughter.”
Brown found a caregiving facility close to her home, and she praised how the caregivers have become part of her family, even being there to help her father make his way down the aisle at her wedding.
“I’ve made my peace with not having him with me and made my peace I’m no longer the name he calls out to when he needs something. That’s a journey every caregiver has to make their way to because we want to do everything but we can’t. You have to be okay with bringing people onto the team who will care for the person you love the way you would care for the person you love—or better.”
Throughout her interview, Brown discussed topics that she felt were vital in the caregiving world, such as proper pay for caregivers and helping encourage people to become caregivers so agencies can be properly staffed.
"Everyone knows care in the home is invaluable," said Davis. "Yet we do have this huge seismic gap between what caregivers really need and what they can access."
"Most people I think would prefer to have their loved one with them and have someone come in the home to care for them, but the cost of that is so much money," said Brown. "I wish there was a way for the same money that's given to send them to a home, could be a fund that is given to the caregivers that want to care at home to bring in people to help at home. That would be just life changing because then your person would be in their familiar space."
Brown also spoke of leadership and how leaders in home health agencies can encourage their teams to do the best work they can do and to use their platforms to advocate things like pay, staffing, proper care for patients. She also noted that it's important for caregivers to not be afraid to be vulnerable.
“I’ve never been afraid of being vulnerable," she said. "I think our vulnerability is the most beautiful thing about us … I feel sometimes the need to be strong can be a detriment, because when you appear to be strong and that you can do everything, it makes other people that are struggling feel like they’re weak. And none of us are weak. We all are doing the best that we can on any given day, and so when I show my vulnerability it gives other people permission to show theirs. I try every day to do my best, sometimes I make it and sometimes I don’t, but I know the love I have for other people and especially my father is my North star and it never changes.”
Her main advice for those who are going through the same caregiving journey for a loved one was to remember one thing.
“You’re not alone," Brown said. "You need your village and your community, and if you don’t have one you need to build one, and it can be people you already know or you can build a village of other caregivers, there are resources out there. I’ve learned that it’s okay to, in your opinion, fail. I promise what is failure to you is excelling to other people.”