Parallel Journeys, Intersected: Narratives of Caregiving Across Class Lines

This duo-autoethnographic essay examines caregiving across divergent class positions through a dialogic, patchwork narrative authored by a gay couple who became caregivers to four parents in their thirties and early forties. Although our parents’ socioeconomic circumstances differed markedly – ranging from long-term care insurance and stable housing to poverty, housing instability, and care refusal – we were equally unsettled by how disorienting caregiving proved to be. We argue that caregiving is fundamentally a communicative and relational process rather than a linear set of tasks or outcomes, one shaped by classed infrastructures, institutional recognition, and family histories. Across narratives of terminal cancer, dementia, alcoholism, sudden death, and prolonged decline, we examine anticipatory knowing, care refusal, indirect caregiving, decision fatigue, and the moral exhaustion that emerges when caregivers bear responsibility without corresponding authority. We introduce the concept of care-receptivity to explain how social class shapes not only access to care but also the conditions under which care can be accepted without threatening dignity or identity. Drawing on family communication, caregiving scholarship, gerontology, and the medical humanities, we theorize caregiving as an ongoing communicative negotiation through which responsibility, authority, and relational labor are continually redistributed across partners, siblings, and family systems. By treating dialogue as both method and care practice, this essay advances communication scholarship by repositioning caregiving as an unfinished relational accomplishment shaped simultaneously by social class, institutional structures, and communicative negotiation.