We’re not going to pretend this is easy.
In 52 days, our world changed forever.
In late 2021, we lost our sister and daughter. Fifty-two days from diagnosis to death. It was a rare, aggressive cancer that didn’t give us much time.
What those 52 days gave us, though, was clarity. About what matters. About how badly people need each other when life gets hard. About how little support exists for people navigating the messy, exhausting, sacred work of caregiving and loss, and how few spaces exist to talk about aging and dying without someone trying to change the subject.
We are Janaan, Natalie, and Pam. Three women across three generations who have been in the thick of it.
We named it Spry.
Spry, because that’s what we believe in. The right to stay spry, live spry, be spry. That means staying engaged, staying active, and moving through every season of life (including the final one) with dignity.
Spry is for people who are aging, caregiving, grieving, or preparing. We believe in honest conversation. We believe in practical support. We believe in the kind of dark humor that gets you through a 3am moment you didn’t see coming. And we believe that death and dying are part of living, not something to be hidden away until it’s too late.
I’ll be honest with you: I, Janaan, am also living this in real time. My 88-year-old grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s, lives with me. My husband and three young kids aged 16, 14, and 10 live with me too. I am what they call a “sandwich caregiver,” which sounds tidy and kind of cute, and is actually one of the most humbling and overwhelming things a person can be. I am learning as I go. We all are.
That’s the thing about caregiving and loss: nobody feels ready. Nobody has it figured out. And yet people do it every day with grace, exhaustion, grief, and love. And sometimes with a well-timed inappropriate joke that makes everything briefly okay again.
We’re just getting started. We’ll be sharing stories, resources, honest conversations, and yes, eventually tools and products that make the hard parts a little more manageable. We’re glad you’re here, whether you’re caregiving, grieving, aging, or just trying to be…spry.