Beba's Story​​ ​

The content on this page is written by members of the Senior Council, an external advisory board to the Humana Foundation composed of leaders from the communities we serve. These articles are shared for their relevance to our mission but are not authored by the Humana Foundation.​​ ​

This story is universal in its focus on the emotional health of an older person caring for another elder, and on how it can be affected by diverse cultural customs and ingrained social mores and expectations. Beba's story also touches on how national health policy must recognize the emotional, mental, physical, and financial needs of our caregivers. Weare now experiencing the long-awaited "Silver Tsunami," with 9.9 million older people age 65+ who provided unpaid eldercare to someone also age 65 or older (source: 2023-2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics).​​ ​

Beba Sardiña-Mann's story, at its heart, is about love, loss, duty, and the kind of resilience that often goes unseen because it is worn so gracefully. It begins in Havana, where she was born into a prominent family, and continues in Miami, where she arrived in 1961 as a young girl with her mother and brothers after political persecution and upheaval in Cuba forced them to leave everything behind. Like so many immigrant families, they came seeking safety and stability, but safety came at a cost: separation from home, the loss of social standing, and the emotional labor of rebuilding a life in a new country, language, and culture.​​ ​

What makes Beba's story so powerful is that it is not only an immigration story. It is also a story about being a daughter, a woman, a mother, and later, a caregiver – roles shaped by culture, expectations, and sacrifice. She describes her life as an "emotional roller coaster," a phrase that captures what many immigrant families understand intimately: how gratitude and grief can live side by side, how strength can coexist with loneliness, and how resilience is often built at home and in private, one day at a time.​​ ​

Growing up in Miami, Beba lived between two worlds. At home, her mother clung to the old customs and strict expectations for Beba, her only daughter. Outside the home, the 1970s offered a different rhythm—more informal, more Americanized. Beba learned to navigate both while understanding what was expected of her and how family judgment could shape even the most personal decisions. Her story reflects a truth many immigrant women know well: adaptation is not only about learning a new country and a strange city; it is also about negotiating identity, belonging, respect, and autonomy within one's own family.​​ ​

For seven years, Beba has been the primary caregiver for her mother, who suffered a massive stroke and now requires round-the-clock care. The woman who once stood at the center of family life—strong, commanding, unwavering—is now bedridden, unable to move, see, or speak. Beba cares for her at home, balancing vigilance and tenderness, grief and gratitude, exhaustion, and devotion. Her mother sacrificed so much, she says; now it is her children's turn to step up.​​ ​

This reversal—the daughter now the one holding the family together—gives Beba's story its emotional force. It invites us to look beyond the surface of immigrant caregiving, and to see emotional health not as the absence of breakdown but as the daily work of continuing: showing up, caring, and finding meaning amid adaptation and strain. In Beba's life, emotional health is not a polished ideal. It is the ability to remain connected, loving, and functional while living with stress, memory, duty, employment, physical and emotional pain, and uncertainty.​​ ​

Beba's story also reveals a broader public health reality that too often remains hidden. Throughout the U.S., many older adults are first-generation immigrants whose emotional health is shaped not only by caregiving, but by the whole spectrum of migration, displacement, family and financial responsibilities and the long afterlife of adaptation. Yet any associated emotional distress is often misunderstood or overlooked. Many Hispanic women were raised to endure quietly—to aguantarse—and may view sadness, anxiety, or asking for help as signs of weakness, shameful, or burdensome to the family. As a result, emotional suffering may be expressed through silence, physical symptoms, or overwork rather than through direct requests for support.​​ ​

The emotional pressures of caregiving are often compounded by systemic barriers: limited access to culturally and linguistically appropriate services, stigma around the caregiver's emotional or mental health, transportation and mobility challenges, financial anxieties, and gaps in health insurance. Some older bedridden patients, such as Beba's mother, may not fully qualify for government insurance programs such as Medicare or Medicaid. Caregivers also often struggle to navigate the complexity of health and social service systems — even when help is available. In these cases, families absorb the caregiving burden quietly—often with remarkable devotion, but with too little help and support.​​ ​

Beba's story asks us to do something important. It asks us to stop mistaking endurance for the absence of need. It asks families, healthcare systems, insurers, and community organizations to recognize caregivers' emotional health as a real and imperative issue. It also asks us all to listen more carefully, check in earlier, reduce the stigmas, and invest in tailored, responsive caregiver support before crises – either with them or their charges -- arrive. All caregivers, regardless of birth origin, deserve support that honors their dignity, language, culture, history, and humanity. Their strength should be admired, their resilience celebrated, but these should never be the reasons we abandon our older caregivers to carry the emotional and physical burdens alone.​​ ​