'There's Nothing Like It:' Levittown Resident Mentors Caregivers

LEVITTOWN, NY. — Levittown resident Erica Kerr describes herself as “a natural caregiver, ever since I was a teenager.”

It hasn’t always been easy for the College of New Jersey graduate, who served as the primary caregiver for both her father and her sister when each was diagnosed with cancer, but the mother of two has found a way to turn her experience into a tool to help others: Mentoring other caregivers, through her work with the nonprofit Cancer Hope Network.

According to the National Alliance for Caregivers, Kerr’s story is similar to that of countless Americans. In a recently released report, the nonprofit group found that 1-in-4 Americans is a caregiver to someone in their family, spending an average of 27 hours per-week caring for a relative.

Nearly a quarter of those family caregivers, the study said, provide 40 or more hours per-week of care, while half of all family caregivers see their employment impacted by the demands of providing care. In more dire circumstances, the nonprofit said, almost half of all caregivers report negative financial impacts from their caregiving, from taking on debt to depleting short-term savings.

While the work of a caregiver can be demanding, Kerr said the work of mentoring others in the role is rewarding.

“I love learning about people and helping them through their journey, and just making them feel like they're not in it alone,” Kerr said. “Because it feels so lonely, even when your family's in it with you, it feels so lonely, because losing someone, or watching them be sick, is a different experience for every family member. . . I love knowing that I'm making them less lonely.”

For Kerr, the journey as a caretaker started after graduate school, working with patients at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.

“I fell in love with it and decided that after a year, I would try to get a transfer over into their psychiatry department, which I was successful at doing,” Kerr said. “I worked on a research study called ‘family focused grief therapy,’ which provided pre-bereavement therapy to families whose loved one was terminal.”

After a couple of years in the role at MSK, Kerr’s connection to cancer became a bit more immediate.

“In December of 2012, on his 63rd birthday, at his dream home in Florida that he had just finished building, my dad was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma,” Kerr said. “Which, yeah, it sucked. Nobody's heard of it. I had heard of it because this was the patient population that I worked with at Sloan, so I knew that it was bad. I knew that it was terminal and it sucked."

Once the diagnosis came in, Kerr said, her work at MSK had equipped her to understand CAT scan reports and lab results more thoroughly, placing her at the center of her dad’s support network. To Kerr, however, it was never a question of if she would take on that role.

“It didn't feel like an option to me. It just felt like I have to keep my family together,” Kerr said. “For a while, he was doing really amazingly well, and then when things started going downhill, I…attempted to effectively communicate to [the rest of the family] that we are on the downhill part of this now.”

Kerr’s father passed away in March of 2015. Before he passed, however, he gave Erica some life altering advice. After serving as his “healthcare proxy” for multiple years, Erica’s dad told her she should devote her life to caregiving.

“When my dad was in his final two weeks of life, we were sitting together at the hospital having, you know, a moment, and he was like, ‘You know, I couldn't have done this without you,’” Kerr said. “He's like, ‘You know, this help has been invaluable….you should do this with your life. This is what you should do.’ And I was like, that's a lot of pressure, wow.”

A couple of years after her father passed, Kerr’s sister was diagnosed with cancer. Once again, Kerr found herself in the labyrinth of CAT scans, charts, consultations and specialist visits. During that difficult time, Kerr said, her sister sought out a mentor for her then-3-year-old daughter, to help her navigate the complicated emotions that come with a parent living with cancer. The mentor connected the Kerr sisters with Cancer Hope Network, where their father had attended group therapy during his own cancer treatment.

“Her daughter was three at the time; she got a mentor through them,” Kerr said of her sister. “And that mentor helped her out. So then, when she was stable, she had decided to be a mentor with [Cancer Hope Network]. And then she approached me, because I've done mentorship in other settings. So she approached me and said, 'Hey, they're looking for more caregiver mentors. You know, you don't have to be in New Jersey where they're located, because it's phone-based. Would you be interested?' I said, 'absolutely.'”

Kerr said her sister has been stable since 2023. For Kerr, the opportunity to mentor other caregivers navigating complicated times has felt like a blessing.

“I love that I can dedicate time to these people, and some of them, I will never come face to face with,” Kerr said. “I know this sounds so dumb, but it fills my cup up — as much as I think it fills their cup up — to know that they can talk to me. I will meet people and talk to them for 10 minutes, and they are gushing their hearts out to me, because someone finally gets them, and someone's there to listen.”

Today, Kerr said her mentorship efforts are a round-the-clock vocation, with texts and calls from mentees coming in at all hours of the day.

“I work around them,” Kerr said. “You need to talk at nine p.m., you need to talk at 8 a.m., that's fine. Text me overnight. I'm sleeping, but if I see it in the morning, I'll text you back. You know, it gives people support where and when they need it.”

For Kerr, the availability is an opportunity to give others the feeling that they’re not alone while caring for loved ones.

“The number one thing that the peer mentoring that Cancer Hope Network provides is that you're not alone,” Kerr said. “When my dad was sick, I was only 29 when he was diagnosed. All my friends, my husband, everyone still had their parents, with a few exceptions. Even when he died and my sister was sick, nobody had gone through it. So, you feel alone. People sympathize, they love you, my friends were the best…but…they don't know what it's like to sit in the chemo treatment with your dad, or to, you know, watch your sister try to learn to walk again after a brain surgery. People don't understand what it's like until they understand what it's like, and so mentoring connects you to somebody when you're in the depths of it that understands what it's like.”

When it comes to how that mentorship is delivered, Kerr said, she’s a big believer in laughter as medicine.

“I like to use humor, because nothing feels better than making a person feel better. And making a person laugh is the ultimate making them feel better,” Kerr said. “It just cuts the tension. Because there’s nothing funny about the situation, but if you can just cut the tension for a hot second…There's nothing like it. Honestly, I am blessed.”