Her Legacy, My Strength

Dedicated to the life, love, and unshakable spirit of Taciana D. Biton

I am the daughter of two immigrant parents who taught me, early, the weight and wonder of responsibility.

I was just a middle schooler, sitting at the kitchen table, helping my parents study for their U.S. citizenship test. While other kids were out playing or watching TV, I was sounding out questions on American history and government, determined to help my parents claim a future they had sacrificed so much to build.

That was my first taste of caregiving but I didn’t know then how deeply it would shape my life.

A Daughter Turned Caregiver

In the late 1990s, when most kids were worried about high school crushes and weekend jobs, my world shifted. My mother was diagnosed with terminal renal failure.

Suddenly, my teenage years were filled with medical terms, dialysis machines, and quiet prayers in the middle of the night. I helped her manage treatments, watched her endure the brutal wait for a transplant, and celebrated alongside her when she finally received one.

But even then, caregiving didn’t end — it evolved.

After the transplant came medication schedules, doctor’s appointments, and the delicate dance of protecting her health while trying to reclaim some normalcy.

Dementia: The Battle and the Blessing

Dementia is not just memory loss.

It’s a thousand little losses.

A thousand little goodbyes.

I had just turned thirty — the age when many are hitting their stride in careers, relationships, or dreams. For me, it was the age when my mother was diagnosed with dementia and my priorities reorganized themselves around her.

Every day was a combination of heartbreak and grace. The mother who had taught me how to stand on my own no longer remembered the milestones we’d accomplished together. There were moments of laughter, softness, and clarity that felt like gifts; and moments of confusion, anger, and exhaustion that left me drained in ways words can’t capture.

Dementia didn’t just test my patience. It tested my heart, my boundaries, and my definition of love.

How Her Journey Became My Strength

Today, I am a mother, a wife, an entrepreneur — and above all, a symbol of empowerment shaped by love, resilience, and the legacy of Taciana D. Biton.

Being a caregiver taught me resilience in the most tender places — sitting alone at the kitchen table, keeping vigil by the hospital bed, and quietly at the medicine cabinet, holding it all together.

Caregiving molded me into:

• A woman who holds space for grief and joy at the same time.

• A woman who leads with compassion, even on empty.

• A woman who fights for the dignity of those who can’t fight for themselves.

• A woman who knows that strength isn’t perfection — it’s presence.

The work I do now — empowering others, lifting women up, showing up real and raw — all traces back to the woman who raised me. It’s no accident that the work I do now centers on strength — not the polished, performative kind, but the real, lived, messy kind.

The Legacy I Carry

When Tyler Perry stood at the BET Awards and said, “The first weapon I ever held was my mother’s hand,” it hit me straight in the chest.

Because my mother’s hand was my first anchor, my first teacher, my first reminder that I was never alone. My mother’s hand was the first place I learned what it meant to carry someone, and to let them carry me.  It was the hand that fed me, steadied me, and later, the hand I held as I steadied her.

So today, everything I am, everything I build, and everything I pour into this world is for her — because of her. Her journey is woven into mine — not as a burden, but as a birthright.

I stand as a testament:

That from care, comes power.

That from hardship, comes purpose.

That from love — even love through heartbreak — comes a strength that can’t be bought or borrowed.

And I carry that strength forward, every day, for her.