About the Author
Founder of KindredMind. Primary caregiver for my mother Sharon. Writing about dementia and stroke caregiving from the inside.
I'm Kirstin Thomas, the founder of KindredMind and the primary caregiver for my mother Sharon, who is 82. I'm 50, I live in Ontario, Canada, and I'm an only child — it has always been just the two of us. I built KindredMind in 2025 because I couldn't find anything that did what Sharon needed, and I couldn't keep going the way I was going.
I have three children, a marriage, and a business. Before KindredMind, I was also running two households, driving my mother to every appointment, and answering her calls as many times a day as she needed. Something had to change.
In 2023, a brain scan showed that Sharon had frontotemporal lobe atrophy. We had already moved her from three hours away to our town during Covid, anticipating what was coming. Through 2024 and into 2025, I took over the logistics of her life — the gym, appointments, friends, groceries, the cat's vet.
In April 2025, her MoCA score had fallen enough that her doctors reported her to the Ministry of Transportation. Her license was suspended. She appealed, studied for the retest, and failed it. She sold her car that summer. That was the beginning of the real caregiving.
In October 2025, Sharon began having TIAs — transient ischemic attacks. The second one happened in my kitchen, in front of my husband and youngest daughter. That was the last time she was fully herself. On November 2nd, 2025, following several TIA episodes, Sharon had a basal ganglia stroke. She spent a month in hospital and lost her left side — movement, language, memory, and context.
Today Sharon is in a care home. I visit every day. She calls up to ten times before lunch. I can't answer every call while working and raising three children — but Sharon needs to hear her daughter's voice. That gap is what KindredMind was built to fill.
Every article on KindredMind is written from lived experience — not research alone. I write about dementia caregiving, stroke recovery caregiving, caregiver burnout, caregiver guilt, and the specific challenge of managing repetitive calls because I have lived every one of these topics personally.
When I write that something is hard, I have been there at 11pm, phone in hand, wondering how much longer I can keep doing this. When I write about guilt, it's because I know what it's like to put the phone face-down and then spend the rest of the day feeling like a terrible person. The experience behind these articles is real.