"The Little Things You Do Are a Big Deal" by Liza Wyles
Summer Season of "Letter From A Caregiver"
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I’m Victoria. You can read why I’m publishing Carer Mentor here: Who Started Carer Mentor and Why? I created Carer Mentor to offer heartfelt empathy for Caregivers. It’s a hub of practical tools, resources, and insights. A community support network for all of us human-ing hard. ❤️ Start exploring here.
Letters from a Caregiver.
“Letters from a Caregiver” is a weekly article where a caregiver offers their wisdom, compassion, and hope to their younger self. No one knows us as well as we know ourselves, and even then, we may second-guess ourselves. The choices, challenges and tragedies we’ve faced have forged us in more ways than anyone can understand; in ways we’re still trying to decipher!
Since September 2025, thirty-two letters have been posted over three seasons.
This Summer Season so far
“Caregiving is a continuous evolution of my love, trust and courage.” by Victoria
“You Have to Receive in Order for the Circle of Love to be Complete” by Kaeli Hansen Caregivers Count with Kaeli
Today’s ‘Letter from a Caregiver’ is by Liza Wyles
I met Liza earlier this year when I came across her publication, “WriteLiza”. Her article “Welcome to WriteLiza! Reclaiming my title as ARTIST through caregiving and creativity” resonated with my efforts to not just define my bespoke version of thriving, but to bring my whole self to each moment.
“I arrive on set as a caregiver and it empowers me to advocate for cast and crew in my role. Care and creativity are entwined for me. It is how I can show up as truly myself and do my best work.” - Liza
I recommend learning more about Liza’s work as an intimacy coordinator and how, in her words, “her caregiving and creativity lives intersect and inform one another.” I’ve enjoyed her humour and appreciate the different frames that she’s presented about care and caregiving.
Bringing Caregiver Energy to Set as an Intimacy Coordinator. But I’m not your mother.
“I didn’t know I might be good at caregiving until I was tasked at doing so. And I don’t think I’m “meant” to do this. I simply am able to understand that help and support cannot come at the expense of another person’s dignity. Whether they’re doing a nude scene in a film, or sitting in a hospital gown with an IV port, waiting to have their brain imaged for signs of tumor recurrence, everyone deserves as much agency as they can command.” - Liza
Thank you for your letter, Liza.
Author’s Bio: Liza Wyles is a writer and intimacy coordinator in Queens, NYC. She is a parent to two teens and a caregiver to her husband, Scott, who was diagnosed with glioblastoma in 2024. She launched WriteLiza in 2025 to share how her caregiving and creativity lives intersect and inform one another. Her essays and humor have been published in The New York Times, Scary Mommy, Romper, and Self, and she has written and produced TV series for AMC Networks, Disney, and Marvel. Ask her anything about Star Wars and 80s New Wave music.
The Little Things You Do Are a Big Deal
Dear 26-year-old Liza at NYU Langone Health Hospital on that hot summer day,
I see you in the room with your mother and aunt, surrounding your grandmother in the bed. The nurse asks loudly: “Are these your girls? How many do you have?”
My grandmother smiles: “Just three,” she answers, looking at each of us.
She is wrong. She has two daughters. I’m her granddaughter. Except not on that day.
You were there, filing her nails. She always had manicured nails, painted bright red or shimmery peach. She did them herself, the Revlon bottles at her bedside, next to the lamp and ashtray. But they were ragged now. She had tried to escape the night before, wrestling with the safety bar on her hospital bed, and tearing her nails in the process. You’re filing them down to get them smooth and even and safe. You’ll do your best. But her nails won’t look the same.
This act will stay with you. It is something you can do. It is all you can do at that moment. It will be enough. It’s the last memory you have of her alive.
It does you good to remember how to do these small things in big circumstances. When you become a parent, the skill is handy. Wet wipes at the ready. Plastic bags to catch vomit. Notes with smiley faces in lunch bags.
In 2024 you will need to do big things. Cancer will require it. It has you driving your husband to the E.R. in the middle of the night while you’re on vacation, and it will keep coming up with new challenges. How to talk to your children about glioblastoma (“Don’t Google it!”). How to advocate for care that falls outside surgery and radiation and chemo and painkillers but is just as essential. How to keep the lights on when neither he, nor you, can work in the wake of his diagnosis and ongoing treatment.
You will find the small things you know you can do well: keeping a dedicated notebook of everything “cancer,” stowing travel toiletries at all times so you can stay at the hospital (and you will, for over a week) asking your parents to care for the kids and making sure they have their insurance cards and your son’s Epi Pens. You try to delegate the rest, like meals and housekeeping, to friends and family who want to help.
And looking back, it’s all these small things that supported the big things. The practice is in the small bits. You might have always known that. Maybe this is why you amused yourself in math class in middle school by listing outfits, in detail, you dreamt of wearing. Pages and pages in the back of your looseleaf, filled with descriptions that read like shopping guides at Benetton and The Limited.
Others may call it low-hanging fruit. Doing the easy stuff. Because you don’t get recognition or reverence for the small things. Glioblastoma is a big disease. You need to match it with big gestures. And that is how your husband has been facing it. Six weeks of daily radiation and chemo post surgery, followed by a year of monthly rounds of chemo that made him tired and turned eating into a chore. But he persisted; daily walks, exercise videos, and full days of remote work once those six weeks of daily treatment were over.
Heroism is what’s called in to fight cancer. It takes heroic efforts. You are not a hero in that sense. You are below Big Energy out there battling the disease at center stage. You’re in the wings of its performance. Running the power cables, securing the safety ropes, cueing the background.
You know people want to help. They always let you know. Sometimes they go ahead and do something without asking, and that is the best. It’s not always the actual thing that helps, but it’s the behavior. It’s them knowing you don’t have the time and bandwidth to manage the team of helpers. So when two boxes of Baked by Melissa cupcakes show up at your door, it’s not what you wanted or needed, but it will be exactly the right way to help.
And you will see that all the people who have come to help are there by design. A testament to the years you and your husband put in at work, and outside the office, to cultivate meaningful connections. Not through grand gestures, but in small ways: walks around the neighborhood, a coffee, a zoom venting session, a rant about the state of movies over text.
A thousand small points of light will illuminate the path to go where you are most needed.
I don’t mean to be unkind by calling these acts “small.” Unfortunately the toxic work culture our generation has grown into will perpetuate a hierarchy of labor that will relegate caregiving to the bottom rung. Even within the caregiving spectrum, there is an order of significance, when viewed from the outside.
I have to implore you to dismiss that.
As you meet other caregivers–and they will all be so additive to your journey–you will learn that from the inside, there is no structure of importance. It all matters. From keeping the bathroom stocked with toilet paper, to picking up his prescription refills, from managing appointments on the calendar, to getting on a reasonable payment plan, from arranging rides for the kids when you can’t do it, to giving up washing dishes because the way you rinse annoys him and he has the right to be annoyed by small things when he’s out there fighting the beast. It’s all caregiving. It all matters. It all adds up to be what sustains a family when cancer barges in.
When you launch your Substack in late 2025, writing from the intersection of care and creativity, it will be because you have gathered all these small bits of experience and realized how big an impact you could have on communities you’re a part of. The artist community. The caregiving world. The parenting group. The midlife diaspora.
Your instinct to reach out and take someone’s hand, to file their nails, to guide them across the street, to anticipate a radio-oncologist’s reading of a scan, is not low-hanging fruit. It is the root of kindness, where only good things can grow.
Love,
Future Liza (July 2026)
One last question to close the letter from Victoria.
Please share one quote/movie/book that’s inspired you.
I saw (the first, but not the chronologically first) Star Wars in 1977 and my creative self came online in that movie theatre. I knew I wanted to do that: write and direct films. Yes, all the special effects were awesome, but I was five, so I didn’t have a lot of context to understand how remarkable they were. What drew me in were the characters: they felt so real. They played off each other in such specific ways to their personalities. My biggest take-away was that humor was embedded in all the space drama, and I think that taught me that life is funny even when you need to save the galaxy.
Prompt for discussion:
What’s a small gesture that made a big impact in your caregiving life? It could be something you did, or an act of someone else.
Please like ‘❤️’ the article to guide others here.
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