Why I Built TwixTalk: A Family Story

I am the oldest of four brothers and part of the Sandwich Generation, the people caught between raising their own families and caring for aging parents. When my parents, Ted and Mary, began to need more from us in their later years, the role of keeping everyone informed fell to me and my wife the way it falls to most families: not through any conversation or decision, but through the quiet accumulation of moments where we were the ones who answered, followed up, and knew what was happening next. We did not choose to become the Loop Keepers for our family. We just were.

Both of my parents lived with dementia. They lived long lives, full of faith and love and generosity, and their final years required everything from us. Doctor appointments. Hospital visits. Rehab stays. Medication changes. Decisions that nobody trains you to make and that have to be made anyway, under pressure, with incomplete information, in hallways outside rooms where someone you love is waiting for you to come back in and tell them it is going to be okay.

Through all of it, my wife was extraordinary. She took notes at every appointment. She tracked down doctors. She kept records that would have otherwise existed only in our heads. She did this not because it was her job but because she understood, the way Loop Keepers always understand, that if she did not do it nobody would.

And still, every day brought the same question from siblings, extended family, and close friends who loved my parents and needed to know how they were. We tried group texts. Shared documents. Phone calls that ran long because the person on the other end needed more than a summary and I did not have more than a summary left to give. The information always lagged behind reality. Details slipped. During hospital stays the urgency sharpened into something harder to manage, and I was often too depleted at the end of a long day to tell the story one more time with the care it deserved.

There was no single place where everyone could go to know what was true right now. There was only me, and my wife, and a phone that did not stop, and the growing awareness that the communication piece of this was breaking us in ways the rest of it was not.

That is when I started looking for something that could help. I looked for a long time. I did not find it. And so I built it.

I am a former CIO with decades of software development behind me. Building things is what I do. But I want to be clear about what drove this one. It was not a market opportunity I identified. It was a Tuesday night after a long day at the hospital, sitting at my kitchen table, too tired to make one more call, knowing my brother was going to call in the morning and I was going to have to tell it all again. It was the specific, quiet grief of being the person who holds everything and having nowhere to put it down.

TwixTalk exists because I lived the problem it solves. I know what it costs to be the one everyone calls. I know what it feels like to repeat the same update until the words stop meaning anything. I know what my wife gave to those years, and I know that no family should have to give that much to the communication piece of something that is already hard enough.

If you are reading this, you probably know it too. You are probably the Loop Keeper for someone you love, managing the information and the calls and the updates while also trying to be present for the person at the center of it all. TwixTalk was built for you, by someone who was you, not so long ago.

Ted and Mary deserved to have their family around them in those final years. They did. And I am grateful for every moment of it. I just wish the communication had been easier. That wish is the whole reason this exists.