Jasmine Garst

You know, the parents I spoke to who did this process of giving someone else emergency guardianship power told me it did make them feel some sort of security, like a sense of control in a world that they feel has gone out of control.

Yeah.

And it also, they also told me it felt like, okay, like some of my neighbors really are watching out for me.

The way one parent said it to me was, I'm not happy, but I'm relieved.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

It's not great, but it, you know...

That's one less thing to worry about if there is something to worry about.

Yeah, and a lot of parents describe that sense of, like, my community does care about me or my friend, my neighbor cares about me.

So at the end of the summer, I was working on a totally separate story in Washington, D.C., and I met a woman who confided in me that she had gotten that call, that she had signed on to be an emergency guardian.

I went to her home, this very lovely house in an upper-middle-class D.C.

neighborhood.

She says the phone rang one day, and it was her son's best friend's father.

She tells me this story as she offers me some freshly baked cookies, some milk.

Would you like oat milk or milk milk?

Milk milk.

This is like an American-American woman.

Yes, it was very like a different world.

She was extremely sweet and hospitable.

She asked that we not use her name.