In April, my 92-year-old mother died, nearly 10 years after suffering a stroke that had her come under my full-time care for more than nine years. Some readers may recall some of the columns I’ve done about my caregiver role and the five cross-country moves my mother and I made attempting to find a place that mostly worked for most everybody.

So, when friends received the news of my mother’s death, a fair number of them said “now you can get YOUR life back!”

After being told by some for years that attempting to be the Joan of Arc of Caregiving was not glamorous, and after acknowledging that I had considered more than once just what “my own life” might resemble after so many years, I thought a lot about what people think about providing often indescribably exhausting care for more than a few months. Care that definitely can take a very great something away from one’s “life.” I also thought about what makes some not want to provide care, no matter the circumstances. Which is remarkable given that 70 percent of Americans turning 65 will develop a long-term care need before they die, according to a 2019 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report.

I guess I was “lucky” when I very unexpectedly became a caregiver, as I was single, childless, and in a better life/work position to do so than my two brothers. And for many others facing similar situations. When my mother had her June 2014 stroke, I sped out of St. Paul to live in her Arizona home and supervise her therapy. I felt it was my duty to do so, but my brothers and I also didn’t want to place her into assisted living just yet. A few months later, I brought her back to Minnesota, where I had spent most of my adult life. Quite a few people said I should have put her in assisted living and that I also should have sheltered her money so that if I ever wised up, Medicaid would pay for the care. As was the case for their parents. OK.

The first three years weren’t too bad, as my mother could still do quite a lot. What was probably too much sacrifice on my part was acceding to her wish to make two moves within those three years — one back to Arizona to be near my brothers and try to reclaim her pre-stroke life, the next to my Milwaukee hometown, which no longer felt much like home after my having been away for decades. As such, I brought both of us back to Arizona from St. Paul in early 2020 following the unexpected death of one of my brothers, the onset of the pandemic of then unknown severity, and the signed promise of help from my remaining brother, who said seasonal service to Minneapolis-St. Paul was available out of Tucson’s easily navigable airport. When I could take a break. A number of friends who said the pope should saint me (which seemed as nuts as being called stupid or nuts) were happy I finally made a decision that, tough as it was, might finally work for everyone.

When my mother deteriorated to the point where long-term-care facility hospice was necessary, there were a few people who thought me negligent and said I should haul out the wallet or take out loans to have round-the-clock home care. Once she was in the first of the two facilities she lived in, I really (really) saw the problems of a rapidly aging population in a country that doesn’t provide reliably quality care on a nationwide basis, at home or in care facilities, without individuals or the government going broke. Or nuts. Along with the spectrum of what people do or do not do as caregivers. This included many adult children who almost never visited, and when they did, screamed indecently about the rotten care provided (including one couple who lived in Maine, visited once a year, and told me I was nuts to be there daily to make sure my mother had a sponge bath or shower while paying $8,000 per month). There were spouses and adult children who mostly moved in and took over, without paying and without nursing staff approval. Then there were the nursing staff who were, for the most part, far too overworked, underpaid and under-appreciated to provide consistently quality care.

Those long-term-care facility horror issue stories you’ve heard? Not all of them are wild exaggerations. I started thinking I wasn’t crazy to keep my mother out of a facility for more than nine years.

Since my mother died, some who called me stupid or a modern-day saint asked if I’d do everything all over again. I would, save those two unsuccessful moves. I hesitate to say this, but I now believe that not putting yourself first doesn’t help you as a caregiver. And I should have taken more than one week of vacation per year. But I’ve asked some of these people what they might do if their parent or spouse needs full-time care from someone. I’ve gotten very curious answers, many of them revolving around caregiving while not “losing” their own lives.

And that’s the matter vexing millions of caregivers, current and future. I only hope that one day, someone, or some group, or some government will do something to not only significantly improve the quality of care in long-term care facilities and make it easier for people who decide to provide care at home, but also foster more nuanced caregiving attitudes. It’s an enormous task. Even a 21st century Joan of Arc probably can’t do it alone.

Until then, I’m going to try to get at least some of my life back (something even my mother endorsed). Once I figure out what that means.

I do hope some of it involves getting back to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport soon enough.

Mary Stanik is a writer and a former St. Paul resident now living in Tucson, Ariz.

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It’s hard to imagine a clearer violation of journalistic ethics than pretending to hold beliefs you don’t, asking Supreme Court justices if they agree, and surreptitiously recording their answers at a no-media dinner. The novelty of the stunt, however, shouldn’t distract us from the real takeaway, which is precisely that the recordings yielded nothing we didn’t already know.

The key conclusions are that Justice Samuel Alito is a religious man; his wife Martha-Ann likes political flags; and Chief Justice John Roberts is genuinely committed to the (somewhat unrealistic) idea that only elected officials — not judges — should make moral decisions.

The recording was obtained by liberal documentarian Lauren Windsor at the annual dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society, itself a rather misunderstood event. As someone who’s been to the dinner (I was the speaker one year after writing a book on Supreme Court history) let me try to set the scene.

The dinner is a reasonably accessible way for a non-billionaire to hobnob with the justices: Anyone who buys a $500 ticket can attend, which is how Windsor got in. That might sound like a lot of money, but it’s less than many non-rich people pay to go to sporting events or Taylor Swift concerts.

Yet the dinner feels elite. The dress code is black tie. The cause — supporting the society’s work on the history of the court — is worthy, but niche. And the dinner, which is supposed to be off the record, takes place in the great hall of the Supreme Court building, all marble and very grand.

The key point is that, at the dinner, the justices are comfortably at home (it’s their office, after all). They are also, to a degree, the effective hosts of the event. They seem relaxed and friendly, and they get to be real people. Or at least, they used to — now they will have to know they can be recorded by their guests.

Windsor’s recordings show the justices as the familiar figures we know. She got Justice Alito to say that in contemporary America, “there can be … a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult … because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.” Um, yes? That statement seems incontrovertibly true.

The false-flag journalist then insisted that people who believe in God must “keep fighting … to return our country to a place of godliness.” Alito agreed. Although godliness here is left vague, it’s hard to imagine a genuinely God-fearing person answering otherwise.

As for Mrs. Alito, she of the scores of flags flown at two homes, the most the provocateur could get was that she had been considering flying a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag to respond to a Pride flag in her neighborhood during June — but that her husband had asked her “Oh please, don’t put up a flag.” The exchange appeared to confirm Alito’s letter to two senators in which he essentially said (in the chastened tones of a beleaguered husband) that his wife likes flying flags and all he can do is ask her not to.

As for Roberts, the chief responded to Windsor’s prompts by giving his patented mini-lecture about how justices are just lawyers who shouldn’t take moral right and wrong into account. He also firmly rejected the suggestion that the U.S. is a Christian nation and that the justices should be guided by that idea.

Those were great messages, ones Roberts deeply believes. They certainly echoed his famous comparison of a judge to an umpire whose only job is to call balls and strikes.

But before jumping to the conclusion that Roberts’ answers make Alito’s look bad, notice the limits of the idea that morality has no role in judicial decision-making. It’s hard to see how a court could make decisions about racial equality or abortion rights or gun control without taking some kind of moral stand. Justices Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were great, morally driven advocates for equality who carried their moral values into their Supreme Court service. Even Justice Neil Gorsuch, a non-moral textualist by his own account, is clearly morally motivated in Indian law cases by the profound injustices done to the tribes over centuries. That seems praiseworthy, at least to me.

Justices are human beings, not machines. We should allow them to be humans, even at social events. And we should grow out of the fantasy of justices as perfectly impartial automatons free of human fallibility.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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In 2015, Pete Docter and Pixar gave us all a handy and fun visual metaphor to talk about how our emotions function in our day-to-day lives and in how we develop as people. Many a GIF and reaction meme were born with “Inside Out,” which provided a visual shorthand for expressing our strongest emotions through the story of Riley, a young girl from Minnesota who experiences a whole range as she moves with her family to San Francisco. It all becomes especially tumultuous when Joy (Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis Smith) accidentally disrupt the transmission of core memories and have to journey through Riley’s mind to stabilize the system.

Nine years later, in “Inside Out 2,” Riley’s (Kensington Tallman) emotions, which also includes Anger (Lewis Black), Fear (now voiced by Tony Hale) and Disgust (Liza Lapira, replacing Mindy Kaling), have found a comfortable stasis, coexisting in a harmony that has resulted in a strong sense of self. That “sense of self” is visualized in the film by a delicate, flower-like structure that grows from a pool of core memories. From each memory grows a glowing strand of a belief system that can be plucked like a guitar string, resonating with a belief or mantra like, “I’m kind,” which results in the belief system “I’m a good person.”

Joy has been carefully tending this belief system, chucking Riley’s bad memories to the back of her mind, creating a happy-go-lucky kid who is totally ill-equipped for what’s coming: puberty. In “Inside Out 2,” directed by Kelsey Mann, written by Mann, Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein, everything is upended by puberty’s surprising arrival, along with a group of new, more complex emotions. HQ is demolished to make room for Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) and the new emotion in charge, Anxiety (Maya Hawke).

They burst into Riley’s brain on the eve of high school, and the morning of a three-day hockey skills camp she’s attending with her friends Bree (Sumayyah Nuriddin-Green) and Grace (Grace Lu). With Anxiety at the wheel, determined to build a new Riley in order to keep her safe, the plot of “Inside Out 2” is essentially “Riley has a panic attack at hockey camp,” but of course there’s so much more going on internally, which is the real story of the film. Once again, Joy has to go on a journey through Riley’s brain, this time to save her sense of self; once again, Joy has to learn that Riley has to experience and navigate every emotion, including these new, thornier ones, in order to be a whole person.

Once again there’s a nagging sense that’s something’s missing: where’s Logic? Reason? Rationality? As each emotion takes a turn at the console controlling what’s going on in Riley’s head, it’s clear that she’s not in charge at all, which doesn’t entirely make sense for a newly minted teenager, pubescent or not. The bored, French cool girl Ennui takes charge when it comes to the more intellectual issues, such as hitting the sarcasm button to overcorrect an embarrassing moment (as she does so, it opens a “sar-chasm” in the Stream of Consciousness, part of the film’s signature wordplay).

One has to put these questions aside in order to fully enjoy “Inside Out 2,” though it is rather entertaining, diverting enough, especially with the new characters, who steal the show. Hawke and Edebiri deliver the best vocal performances as the tightly wound Anxiety and Envy, dueling demonic twins, and Exarchopoulos is inspired casting. There’s also a fun sequence with a few new characters who are found in the vault in Riley’s head, a crush on a video game character, Lance, and Bloofy (Ron Funches) a cartoon dog from a show aimed at preschoolers, who are legitimately funny and offer the animators a chance to play with character design and style. These characters are also vastly underused.

The new emotion character design is creative and fun, especially Anxiety (Embarrassment and Ennui seem to be nods to the 1980s language-learning cartoon “Muzzy”) while the human/“real world” design is par for the Pixar course: hard, shiny and photo-realistic in certain moments. It makes you wonder if this would be better served as depicted with real actors in a live-action format.

As Riley grows up in “Inside Out 2” the metaphor is stretched to its limits, unfairly rendering her a quivering mess ruled entirely by emotions. The visual representation of how emotions and memories create a belief system and sense of self are indeed useful for talking to kids about how their inner lives and brains work, and the imagery is smart and creative, but it has the feeling of an educational children’s book. The film’s internal logic tests our own belief systems, and fails to impart anything profoundly insightful to an adult audience.

‘Inside Out 2’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG (for some thematic elements)

Running time: 1:36

How to watch: In theaters June 14

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The Minnesota Aurora beat Rochester FC 3-0 on Thursday to stay on top of the Heartland Division with 17 points. Sophie French, Saige Wimes and Katie Duong each scored for the Aurora.

French’s fourth goal of the season came in the 31st minute to open the scoring. She becomes the fifth Aurora player with 10 career goals.

After Cat Rapp intercepted a pass for Minnesota, she passed to Wimes for a goal in the 57th minute. Wimes had a goal and assist.

Duong finished the scoring late, capitalizing on a free kick from 35 yards out.

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