There is a photograph Julia Burrowes does not keep on her desk, but might well exist somewhere in her memory: herself as a high school student, sitting beside a hospital bed, learning to be comfortable with silence. She was a hospice volunteer then, drawn by an instinct she could not yet name to the company of people at the end of their lives. Most teenagers spend their afternoons trying to escape the gravity of adult expectations. Burrowes was moving toward something heavier, more fundamental. She was learning, without quite knowing it, that the end of a life is not separate from the whole of it, that caring for someone in their final months is an act of attention to everything they have been.
It would be years before she discovered that gerontology existed as a formal discipline, a field of study with its own vocabulary and methods. But by the time she encountered it in college, the recognition was immediate. "I never had any doubt that this is what I was made to do," she says, and the phrasing is telling. Not what she wanted to do, or chose to do, but what she was made for. It suggests a kind of inevitability, the way a river finds its course.
Today, working from Charlotte, North Carolina, Burrowes describes herself as a gerontologist and pro-aging advocate, though these terms hardly capture the particular quality of her work. She is interested in something more fundamental than policy or practice alone: the question of how we might all travel well in the only direction time permits.
The work has not always been abstract. For a time, Burrowes served as a supervisor in home care services, managing a team of aides who visited the most vulnerable older adults in her community. The job had its administrative components, its paperwork and scheduling challenges, but what she remembers most vividly are the stories. Every day, she heard accounts of small dignities preserved: a client helped to bathe, to dress, to remain in the home they had lived in for forty years. And more than that, she witnessed something she describes as magical, the long-term relationships that formed between aides and clients, bonds that transcended the professional boundary between caregiver and cared-for.
"When a client calls and says 'I couldn't do this without you,' you know you are doing something right," Burrowes recalls. The observation seems simple, even obvious, but it points to a deeper truth about the nature of care work. We speak often of healthcare as a system, a set of institutions and protocols, but for Burrowes it is first and foremost a relationship. It is the accumulated weight of daily presence, the trust built through repeated acts of attention. An aide who arrives each morning becomes not just a service provider but a witness to a life, someone who knows how you take your coffee, which photographs matter most, who you have always been.
This understanding shapes Burrowes's approach to her field. Where others might see aging as a problem to be solved or a condition to be managed, she sees it as a shared human experience, something we are all moving through together. "At the end of the day, we are all aging, we are all in this together," she says. "I want to be a part of the network that makes it better for everyone." The language of networks and collective experience is characteristic. She does not position herself as an expert dispensing solutions from above, but as someone working alongside others to improve the journey for everyone.
Her advice to students and early-career professionals reflects this sensibility. Build a broad network, she suggests, not of people doing exactly what you do, but of people passionate about their own work, whatever it might be. "Their work may not directly intersect with your goals," she notes, "but surrounding yourself with passionate people will keep your own creativity and spark bright when things get hard." It is counsel born of experience, an acknowledgment that sustained commitment to difficult work requires more than expertise or determination. It requires community, inspiration, the example of others who have also found meaning in their labor.
When Burrowes speaks about the meaning of healthcare, she returns to the language of mutuality. "Healthcare is about helping each other," she says. "We all have the ability to provide care, and we will all need care, why not be invested in the greater good?" The formulation is deceptively simple. It collapses the distance between caregiver and recipient, suggesting that these are not fixed categories but temporary positions we all occupy at different moments. The young woman who once volunteered in hospice will one day require hospice herself. The aide who helps someone dress will someday need help dressing. To be invested in the greater good is to be invested in one's own future, and in the future of everyone we love.
Looking toward that future, Burrowes hopes for a healthcare system that is more equitable, one that breaks down barriers to access. But she is careful to note that access is not only about cost. "It's not just about the cost," she insists, "but the trust we should all hope to have in our healthcare systems." Trust is earned slowly and lost quickly. It requires consistency, transparency, the demonstrated commitment to put patient welfare above convenience. For communities that have been historically underserved or mistreated by medical institutions, trust is not a given but an achievement, something that must be rebuilt through years of reliable care.
This is the work Burrowes has committed herself to: the slow, patient labor of building systems and relationships that honor the full arc of human life. She began as a teenager who felt drawn to the company of older adults, who found in their presence something she needed even if she could not articulate what it was. She has also become someone who thinks carefully about how we might all age with dignity, supported by networks of care that recognize our common vulnerability and our common strength.
In a culture that often treats aging as decline, as a "falling away" from the vitality of youth, Burrowes offers a different vision. She suggests that aging is not something that happens to us but something we do, a process we can shape through attention and care, through the relationships we build and the systems we create. She has spent her career learning how to be present to people in their later years, and in doing so, she has learned how to think about what all our later years might become.
The teenager in the hospice ward could not have known where that early impulse would lead. But looking back, the path has a certain serendipity. From those first encounters with mortality to her current work advocating for better systems of care, Burrowes has been guided by a consistent conviction: that how we treat the most vulnerable among us reveals who we are, and that we can choose to be better. It is not a small ambition. It is, in fact, the work of a lifetime.
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