Jane Bernstein's essay, "Taking Care," explores the emotional difficulties of living with someone with a serious disability-in this case, her daughter, Rachel, who is mentally retarded, and her uncle, Ben, who has Alzheimer's disease. The idea for the essay came to her one evening at a family party, during which she listened to her cousin describe what it was like to live with Ben.

"I was sitting on my steps, listening and thinking, 'Sounds like Rachel,'" Bernstein says. "I may have even said that. I talked often to my cousins over the next few weeks because I was deeply upset about Ben. I never intended to write about my uncle. I had absolutely no thoughts about shaping this unhappy family story for strangers."

How did Bernstein manage to write about such an emotionally loaded subject? She could only do it after time had passed-and after she was required to take a trip away from her own family as well.

"About two months after my cousins visited me, I had to go to New York," she says. "I was in the car, about a mile from my house, when I started to think about Ben and my daughter. Clearly I needed the distance, but still it strikes me as kind of funny that I needed not only for time to pass but some physical distance from my home."

As she began to write, Bernstein tried to interweave the two voices speaking at once in her head-Rachel's and Ben's. "The challenge for me was to tell my daughter's story and Ben's story, without one overpowering the other."

Bernstein interweaves Rachel's and Ben's voices by making them echo each other. Rachel repeats, "May I have an apple?" while Ben asks, over and over, "Where's Rose?" We hear the tension and frustration these echoes create in the essay's narrative voice, and it's this tension, combined with the language, Bernstein says, that drives the story.

"The one thing that does please me is the cadence of the piece and the way I was able to weave together my daughter's chants and my uncle's chants," Bernstein says.

Still, Bernstein relied upon the traditional fictional techniques of scene and dialogue. "Scenes are the showing parts of the story, and the nonfiction I write tends to be about families, where the issues must be played out or shown to be understood."