What would you sacrifice if the person who needed you most had no one else left? Not for a week, not for a season — but for eighteen years, without a real break, without a plan B, and without anyone asking if you were okay?
When I sat down with Monique Washington at a diner on East Baltimore Street in early March 2026, she had just come off a six-day UPS delivery route. Her coffee went cold while she talked. She didn’t seem to notice.
The Weight She Carries Without a Title
Monique Washington is 43 years old, a unionized UPS driver earning approximately $78,000 a year — solid wages by most measures. But she is also the sole caregiver for her brother Darnell, who was 25 when a car accident left him with a traumatic brain injury and permanent physical limitations. Their parents have both passed. There is no one else.
Darnell receives Supplemental Security Income. In 2026, the maximum federal SSI benefit is $967 per month, according to the Social Security Administration. That’s $11,604 annually — an amount that covers basic living but leaves a significant gap when it comes to adaptive transportation, specialized medical supplies, and the kind of daily assistance that Medicaid either doesn’t fund or funds inconsistently.
Monique fills that gap herself. She estimates she spent roughly $16,000 out of pocket in 2025 on Darnell’s supplemental care — respite aides when she’s on shift, a wheelchair-accessible vehicle modification payment plan, compression medical supplies, and co-pays Medicaid denies.
“I never even thought to ask the IRS for anything,” she told me, half-laughing. “My parents handled the taxes. Then they were gone. I’ve just been filing the same way every year, single filer, standard deduction. Nobody ever told me I had options.”
The Filing That Was Different
For the 2025 tax year, Monique filed her federal return on February 3, 2026, using tax preparation software for the first time. A coworker — a driver who’d taken a community college tax prep course — told her she might qualify to claim Darnell as a qualifying relative dependent under IRS rules.
The IRS allows taxpayers to claim a qualifying relative if, among other criteria, the filer provided more than half of that person’s total support during the tax year. Because Darnell’s SSI income is $11,604 annually and Monique contributed an estimated $16,000 in direct care costs — and covers his rent as well — her total support contribution exceeded the threshold.
Once Darnell was established as a dependent, Monique also itemized medical expenses on Schedule A. The IRS permits deducting qualifying medical expenses that exceed 7.5% of adjusted gross income. On her $78,000 income, that threshold was $5,850. She had documented receipts totaling just over $14,200 in eligible medical costs for Darnell — netting her approximately $8,350 in deductible medical expenses above the floor.
“I had a shoebox of receipts I kept because my mom always said to keep them,” Monique said. “I had no idea they were actually going to mean something.”
Thirty-One Days of Watching That Screen
The IRS’s Where’s My Refund tool became something of an obsession for Monique over those weeks. She checked it most mornings before her 5 a.m. shift started. The refund she was expecting — $2,847 — wasn’t life-changing on its own. But it represented the first time in nearly two decades that any system had acknowledged what she was doing.
“It’s not that the money solves anything,” she told me carefully. “Darnell needs a new shower chair that costs $400. The van payment is $380 a month. The refund helps with that, but it’s gone in a week. What it meant to me was different from what it actually does.”
The refund did arrive on March 6, 2026 — exactly 31 days after filing. The IRS generally issues most electronic refunds within 21 days, but returns with itemized deductions can take longer to process, particularly when dependent claims are being verified. Monique’s return fell just outside that typical window.
She didn’t panic when it stretched past 21 days. She had a coworker warn her that complex returns could run long. But she did call the IRS helpline on day 24, waited 47 minutes on hold, and was told simply that her return was still in process with no issues flagged. Two days later, the status on “Where’s My Refund” flipped to “Refund Sent.”
The Costs That a Refund Cannot Reach
The harder part of my conversation with Monique wasn’t the tax mechanics. It was listening to her describe what the past six years have cost her that no form accounts for. She hasn’t taken a real vacation since 2019. She turned down a shift supervisor role at UPS — more pay, better hours — because it would have required occasional overnight travel she couldn’t plan around Darnell’s care schedule.
“People assume that because I have a union job and I’m not on assistance, I’m fine,” she said, and her voice shifted slightly — not to anger, but to something more tired. “I’m not not-fine. But I’m also not saving anything. I’m just holding the line.”
When I asked what she wished she had known earlier — about taxes, about caregiver support — she paused for a long time.
She’s not wrong that the system is hard to navigate. The IRS’s rules around caregiver dependents, the medical expense deduction threshold, and documentation requirements are buried across multiple publications. The average filer relying on the standard deduction would have no reason to dig into them — and without a specific prompt, many caregivers like Monique simply don’t.
What She Plans to Do Differently Next Year
When I asked about her plans for the 2026 tax year, Monique was pragmatic. She’s keeping a running folder — not a shoebox — for all of Darnell’s qualifying expenses. She found out mid-March that she may also qualify to deduct a portion of her home as a care-related expense, but she wants to speak with a certified tax professional before claiming anything she isn’t sure about.
- She is tracking all adaptive transportation costs separately, as these may qualify as medical transportation expenses under IRS guidelines
- She is logging respite aide payments with names, dates, and dollar amounts in case of an audit
- She plans to consult a CPA before next January — a cost she acknowledges she avoided for years because it felt like one more expense
The $2,847 refund she received in March has already been largely allocated — $400 for the shower chair, $380 toward the van payment, roughly $900 set aside for Darnell’s next Medicaid-denied supply order. The remaining amount, she said, she put into her savings account “just to see the number be something other than zero for a few weeks.”
Driving back across Baltimore that afternoon, I kept thinking about the phrase she used — holding the line. It’s a military expression, built for situations where retreat isn’t an option and reinforcements aren’t coming. Monique Washington has been holding that line for eighteen years. A $2,847 tax refund, arriving 31 days after a February filing, doesn’t change that arithmetic. But it told her something small and real: that what she does counts as something, somewhere, to someone keeping records.
That, she told me, was worth more than the number on the deposit.
Related: After 32 Years at USPS, She Retired Comfortably — Then Her Husband’s Death Changed Everything
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