From Hallmark Star to Caregiver to Advocate: Actress Nikki DeLoach Shares Her Emotional Journey (EXCLUSIVE)
‘We think we are burdening people with our cries for help, but actually we’re giving people a gift’
As one of the Hallmark Channel’s most beloved stars, Nikki DeLoach knows a thing or two about embracing life’s comforts and joys, but offscreen she’s fought her share of devastating battles, and has worked hard to find positivity in the most trying moments.
“In 2017, my dad got diagnosed with Pick’s disease, which is a rare and aggressive form of dementia, and that same week I found out that my baby that I was carrying had multiple congenital heart defects and without immediate intervention at birth, he would not survive,” DeLoach says. “My life got turned upside down. I didn’t know how to ask for help. I didn’t know how to take care of myself. I was like every other woman out there who was like, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ I had to make sure that everyone survived while I was dying.”
In her day-to-day life, DeLoach balanced caring for her infant son as he underwent surgeries while also caring for her declining father in any way she could. In a therapy session, she had a life-changing epiphany: “The therapist looked at me and said, ‘You’re taking care of all these people, but who’s taking care of you?’ My answer to him was ‘No one.’”
The power of simple questions
“No one is asking the caregiver, ‘Hey, have you eaten today? Can I get you something to eat?’ No one is asking the caregiver, ‘Hey, how are you feeling today? Is there something I can do for you? Is there something I can take off your plate?’ Nobody is doing that,” she says. “We have to train the people in our lives. We have to teach them how to show up for us, and we also have to be the ones that are going to save ourselves. We have to stop being martyrs in the journey of caregiving. We have to learn how to also take care of ourselves while we’re taking care of other people, and a giant part of that is learning how to ask for help.”
“The hardest thing that I ever learned how to do was asking for help when I needed it,” DeLoach says emphatically. “What I put my body and my mind and my soul through—I’m still recovering years later. Because it was so bad, and I had no tools to care for myself, I had a parasympathetic collapse. I had to really think long and hard about how I was going to move forward and what I needed to do for myself to begin. I realized nobody was coming to save me. I had to save myself.”
Nikki DeLoach’s passion for advocacy
Today, DeLoach strives to provide the type of resources she wished she had during her darkest hour, as she’s a spokesperson for the Alzheimer’s Association and the President of the Foundation Board of Trustees at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, the hospital that treated her son. She is also a board member for Mind What Matters, an organization dedicated to caregiver support, and she cohosts their podcast of the same name. “We are speaking directly to caregivers,” she says. “It is back-breaking work, but together in this community, we need to hold ourselves up, lift each other up and keep putting one foot in front of the other, because the one thing we will never do is abandon the people that we love.”
“We need to be realistic,” she continues. “We’re never going to put the oxygen mask on ourselves before we put it on our children, but there are things that we could do immediately after we put that oxygen mask on our children. There are foundational basic things that we can do for our spiritual, emotional, mental and physical health. If we don’t do them, we will go down with the ship.” she says, citing “preserving my sleep with everything that I have” as one of the most crucial practices she maintains.
How Hallmark helps to heal
DeLoach sees a connection between her Hallmark work and her experience as a caregiver. She was proud to star in two movies about grief, Five More Minutes and The Gift of Peace, after her dad passed away in 2021. She recalls, “I couldn’t find the joy, and I felt like I was in quicksand every day. Those movies taught me the gift and the power of sharing my grief with other people, and not living in isolation. They got me unstuck. Art imitates life, life imitates art. Those were two movies where my life was very much inside of that art.”
She also observes, “A majority of our Hallmark audience is caregivers and first responders. I can walk into any hospital from the East Coast to the West Coast, and I can guarantee that most of those nurses and doctors will know who I am because they watch Hallmark.” “Everything I do has the foundational messaging of hope,” she says, and she sees her Hallmark movies as a source of solace for overburdened caregivers. “There is a community for you to lean into, for you to share both the joy and celebration and the sadness and despair.”
Finding hope through community has been crucial to DeLoach’s caretaking journey. “If there’s any message I can send, it’s that we think we are burdening people with our cries for help, but actually we’re giving people a gift,” she says. “People want to show up for you and be of service, they just don’t know what to do and they don’t know how to help, so they’re waiting for somebody to wave that white flag and say, ‘I surrender. Can you please help me?’”
By learning how to ask for help, DeLoach became a better caretaker, and while her father is no longer around, she carries his spirit through her work as both an actress and an activist.
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