Why does my mom with dementia call me over and over?

My own mother calls me more than 30 times a day, so when I write about this I am not summarizing an article I read. I am describing my afternoon. I wrote a practical companion piece about what helped and what did not; this one goes deeper into the why, because I have found that understanding the why is what finally softens the anger and the guilt.

The loop underneath the calls

Here is the shape of it, as our family lived it. A worry rises in her: something about the door, the pills, the time, or nothing she can name. She calls. Your voice arrives, and for a few minutes the worry lets go of her. Then dementia does what dementia does: the memory of the call dissolves. But the worry was not stored in the same place as the memory, so it stays. A little while later the fear rises again, whole and fresh, and she reaches for the phone, because the phone is the thing that worked.

Caregivers and the Alzheimer's Association describe this repetition the same way: the person is seeking comfort, security, or familiarity, and cannot remember they have already asked. What I would add from the inside of it is the part that changed me: the feeling of a moment seems to outlast the facts of the moment. She forgets that we spoke. She does not forget that I am her safe place. So the reaching continues, aimed at you, precisely because your voice works.

Why the phone, of all things

Of everything in her house, the phone is the one tool that still does what it has done her whole life. Appliances change, remotes multiply, screens ask for passwords. The phone stays simple: press the buttons that mean you, and you appear. My mom has dialed my number so many thousands of times that I doubt the dialing even passes through thought anymore. It is muscle memory shaped like love.

That is worth sitting with, because it reframes the ringing. The calls are not a malfunction. They are the last, most practiced path between her fear and her comfort. When the rest of the world becomes foggy and unreliable, the path she keeps is the path to you.

There is a tenderness hidden in that, if you can bear to see it on a hard day: of all the things dementia has taken from my mother, the way to reach me is one of the things it has not managed to take. Her fingers still know the shape of my number. I have learned to hold the ringing and that fact in the same hand.

Why it is you she calls

If you are the one whose phone rings 30 times while a sibling's rings twice, you have probably asked, in your worst moments, why me. Here is the answer I landed on: you are not the person she trusts least with her fear. You are the person she trusts most.

Attachment does not dissolve with memory. Long after the day's details slip, she knows exactly whose voice makes the fear stop. In our family that was me, the daughter who had answered the hospitals and the doctors and the 7am updates for years. The calls concentrated on me because the trust concentrated on me. It is a heavy honor. It is still an honor.

What makes the calling heavier

Some days hold 30 calls and some hold 50, and over the years I noticed a few things that turned the volume up:

• ·An unresolved worry that keeps resurfacing, because the worry outlives every reassurance
• ·Changes: a new room, a new schedule, a missed routine, an unfamiliar voice in the house
• ·Long stretches alone, when the phone is the only company within reach
• ·Hard evenings, when the day's tiredness and the fading light seem to feed the fear; I wrote separately about sundowning and evening phone calls
• ·And your own absence, felt but not understood: a business trip, a meeting, a night you finally slept

None of these are anyone's fault. They are weather. Knowing the weather helped me stop blaming her, and stop blaming myself. It also helped me plan: if a hard evening or a disrupted week reliably brings more calls, then those are the hours to have coverage ready, whether that coverage is a sibling, a kind neighbor, or a voice like mine that does not sleep.

What helps, in our house

I will not promise any of this reduces the number of calls, because in our family the number has stayed stubborn. What changed is what the calls cost her, and what they cost me.

• ·Answer the feeling, not the fact. "Did you eat yet?" and "where are you?" are usually one question: am I safe, am I loved. Answer that one.
• ·Keep it short, warm, and repeatable. A ninety-second call she can have often beats a twenty-minute call you can only survive once.
• ·Do not correct her about the earlier calls. To her they did not happen. The correction adds shame and subtracts nothing.
• ·Lower the day's temperature where you can: steady routines, familiar rooms, fewer surprises.
• ·Share the ringing. Siblings, cousins, a trusted friend on rotation. One phone number should not be the only shape love comes in.
• ·And decide, honestly, what happens when no one can pick up. This is the question I could not solve by trying harder, and the one I finally built Everline to answer: her calls are met on the first ring, in my own voice, in Vietnamese, with the same warmth at the fortieth call as at the first. How that works, and the care philosophy behind it, is on our methodology page.

What the calls are not

They are not manipulation. They are not evidence that you have spoiled her, or that you answer too much, or too little. And your dread of the ringing is not evidence that you love her less; I wrote a whole letter about that guilt in Caregiver burnout from constant phone calls, because it deserves more than a paragraph.

The calls are one thing only: a frightened person using the last reliable tool she has to reach the person she trusts most. Seen that way, the hundredth ring is still exhausting. But it stopped feeling like an accusation, and started feeling like what it is. She is not calling to take something from me. She is calling because, in the fog, I am still the landmark.

The question under the question

Why does my mom with dementia call me over and over? Because she loves you, and because the illness will not let her keep the comfort you keep giving her. Neither of you chose this loop. You are allowed to need help carrying it: other family, gentler routines, and yes, if it fits your family's values, a voice like yours that can answer when you cannot. Whatever you choose, choose it as someone who plans to be there for years. That means the person answering the phone has to last too.