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This post is inspired by a question I received the other day on my Facebook page about my podcast. (So many mediums to find me!) Anyway, this reader asked about her mother, who constantly wants to visit and call her own parents. My reader is distraught by how frustrated her mother is—“Why don’t they ever visit or call me?”—and doesn’t know what to tell her. I completely understand, and I have a solution based on something I actually did years ago.
About three years ago, I was working at a dementia care community and sitting in my office when one of my residents approached. “Hey hun,” Renata started. “Can you help me with something?”
“Of course,” I smiled. “What’s up?”
“Well,” Renata paused. “I…haven’t heard from my son in a while…do you think I could use your phone to call him?”
Damn it, I thought. Renata’s son had died a couple years earlier. Certainly, I did not want to remind her of this awful fact, but how could I help her? She was asking me a very direct question with a very obvious solution. I thought quickly and responded, “Sure!”
I picked up my office phone and dialed my cell phone’s number. I waited until it rang a few times and heard the start of my voicemail, “Hi, you’ve reached Rachael Wonderlin…” and turned to Renata. “It’s going to voicemail,” I said. “Would you like to leave him a message?”
“Oh yes,” she said, accepting the phone. “Hi Lenny, it’s your mother…I hope you’re doing well, just wanted to check in with you. Please call me back soon and let me know how you’re feeling.”
She hung up and handed the phone back to me. “Thanks, hun,” she said, sighing lightly. “I feel a little bit better.”
Renata never asked about calling her son again. Instead of solving the FACTUAL problem—whether or not she could actually reach this man—I solved the emotional one.
2 thoughts on “How to call someone who isn’t alive anymore”
This was a situation that I encountered when I was the Director of a Memory Care Unit. We had a resident who would ask to speak to her deceased husband. I had a list of 10 of the male staff at the community. I had spoken to each one and shared with them information about this resident. When this resident would ask to speak to her husband we would call one of the men on the list. All the men fully embraced this and enjoyed being part of “embracing this resident’s reality”!
Love that, Gwen!