What to say on the phone when your parent has memory loss

Stop asking questions that have a right answer

Most calls open with a small quiz. Did you eat. Who came today. Do you know who this is. Every one of those asks your parent to produce a fact on demand, and producing facts on demand is the exact thing that has become hard. When the fact does not arrive, both of you hear it not arrive.

Families who find the call easier have usually stopped asking and started telling. A statement asks for nothing and can simply be agreed with, so your parent can take part in the conversation without having to retrieve anything.

• Instead of "do you remember Rahul", try "Rahul called me yesterday, he sounded happy".
• Instead of "what did you eat", try "I had khichdi for lunch, it was too salty".
• Instead of "do you know who this is", say your own name in the first sentence, every time.

Say your name first, and say it warmly

Saying your own name at the start of a call feels strange for about a week and then it becomes the kindest part of it. It removes the one question your parent was most afraid of failing, before they have to face it.

Tone matters more than the words. "Ma, it is Priya" said warmly is an arrival. The same words said carefully, in the voice people use for somebody who is unwell, is a reminder that something is wrong. Your ordinary voice is the one they know.

Let the same things repeat

A repeated question is not a failure of the conversation. It is often the safest thing in it: your parent has found a subject they can hold, and they are returning to it. Answering it the same way the fourth time, in the same tone, costs you very little and it keeps them in the room with you.

Correcting is the instinct and it rarely helps. If your mother says your father is coming home this evening and he died six years ago, the correction lands as fresh news of a death. Most families learn to answer the feeling rather than the fact, and to move gently to something next door to it, like what he was like when he was late.

Keep it short, and keep it often

Long calls are harder than frequent ones. Attention gets thin quickly, and a call that runs past that point usually ends in a tired, flattened silence that both of you then carry for the rest of the day.

Four minutes at a good hour beats twenty at a bad one. If you can only manage one, take the morning. Most families find the earlier part of the day is when their parent sounds most like themselves, and that it gets harder as the light goes.

When the call goes badly anyway

Some calls will go badly and it will not be because you did anything wrong. Poor sleep, a noisy room, an infection, a hard afternoon, any of these can take away the person who was there on Tuesday. The call is still worth making on Wednesday.

What stays, long after the details of a conversation have gone, is the feeling that somebody familiar was just here. Families notice their parent repeating a fragment of a call to a neighbour hours later with no memory of who said it. That fragment is what the call was for.

Where else to look

These are other people’s pages, not ours. Our own published work and the neurologist who reviews it are on the research page.

• Cultural adaptation of Alzheimer’s disease assessment scale-cognitive subscale for use in India and validation of the Tamil version for South Indian population.
  The cultural adaptation of the same questionnaire for use in India.
• Hindi Version of Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination III: Distinguishing Cognitive Impairment Among Older Indians at the Lower Cut-Offs.
  A Hindi memory questionnaire validated for older adults in India.
• Alzheimer’s and Dementia Support, India
  The Alzheimer’s Association’s own pages for families in India.