When your parent asks for someone who has died

Do not tell her again

The instinct is to tell the truth, because lying to your own mother feels like a small betrayal. But she is not asking for information she has lost. She is asking a question from inside a year when he was alive, and the true answer lands as news.

Families who have said it plainly describe the same thing happening: she hears it for the first time. The grief is fresh and complete, and it arrives with no memory of the four years she has already spent surviving it. Then it fades, and an hour later she asks again. Correcting her does not teach her. It only makes her bury him once more.

This is the one place where being accurate and being kind point in different directions, and most families come down on the side of kind. You are not deceiving her about her life. You are declining to hand her a loss she cannot keep hold of.

Answer the feeling, not the fact

Underneath the question there is almost always something simpler. She is looking for him because it is the hour he used to come back, or because the house is too quiet, or because she is frightened and he is who she goes to when she is frightened. That part is real and you can answer it.

What works is an answer that is warm, short, and does not commit you to a lie you will have to maintain. Then move, gently, to him rather than to where he is.

• Instead of "Papa died four years ago", try "He is not here just now. Tell me about the year you two went to Nainital."
• Instead of "Ma, we talked about this", try "I miss him too." Then sit down. Sitting down changes the room.
• If she asks directly whether he is dead, do not lie outright. "I know. I think about him every day" is true, and it answers her without announcing it.

Why she asks at the same time every day

It is usually the hour the person used to arrive. Late afternoon, around the time the light goes, is when most families report it. The routine of the house is still in her somewhere even when the names have gone, and four o clock still means he should be here by now.

Once you notice the hour, you can get ahead of it. Put something in that slot that belongs to her rather than to the gap: tea made a particular way, the radio, a call that arrives at ten past four. It is not distraction exactly. It is giving the hour a different thing to be about.

When she is asking for her own mother

Sometimes the person she wants has been gone for fifty years. This tends to be harder for the family and easier for her, because she is further back and more settled there, and she is often not anxious at all. She simply wants her mother, the way anyone unwell wants their mother.

The same answer works and it costs you less, because nobody in the room is freshly bereaved. Ask her what her mother used to cook. You will frequently get a better half hour out of that question than out of anything else you tried that week.

What this costs you

More than people admit. You are managing her grief by carrying it yourself, several times a day, and you do not get to put it down at the end. Families describe the fourth time in one afternoon as the one that breaks them, not the first.

Two things help a little. Agree the words in advance with whoever else is in the house, so nobody improvises a correction at the wrong moment and so you are not deciding fresh every time. And say out loud to somebody, at some point, that your father died and that you are the only one in the house who remembers it. That sentence is true and it is doing a great deal of work unacknowledged.

The Alzheimer’s Association has pages for families in India, and Dementia India Alliance runs helplines where the person answering has heard this exact question before.

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.