Caring For A Loved One, From A Different Time Zone

Caring for someone is stressful enough as it is. Add a few thousand miles and a time difference on top of it, and I think you can multiply that stress by a ton.

The truth is, even if someone lives an hour away, or in the next city, there's still that same underlying fear — you just don't know what's going to happen. Most of the anxiety of caring from a distance is built around that not knowing. Whether it's a phone call at 3am your time, or a silence that goes on too long and starts to feel wrong, the not knowing is its own kind of exhausting.

With dementia specifically, that fear takes on a different shape. It's not just "is she okay right now" — it's "does she still know who she is right now, and would she even be able to tell someone if something was wrong." I spent years living somewhere between those two questions.

There were nights I'd lie awake doing the math on what time it was there, wondering if she was asleep, or wandering, or frightened, and there was nothing I could do about any of it from where I was. There were mornings I'd wake up to messages that had come in while I slept, already hours old, already needing a response I couldn't give fast enough.

I got used to carrying two clocks in my head at once — the one on the wall in front of me, and the one ticking away in her house, thousands of miles from mine. I never really got used to the guilt that came with both of them.

What helped me most wasn't any single tool or system — though I built plenty of those, and I've written about all of it in the full guide. What helped was accepting that I couldn't do this the way someone caring for a parent down the road could. I had to grieve that a little, and then build something that worked for the life I actually had, not the one I wished I had.

If you're doing this too — from a different city, a different country, a different continent — I see you. It's a specific kind of hard, and it doesn't always get talked about enough.

But you can do it!

The blog shares my experiences. The Caregiving Guide shows you exactly what I put in place to keep my mum safe and help me care from another country. Find out more here