If you've lost your mom and you still call her number sometimes, you're in a large and quiet company. People keep the contact. They dial it on the drive home, on her birthday, on the bad nights, knowing exactly what will happen. This page is about why people do it, what happens to the voicemail greeting, the phone in a Japanese garden that thousands of people line up to use for the same reason, and what the research says about staying connected to someone you've lost.
Why do people still call a parent who has passed?
Because the call was the relationship. For most adults, a mother or father lived mostly inside the phone: the Sunday check-in, the "made it home" text, the number you dialed first with good news and first with bad. When they're gone, the habit is still wired in. You reach for the phone before you remember. That isn't confusion. It's forty years of practice.
Some people call once and never again. Some call every week. Some only let it ring once, so it doesn't go through, so they don't have to hear the recording say the number isn't in service. Some pay the bill to keep the line open. People do all of these, and none of them is a sign that something is wrong with you.
What they're reaching for is not a conversation. It's the shape of one. The hand knows where the number is. Hearing it ring is close to hearing them say hello.
Is it weird to call his number?
Someone asks this in nearly every grief group online, usually at night, usually with an apology attached: is it weird that I still call his number, is it strange that I text her, does anyone else do this. The replies come fast and they all say the same thing. No. Me too. Every day. Three years.
It gets asked so often because people have been taught that staying attached is a failure to "let go." It isn't. The habits of love outlast the person they were for, and the phone is where many of those habits lived. Calling the number is the same gesture as setting their place at the table or saying their name out loud. You're doing something with love that has nowhere else to go.
If you've been embarrassed about it, you can stop. If you've never done it and want to, you can.
Can you still hear their voicemail greeting after they're gone?
Sometimes, for a while. This is the part people most want to know and the part nobody warns them about.
As long as the line stays active and the bill is paid, the greeting can keep playing, and many people call just to hear it: the four seconds of her saying her own name. Once the account is closed, the greeting goes with it, and after a period the number is given to someone else. One day you call and a stranger picks up. People describe that as losing them a second time.
So if there's a greeting you want to keep, don't wait. Call the number from another phone and record the greeting as it plays, with a voice memo app or a second device. Ask the carrier whether the greeting can be exported before the account closes. Save it in two places. Nobody regrets saving it. People regret the day they found out it was gone.
A voicemail they left you is different from the greeting, and more valuable: it's them talking to you. If you have one of those, back it up this week.
What is a wind phone, and why do people line up to use one?
In 2010 a garden designer in Ōtsuchi, Japan, named Itaru Sasaki, put an old rotary phone in a booth in his garden after he lost a cousin. The phone was connected to nothing. He said he wanted his words carried on the wind. The next year the earthquake and tsunami took about 1,400 people from his small town, and he opened the garden to everyone. More than 30,000 people have since walked up the hill, picked up the receiver, dialed a number they still knew, and talked.
There are now hundreds of wind phones in the United States, in parks, cemeteries, hospices and church gardens, most of them put up by someone who lost a parent, a partner or a child. People drive hours to use one. They dial the real number. The wind phone in Kent City, Michigan, remembers one woman's parents, and she dials the number they kept for fifty years before she speaks.
A wind phone is calling Mom in heaven with a handset in your hand and a bench to sit on. It's the physical version of the thing you already do in your car. If there's one near you, our list of US wind phones is in the post linked below.
Is it healthy to stay connected to someone you've lost?
For a long time the advice was to detach. In 1996, grief researchers argued that staying connected to the person who passed is normal and can be healthy, not denial (Klass, Silverman and Nickman, 1996, Continuing Bonds). That book changed how grief is taught.
A review of 79 studies found ongoing bonds with the person who passed can comfort people and help them adapt, though sometimes they hurt (Hewson et al., 2023). Both halves of that sentence matter. Calling the number can be the kindest ten seconds of your day, and on some days it can flatten you. Neither tells you to stop. It tells you to notice which kind of day it is.
And for the people who feel their mom close by when they dial, the ones who swear she answered somehow: in a survey of nearly 1,000 people who had sensed a loved one who had passed, about 7 in 10 said it brought comfort (Elsaesser et al., 2021, BJPsych Open). That survey was of people who came forward to say it had happened to them, so it can't tell you how common it is. It can tell you that most of the people in it were glad.
If calling the number has become the only thing you can do, or the days around it are getting harder rather than lighter after a long time, that's worth telling a grief counselor or your doctor. Not because the calling is wrong. Because you shouldn't carry it alone.
What do people say when they call?
Small things, mostly. The weather. What the kids did. That the recipe didn't come out right. "Hey mama, I miss you. I know you're around," one woman said into the Ridgefield, Connecticut wind phone. In Middlebury, Vermont, a mother who lost her son fills him in on his brothers. In Arlington, Texas, the woman who built the local wind phone said her calls started as questions and became, over time, "Here's what happened today," and "I so thought of you when I did this."
Nobody is making a speech. They're doing what they always did on that number: checking in. If you don't know what to say, say that. Say their name. Tell them one thing from today. Then hang up the way you always did.
When her number isn't enough
Calling her number is a way of checking in, and the ring and the silence are part of it. Some days, though, what you want is to hear her voice on the other end.
If she left you a voicemail, or you have an audio file of her from an old phone, or a video where she's talking, CallPastNow can make a recreation of her voice from those recordings you already have, one that picks up when you call. It isn't her, and we don't pretend it is. The free call is how you find out if what you have works: you hear her voice first, free.
No card needed. In the US.
