Hearing Voices

Tending to Endings (twenty-one)

The truck was overheating and I only had minutes. The A/C pump froze and now I’m trying to make Banner Summit so I can coast to where it’s a few degrees warmer and within hiking distance of a phone. It’s ten below and the Eve of New Year’s Eve, December 30, almost midnight and there hasn’t been a single car since Stanley. When I finally crest, I turn off the engine and hope I haven’t ruined the motor. I remember there is a flat spot a couple miles down. I keep hoping to get past it, closer to Grand Jean. But it’s cold and there’s black ice so I can only go so fast. Then the road flattens and the truck comes to a stop. It won’t start. It’s toast. I sit there and the world is as quiet as you’ve ever heard.

My husband, John, is telling the story which begins with the divorce and the ill-fated elk hunting trip and eventually leads to him building a house in the mountains, a project that takes eight years. The story of Elkhaven is family lore and any one his kids could chime in with details about how he raised the walls himself by riggin’ ropes and pulleys, or about George, the grouse who kept him company. I’ve heard the story many times, and I eventually lived in that house for six years before the boys hit driving age and we moved back to town.

Only this time, I have promised to write it down and so I’m sitting on the couch of our living room during quarantine time with the voice memo feature of my iPhone on. Also, I’m hearing the story as a woman who has recently lost her mother. Which means, I’m hearing the story with the ears of his grown children and I am so grateful I hit the record button. Because what really will matter to them someday when we are both gone, is not so much the story but the way that John tells it.

One of the hardest things for me to accept about my mom’s Alzheimer’s was that her voice changed. She became quieter, less certain about whatever she had to say. She stopped calling me. When I called her, she wanted to get off the phone quickly.

I eventually learned more about the disease and found ways to be close to my mom throughout the changes. But at first, all I could notice was what was gone.

One of the first times I noticed the change in her voice was when we were heading to my nephew’s football game. I made some joke about how she ended up with a grandson who played football, and she said, “It’s so nice, isn’t it?”

I looked to see if she was being facetious. She wasn’t. Instead, my mom who was not a fan of competition and especially not violent sports was quietly following my dad up to the bleachers.

My mom loved her grandchildren beyond measure. She may well have gone to that game pre-Alzheimer’s, but it would not have been without comment or without laughing at herself for ending up at a football game for her grandson.

I missed my mom’s edginess. The way she made sure we knew how she saw the world.

Voices are how I remember people most. I do not know if this is a weird Laura thing, or whether this is true for others as well. But the tone and the rhythm of a person’s voice is much of what I miss when they are gone. The way words lift on certain syllables and fall on others. Where they land the funny parts. Where their voice cracks with sadness or anger or truth or glee.

I remember how my friend Pat, who died in February of 2015, would say my name on a voice message, “Laura!” drawing out the two syllables like some enthusiastic song. “I’m so sorry I missed your call!” In one short message, I could feel her love.

I still have my friend Susan’s last voicemail she left in April of 2016 while she was waiting to learn whether she was going to return to the Children’s School, a job she subsequently got, but did not begin because she died that summer from a brain aneurysm. I saved it not because of the content, but because of the Susan-ness I hear in her voice.

Yeah this has been an interesting process and maybe I’ll get my old job back and maybe I won’t. And if I don’t, that will be ok, too. But, still uncertain. And I’m fine. And, I’m going to be hatching chicks this month so that’s going on and life is good! And so, happy Friday dear, thanks for thinking of me today. Take care. Bye.

Mostly, I don’t need the recordings. Voice contains so much of us. It carries with it the places we are from and the quirks from our own parents and traces of books we have read. Voice is breath shaped by thoughts and experience and larynx and lungs.

A friend in Boise once introduced me to her friend, a man in his sixties visiting from Brooklyn. As soon as the man started telling a story, I heard my grandfather. I realized only then that the voice I knew so well as my Grandpa’s was heavily rooted in the place he was born.

I can still hear my grandmother’s voice as she read Madeline to me, my favorite book as a child. I remember the cadence and the tone and the way she would speed up the pace when Miss Clavel, afraid of a disaster, ran fast and faster. And something else in her voice, too, that I know now (but didn’t know then) was irony. She knew what was coming.

I knew many things about my grandma. She cooked our favorite meals but didn’t eat much. She was a worrier. She loved being a grandma. She volunteered at the hospital so she could carry newborns to car when it came time for them to go home.

But today when I think of my grandma, it is her intelligence I recognize first in her voice. My grandma saw flaws inherent in the human condition and she was drawn satire and wit. She talked about books and politics and words and people.

Though I was a child when my grandma was alive (she died when I was 18), I somehow feel closer to her now than I did then, and I believe this is because as I have grown I have understood her more, something that is only possible because I remember her voice.

It was last fall when a friend of mine asked me to write the story of her two daughters, born after a long series of trials and losses and then, finally, two beautiful births. In the past I had always taken notes by hand when writing a story. But I had recently discovered how easy it was to use the voice memo feature on my phone.

Once Darcy’s husband Mike started talking, I was so glad I had done that. I never would’ve remembered his wording exactly:

I think the story starts on our first date. Where we ended up at the fricken’ animal hospital. Dog ate a bottle of the Boxer’s pee pills. But at the end of that night, we drove up to the top of Quail Ridge and were looking at Christmas lights in Boise. That’s when Darcy said, “Just so you know. I want a kid.”

As soon as I got home and listened to the recording, I knew I was going to write the story in their voices. It would not just be what happened, but how their parents would tell the story that would matter someday to those girls.

In May of 2018, I received a message over FaceBook from a stranger that I almost deleted but then read.

“I live in a house you used to live in on Devonwood. I found a box of your things up in the crawl space. Memorabilia you might want, like photos and poetry.”

Devonwood was where I lived before John and I moved up to Elkhaven. It had been fifteen years since I lived there. Curious, I drove over to pick up the box.

I rifled through papers while still parked outside that house where my sons had spent their first years of life. There were high school year books and binders full of poetry from my teenage years. I could’ve lived without all of it.

Until I found envelopes in my mother’s handwriting, letters she wrote when I moved to California. One written just after I started graduate school:

I hope that someday you have more of what I have, the joy of reading and learning for the joy of reading and learning. This fall, however, excess time would only allow you to pay more attention to the Presidential elections and they aren’t much fun. I will cast my vote (for Dukakis) but beyond that I believe whoever get in, the people are going to begin to prevail. I’m going to encourage everyone to write the President often with feedback, suggestions, demands, etc.

I held the packet of letters to my chest. There it was, my mother’s voice.

It is memorial day weekend, and many will be remembering the stories of those who are gone. I’ve been thinking lately about how often we focus on the stories we haven’t heard yet. The war stories that someone might take to the grave. The things parents didn’t tell us about their own childhood. And those stories no doubt have great value.

But lately I’ve been thinking too, about the stories I’ve heard over and over. Maybe I have even had the thought, not this one again. Only these days, I may reach for a pen or ask if I can turn on the recorder. These days, I’m more apt to listen. Maybe at first because I recognize this person could be gone. But then, then, because they are here.

More Resources

Normally I’ve been including links here, but this week I want to recommend the voice memo feature that comes standard on most phones if you haven’t already found it it. On the iPhone it is usually grouped with utilities like the calculator.

It makes for a very easy way to collect family stories whether people are apart or together. Just push one button and you can audio record a short or long story that will be saved in an audio file to your phone and can be sent to loved ones via email or text attachment.

For inspiration listen to Story Corp podcasts.

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