A few days ago, a caring friend asked me what I missed most about my mom. I thought for only a second or two before I responded, “Her voice.” Suddenly I felt the tears and before they could overflow, I said, “Stop, enough. I can’t talk about it.” My friend felt terrible as he tried to change the subject for me and move on from my unexpected reaction. I realized later that, strangely, I hadn’t thought before of this horrible truth: the familiar voice that I loved so much is slowly fading from memory and becoming harder to recall. This disturbs and saddens me.
It is said that of blindness and deafness, deafness is worse. Most hearing, seeing people seem to disagree with that, but I can totally understand it. I am a language geek, dialect mimic, music lover and dilettante maker of same. Sounds of nature fascinate me; one of my favorite CDs is music interspersed with nature sounds and wildlife calls. I so love the ocean partly because of the sounds of the waves pounding the shore and the seagulls calling to each other. When I study, I must have quiet; music only distracts me, draws me in. Often in the car, I turn the radio off so I can think. When I’m doing housework, however, I want music playing, loud enough for me to really hear it. And when I go to a concert, I want it LOUD, really loud, so nothing distracts from the entire experience of the music. Sounds comfort me, excite me, fascinate, disturb or distract me. Whether lovely or loud, sound is of vital importance to me.
Right now, just over seven months since her death, I can still hear the rich, velvetiness of my mother’s voice. For most of my life, she had a soft North Carolina accent that made her a delight for employers in Colorado, California and Germany; they were thrilled to have her as one of the “voices” of their organizations. During the last years of her life, her accent was made more pronounced as she shared her home with her sister, who rarely left the Southern Appalachian Mountains; I teased her sometimes about sounding like a hillbilly. Her singing voice was deep in the alto range; treasured are my memories of singing with her. She took the harmony as we sang together, until I learned from her to harmonize as she did — a third below the melody; we favored Gospel and Country songs as our repertoire. After years of smoking, she lost much of her range but the notes she retained were still strong and full.
Hearing her voice in my head makes me smile. Bits of our conversations sound as real as the times I actually heard her speaking. Several specific things she would say are fixed in my memory. When anyone said something nice about me or my sister, she would affect this silly and unidentifiable accent and say, “Well, of course; she only takes aftah her mothah!” When she would call me and leave a message for me to call her, she would usually begin with, “Now, nothin’s wrong…” because she knew I worried about her. And her usual greeting to me: “Hey, Baby Girl.” Her laugh is there, too, uninhibited, throaty, filled with abandon and absolutely contagious.
It scares me, though, that already some of her words are starting to fade from my memory; I have to think really hard to bring them to mind. She loved to watch “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” and she would tell me about it sometimes. I can’t hear her voice saying the word, “dog,” though. I can’t hear the accent exactly right. She would greet loved ones with a happy, “Hey!” but I can’t remember which word she favored with people she didn’t know very well, whether it was “hi,” “hello,” or something else. This forgetfulness is disturbing; I want to remember her voice! I want to remember how she sounded as we sang together, and the sound of her laugh. Most of all, I want to remember her calling my name or calling me “Baby Girl.”
I realize how blessed I am to have been “Baby Girl” to her for so long; she called me that for fifty years! How lucky I am! It doesn’t do to feel sorry for myself; there are so many who don’t have their moms for nearly that long. I really do hope, though, that the memory of the sound of her voice stays with me for many more years yet; I dread the thought of saying goodbye to her voice, even though it lives with me only in my head.
What Living Feels Like 