Preface To Mom: Mother's Day

(this is from here)

A while ago I was having a conversation with my sister Pat, who died in 2015, about our father, who died in 1991.  I told her that I couldn't remember his voice.  I sometimes think I have a sense of it, but he wasn't around a lot when I was a kid, & we didn't really have a lot of conversations.  I imagine there are traces of it in my brothers who, because they have retained their southern accents, tend to be higher & more reedy than my own.  But I can't ever be sure.  I don't know if there are any recordings of it anywhere.

For the record, my sister told me that she remembered it like it was her own voice, & still heard it from time to time, even more than two decades later.

There's is no chance of the same problem with my mother's voice.  I spoke with her weekly for the last two decades of her life, & saw her many times - once a year when I lived out of state, much more frequently when I lived in Texas.  I even have recordings of her voice - she called in to my radio show more than once, & I have tapes of her leaving a message on my old answering machine, which used an actual cassette tape.  Fun fact!  I used that machine until probably 2002!

Listen, I even can remember her voice changing as she got older & got a little more senile - or perhaps more demented.  I remember ridiculous arguments I had with her while I was walking the dogs in Kentucky & I remember the last time I spoke to her, when she was in the nursing home last summer, confused & close to incoherent, not really sure she knew she was talking to me.

This is the first Mother's Day in years that I haven't called her.  I tended to call her nearer to the end of the day so she could regale me with all the visits she had, the calls she had, the gifts she received.  She really loved this day.  I guess the last Mother's Day I spent with her was in 2018 - two years ago I would've been on my way here, & last year I was here, & doubtless called her.  She was fading at that point.  It wasn't easy speaking to her.  & whereas we could easily fill an hour in conversation - she tended to talk at me, telling me about her life as well as filling me in with information about my siblings' lives - by the end we spoke for mere minutes.  Her world was closing in on her, & her words were started to fail her.

So I didn't call anyone today.  But when I grabbed that image above, I wasn't sad.  Because I suspect I'll go to my own death with my mother's voice in my head.  It seems inconceivable that I could ever forget it.