I'm reposting a version of an essay I wrote for The Boston Globe several years ago that contains some advice I still like to offer folks, especially at this time of year. It's an essay about the power of recording our loved ones' words, and the power specifically of recording my son's words and also those of my mother, in what was one of the last good recordings I made with her.
Be fair warned, though: "Sound gets inside of you -- it inhabits you. It can break your heart."
Here's the essay:
During a
weekend visit to New York last winter, I recorded my son’s impressions of the
city. I began by asking where we were. I thought he would simply say
“Manhattan” or “at the hotel,” but Leo, then 9, said, “We’re in a hotel in New
York City, in North America, on a planet known as Earth, in a galaxy known as
the Milky Way, in a universe known as the Universe.”
When I
became a mother in my late 30s, I wanted to do more than take photos or videos
of my son. I wanted to remember his speech development by preserving his
sounds. So I recorded him.
Jay
Allison, the founder of “The Moth Radio Hour,” once told me that humans relate
to sound in a way that’s distinct from other media.
“Sound
literally gets inside of you — it inhabits you,” Allison said. “It can break
your heart. That’s different from photos, which remain on the outside.”
I recorded Leo’s snores, his gurgles, his first words. Some recordings are filled with his guffawing as he watches TV. His belly laughs are a tonic.
Recording
has been a tradition in my family. My late father recorded conversations with
my sisters and me on a handheld tape deck. Piling into his den, we crowded
around his desk as he pressed the two large play and record buttons. Later, we
would listen back to the tape with glee.
Far too
late, I grasped the importance of recording my mother and father. If pure joy
compelled me to record Leo, pure dread inspired me to begin recording my
parents a few years ago. What would happen to their stories when they died?
Before
it was too late, I needed to piece together one bit of crucial family history
that had never been fully explained: What had happened when my mother’s younger
brother died in a car accident at age 18?
She
rarely mentioned him during my childhood, except to say that my grandparents
never recovered from the loss of their oldest son, whom everyone called Spike.
I only gleaned a few snippets about him during the adults’ cocktail hour at my
grandparents’ house: He had an outgoing personality and was a football star.
My
mother was 19 when he died. Now, in part because of my recordings, I see his
death, in 1957, as an event that has hovered over her entire adult life.
Recording
my mother’s words made sense for another reason: Video is for action, and her
action days are behind her. At the time of my last good recording, she was 83.
She sat down in her chair at the foot of the stairs, and, bathed in the glow of
a floor lamp, she lit a cigarette. She was game to talk about anything but the
present or recent past, which dementia had begun to scramble in her brain. More
or less housebound, she spent most days chain-smoking and dozing off, unsure of
the month or sometimes even the season.
Her
mental fog would soon force us to move her to a nursing home, but when I asked
about the circumstances of Spike’s accident, barely a second elapsed before she
began reciting a chronology of events. It was as if she was supplying answers
she’d had at the ready for decades.
The
accident had occurred during the summer. Spike was driving a convertible. A top
student, he’d been given the car as a graduation gift from my grandparents,
following his acceptance at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. He’d
been killed instantly when his car collided with an embankment and flipped
over.
The
funeral was held at his Catholic high school. “Oh God, thousands of people
came,” my mother told me. “Thousands.” It doesn’t matter that she’s likely
wrong about the number — it matters only that in her mind’s eye, legions of
people came to pay their respects to the luminous brother she’d lost.
It
wasn’t until months later, when I listened again to the recording, that I
discovered a moment I had overlooked. After the funeral, my mother told me,
they drove out to the cemetery, which was some distance away. At one point
during the muggy hour-long drive, the road curved, and my mother turned to look
behind her. And that’s when she glimpsed through the back windshield the
headlights of the dozens and dozens of cars following the hearse to her
brother’s final resting place.
More
than anything else, that image crystallized for me the tragic loss she’d borne
for 65 years.
Recording
affords us the ability to save not just our parents’ voices but their stories.
“People
would tell us, ‘I have a recording of my father’s voice, and it’s all I have
left,’” Allison told me. “It was an actual part of the person — it contained
his breath.”
In the
years to come, these recordings that contain my mother’s breath will remain
precious to me. And the little that I learned about Spike furnishes me with an
outline of the uncle I never knew and his role in my mother’s life.
This
holiday season, consider pressing “record” on your smartphone when you’re
around the table. The sounds of gathering — the voices, the stories, the
ambient clatter — will fill an audio time capsule you’ll cherish on some future
day when you’re longing in vain to hear a loved one’s voice.
You can also read the essay (with the full image of the wonderful photo they chose) on the Globe site:
