When I upgraded my iPhone recently, I saved the messages to a digital voice recorder, not wanting to ever lose them.Ī day before my mom's heart unexpectedly stopped, sending her into the coma that she never recovered from, she called my dad's cell phone from the hospital emergency room where she had gone with a bad cold. Home answering machines are usually erased, but our phones allow us to carry memories with us, perhaps without realizing it. My eight-year-old's obsession with our fantasy sports teams. My 5-year-old son's impishness as he asks for a call back. Unlike photos that capture how we looked in second grade or remind us of our 21st birthday, voice mails - perhaps because they are divorced from the visual - capture the essence of us at different moments in time. It struck me that our phones have become the new memory books. I then made the fortuitous discovery that my smart phone was really smart - it required a second delete to send the messages into the ether. While going through voice messages of condolence from friends, I came upon a single, mundane call from my mom. I had stumbled upon the messages almost by accident. I hear the dad who always made us roll our eyes and good-naturedly chuckle with his insistence on noting the precise instant of his call - "1:33 and a half" - despite the time stamp on the message and Caller ID. The mom increasingly frail as her Parkinson's disease advanced. The mom who called every few hours, brimming with excitement as my family and I drove 10 hours from New Jersey to visit her and my dad. The mom eager to share a juicy story ("Just watching the news and there was another crazy New Jersey guy. I hear that Jewish mother who was ever protective and worried, even as I raised a family of my own hundreds of miles away. But somehow, oddly, the voice mails - those unscripted moments of everyday life - are the ones I turn to most often. I, of course, have videos of her at my Bar Mitzvah and wedding. I have serving platters, wine glasses, and photos of her as a girl and with my children. I cherish her parents' naturalization certificates upon becoming U.S. I have many treasured memories of my mom, who died two years ago this month. I unearthed this message and others from her while plumbing my iPhone's cache of deleted messages, amazed and grateful by this unexpected ability to preserve that voice. But three weeks after she uttered those words my mom died at a hospital outside Detroit. It's the type of message I normally didn't pay much attention to - if I listened to it at all.
#Kiss i can hear your voice full
"Hi, it's mom," she began, then chatted on, full Jewish mom in her distinctive gravelly timbre. The voice mail message was like so many others from my mom over the years. Through their voice messages, saved on his phone, Ornstein has a trove of verbal memories. Charles Ornstein with his parents at his Bar Mitzvah.