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The Joy of Doing
How my desire to immortalize my mother’s voice became an audiobook
In September 2020 I lost my father.
He breathed his last on a hospital bed right in front of me. Almost three years later, I still dream about that final moment, that final gasp, and the blank stare in his eyes as he left for the great beyond. To say that I miss him is an understatement.
After his death, which I tried unbundling in a series of Medium posts here, here, and here, I realized that what I missed most about him was the sound of his voice. Of all the recorded memories he left behind, there was nowhere we’d recorded his voice to remember what he sounded like. No videos, no phone recordings, nothing. Just a few pictures and a headful of anecdotal quips he chimed in occasionally to make us laugh. The more I searched for a record of my father’s voice, the more convinced I was that of all the senses, voice captures the most essence of human memories. It is the living, breathing dimension of our tenuous existence.
Indeed, the history of sound recording, heralded by the invention of the phonautograph by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857 was an attempt to ‘photograph the word’ and preserve it for posterity. So, in search of redemption, I made a decision to capture my mother’s voice for the future, unknown. Presumably…
