My Mother’s Voice

My niece, Christina Garland, posted a very special video on her Facebook wall yesterday. It was filmed on October 31, 2010. It featured my mother, holding Christina’s infant son Ezra in her arms, singing to him in her beautiful alto voice, a song of unknown origin. Part of it was vaguely familiar, but most of it was my Mother playing fast and loose with the original lyrics, and making stuff up as she went along. At one point, whoever was filming moved closer to Mom, and this new angle revealed my Dad sitting next to my sister Linda, the proud grandmother of the infant child. They were talking and laughing with each other. Dad looked happy and healthy. So did Mom. She had less than three years to live.

There’s another one of these videos around somewhere, one of Mom and Dad sitting on the sofa in our old house holding Kaitlin in exactly the same way, Mom singing some diddy claiming that Kaitlin was the most beautiful girl in the world. In that video they were both younger, less gray in their hair, thinner, more robust. I searched for it, but couldn’t find it, so I settled in and listened to Mom serenade Ezra...over and over again.

It’s funny what the sound of the human voice does to a person. Shortly after Mom passed away, Pam and I found a message that she had  left on our old land line. She needed for one of us to take her to a doctor’s appointment. Her voice was filled with sorrow and frustration. There were times towards the end when she would fall into despair, and this was one of those times. After listening to the message, I immediately regretted doing so. I didn’t want to remember her voice this way. The day I had listened to it, I had left for a four day business meeting in Chicago. It had only been a month or two since her death, and I hadn’t up to that point shed a single tear. Two days later, while on a treadmill in the gym of the Marriot Hotel, overlooking Michigan Avenue, the sound of her defeated voice from that phone message came back to me, and I immediately began to cry.

But, yesterday, thanks to Christina, I finally have a new voice from my mother to remember, a generous, loving, melodious alto spent doting on one of her great grandchildren. Much better.

Thanks, Chrissy...