Saving Voicemails
Digital heirlooms from our parents
I have been saving voicemails for the past three years. I simply upload the recording to Google Drive and now have thirty or so messages in a folder, audio acorns, tucked away for a rainy day.
Most are from my parents, but others are from friends. One is from an Xfinity salesman with an Indian accent. I saved this one by mistake, but now his unbeatable internet deals will be with me forever. Another, this one saved purposefully, is from a podcast guest, Chris Keener, who goes on a two-minute exploration of the word “solid.” What a delightful word it is, especially when used in the possessive. “I’m solid, how are you?” To feel solid in a world designed to destabilize is an achievement and should be celebrated in a tangential voicemail, don’t you think?
When you write a book, readers use it in unexpected ways.
Like the NGOs who distribute mosquito nets across sub-Saharan Africa only to have the villagers use the nets to catch fish, I’ve been surprised by the number of readers using “One Last Question Before You Go” not to interview their parents formally, but use the chapter titles (all of which are questions) as conversation starters around the dinner table.
Additionally, I’ve been surprised by the number of readers who told me they enjoyed the book as a story, but when I ask which parent they plan to interview first, stare blankly, then sigh. It’s simply not in the cards.
For these people in particular, save your parents’ voicemails.
Numerous workbooks exist to capture our parents’ life stories. Give your parents the workbook and let them fill it out. It’s a nice thought, but I’m not sure learning about my dad’s greatest achievement through a paragraph of chicken scratch is going to make me feel close to him after he dies. It’s the voice. The inflection in his “okey dokie,” sign-off, and the meandering way he’ll start his voicemails with a simple point, “Hey, call me back,” then veer off into a colorful play-by-play of his adventures with the plumber. (Never stop, ET. Never stop.)
We groan when we see that four-minute message from mom. How dare she take up megabites on our phone? But all these voicemails hold unexpected value, especially when we get that unexpected call.
My own grandmother, who died at 100, had advanced Alzheimer’s for the last decade of her life, and my mom never had a chance to interview her. In a recent podcast we did together, my mom said that one of the only pieces of audio she had saved was a happy birthday voicemail from my grandmother.
“It wasn’t even my birthday,” she said. “But that’s not the point.”