Sometimes, when I’m falling asleep, I hear voices: odd
snippets of conversation. I’m sure it’s all in my head, and I’m half-dreaming.
But sometimes I can hear my mother’s voice, or some other person long dead, and
it’s exactly their tone of voice.
I usually can’t quite make out what they’re saying, and when
I can, it doesn’t make any sense, which tells me that it’s mostly a dream.
Funny how my brain produces these old voices out of nowhere
and replays them for me.
A friend told me once that, after his mother passed away,
he’d call his aunt from time to time, just to hear her voice, because his
aunt’s voice reminded him of his mother’s voice.
I understand this perfectly. What voice did we first hear?
Our mother’s voice. They say you can hear it even when you’re in the womb. It
must naturally be a very calming thing (although my mother was not perhaps the
most calm-inducing person in the world).
And I like fooling myself sometimes. As more of my family and
friends pass away, I feel better sometimes with the idea that maybe they’re not
dead after all. I see and hear people all the time – in crowds, on the sidewalk
– who look and sound, almost, like the people I used to know. My heart leaps up
and I think: it was a mistake after all. They’re not dead.
And, just for a second, it makes me feel better.
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