My Mother’s Voice Lost and Found 

In my earliest memories, my mother is bustling about our house, crossing each completed task from her to-do list. Her slippers swish across the floor as she tidies the kitchen, arranges the shoes in the front hall, and waters the living room plants. Her footsteps bah-bump downstairs to the basement laundry room, and pah-pah back up as she lugs a basket of clean linens and clothes. In the late afternoon, we pick lettuce, cucumbers, and cherry tomatoes from her garden. We happily crunch the lettuce and cucumber at dinner, while the sweet tomatoes burst on our tongues. 

When I was six or seven years old, Mom disappeared for hours at a time to her basement workshop, sawing, sanding, hammering, and painting, until one day she brought up to my room big bolted structures that she assembled magically into a shiny white bunk bed. The top bunk was so close to the ceiling that I felt like I was hiding in my own cozy cave on top of the world. I loved to snuggle up there at night, under the quilt that Mom sewed for me, a patchwork of pink, peach, beige, and brown, with a big block letter A of soft grayish black. 

During my teen years, Mom and I shared crisp, lighthearted conversations in the living room as we played music together (me on oboe and her on viola da gamba), in the car on the way to lessons and rehearsals, and in the kitchen while we cooked dinner. When I moaned about piles of homework, tricky orchestra music, and the cute boy at school that I was too shy to talk to, she said, “Oh Audrey, you’re busy worrying. Don’t I keep telling you to copy my good points?” Then she made a point of having to reach upward to give me a hug. Her arms couldn’t enfold me the way they had when I was smaller, but they still filled me with comfort. 

Throughout high school, into college, and beyond, people thought Mom looked too young to have a daughter my age. “You look like sisters,” they exclaimed, not realizing that the brown of her hair was only the hairdresser’s best approximation of its natural color, concealing the gray. 

I smiled to hear it, but Mom’s reaction to the compliment was more guarded: “I’m not that young.” The tension in her voice pulled at her words, freeing for an instant the Midwest accent of her childhood that had been masked by years in New England. “I’m not thay-at young.”

If there was an ominous message lurking behind those simple words, I chose to ignore it. But as she approached middle age, Mom brought up the topic more explicitly: “I’m not afraid of dying; I’m only afraid of growing old.” 

I couldn’t wrap my mind around that refrain. Old age and death felt far removed from us both. At sixty-three, Mom was as active as she’d ever been: walking, hiking, traveling. She even took up a new instrument, the cello, with weekly lessons and diligent daily practice. Meanwhile, at thirty-six, I juggled dual jobs as musician and teacher, while nurturing a promising new romance. 

We lived only fifteen miles apart, but our busy schedules left few opportunities to see each other. Still, we found time to talk. Seated in our respective kitchens, eating our separate food, we’d “have dinner together,” hardly noticing the time passing until our shoulders grew stiff from pressing telephones against our ears. When my boyfriend became my fiancé, then my husband, I cherished Mom’s phone calls even more, navigating the unfamiliar landscape of married life with the familiarity and comfort of Mom’s voice in my ear.

It was during one of those conversations that she first mentioned the trouble with her hand. There was a faint shadow in her voice, a lost, lonely note I barely registered, focused as I was on the lazy warmth of summer and the queasy excitement of early pregnancy. “I’ve been dropping the bow,” my mother said.

My first thought was “she’s ‘busy worrying’ again,” so I tried to reassure her. “It’s probably from too much cello practicing.” But as my pregnancy progressed, the trouble with Mom’s hand got worse, even with breaks from the cello. When she took me shopping for maternity clothes in early autumn, she reached across with her left hand to work the car’s stick shift, her tired right hand lying helplessly in her lap. In January, during lunch after a prenatal checkup, she recounted her own experience of pregnancy and birth while I cut up her steak tips the way I’d someday cut French toast for the child now shifting gently inside me.

By the time my baby was born, Mom had developed other symptoms as well: stooped shoulders, a shuffling walk, and general fatigue. The most disturbing change was in her voice. Once strong and emphatic, it became halting and angular. She stumbled over the r’s and l’s, and her Midwestern accent escaped unchecked, exaggerated. “Oh, Aujh-rey, he lllooks so hay-appy…” she slurred, stroking baby Ricky’s head with one stiff, curled hand while I rocked him in my arms. We couldn’t trust her arms to hold him.

I heard a wistful sound in her voice, but her doctors detected something far worse: the decisive symptom in the growing list. While I sat on her sofa, bouncing my smiling baby Ricky on my knees, Mom got on the phone to deliver the devastating diagnosis to family and friends. She spoke slowly, carefully enunciating each syllable. “ALS. They say I have one to three years. But I’m taking an antidepressant, so I’m smiling.”

I’d heard of ALS, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, and knew it was a progressive and incurable disease that caused paralysis. Now, I learned with horror that it would attack more and more of the nerves controlling Mom’s limbs, chest, jaw, and tongue. She would lose the ability to move, to speak, to eat, and finally to breathe. 

But Mom was as stubborn and determined as her disease. She wasn’t about to lose mobility and independence without a fight. Whenever I visited, she greeted me with her latest to-do list: laundry and groceries, reorganizing items in the kitchen for easier access, setting up her bedside table at night. We tracked the delivery of a seat for the shower and an extension to raise the toilet seat, while three-month-old Ricky sat nearby in his bouncy seat, swatting at toys. We ordered simple pull-on clothes so that Mom wouldn’t need to manage zippers and snaps, while four-month-old Ricky napped in his snap-on onesie. A physical therapist came to help Mom work the muscles she could still control, while I fed six-month-old Ricky his first solid foods.

But for every to-do item, there was one that didn’t make the list. No reminiscing about Mom’s life when she was a new mom. No sharing my excitement and doubt as I entered each new stage of early motherhood. There was no room for us to consider the challenge of balancing teaching and oboe practicing with caring for a baby, not to mention caring for a sick mother. And there was no chance to explore thoughts and emotions, hers or mine; no expression of sadness, regret, fear, or anger.

As her illness progressed, and she lost the ability to move her arms and legs, the physical act of talking also became harder. A specialized computer provided a last glimpse of hope. With a reflective dot on her forehead, Mom could tilt her head to choose letters or words from a list on the screen. Then the computer uttered the words aloud, restoring, in some sense, Mom’s ability to speak. But each precise movement took intense effort, only to trigger a voice that sounded robotic. By the time she died, one month before Ricky’s first birthday, Mom could only say goodbye with her eyes.

For months after her death, my grief ran cold, hollow, and silent. When the chill began to thaw, and Mom’s presence slowly returned as a warmth in the heart, the silence persisted. But one day, after toddler Ricky erupted in a torrent of “Why? Why? Why?” I blurted the universal parental cry of desperation, “Because I said so!” That same moment, another phrase sprang to mind. “So you can ask questions!” And I whispered, “Oh, wow. Mom used to say that.”

My breath caught to hear her voice again, no longer thin and slurred, but strong and brisk, healthy and young. “So you can ask questions…” I mouthed the words silently, tasting them, trying them on. For a moment I recalled my childish confusion: Why did Mom want me to ask questions? Then my mouth relaxed into a smile. I now understood the frustration and humor tucked beneath her words.