I tried to remember my mother’s voice yesterday. I couldn’t.
This scared me more than anything has scared me in years.
She died three years ago. I remember her face clearly. Her hands. The way she walked. But her voice? It slips away like water through fingers. I reach for it. It’s not there.
This is a strange kind of theft. Memory steals from us slowly. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Just a little bit every day. Until one morning you realize something precious is gone.
I remember what she said. The words are still there. But the sound of those words? The exact way she pronounced my name? The melody of her laugh when something truly amused her? These are fading. Becoming shadows of shadows.
My mother had a specific laugh for kitchen disasters. When rice burned or curry spilled, she would make this sound—half frustration, half amusement. That laugh could turn a small tragedy into a shared joke. I can describe it. I cannot hear it anymore.
This is what grief does. It doesn’t just take people. It takes pieces of them. Slowly. Over time. The big things stay. The small things disappear. And sometimes the small things were the most important.
I found an old voicemail last month. Her voice. Recorded. Preserved. She was asking if I wanted to come for dinner on Sunday. Nothing special. An ordinary invitation. I listened to it seventeen times.
Her voice sounded different than I remembered. Or maybe I remembered it wrong. This is the cruel trick of memory. Every time we remember something, we change it a little. We are not playing back a recording. We are rebuilding from pieces. And some pieces get lost. Some pieces get replaced with wrong ones.
I am forgetting my mother in ways that feel worse than her death.
My father’s voice is going too. He died when I was twenty. That’s fifteen years of erosion. I remember he told me stories at bedtime. Adventure stories. He made them up as he went along. His voice would change for different characters. Deep for the villain. High for the princess. Silly for the animal friends.
I remember this. But I cannot hear it. The memory is silent now. Like watching a movie with the sound turned off.
Sometimes my body remembers what my mind forgets. My throat still knows the shape it made when I called for my mother from another room. “Ma!” That specific sound. My ears still expect her response. After three years, they still wait for a voice that will never come.
Dreams are the worst. In dreams, their voices return perfectly. Complete. Real. I wake up believing I just heard them. For three seconds, maybe four, they are alive. Then reality crashes back. And the silence becomes unbearable.
I have started noticing other people’s voices more. In restaurants. On buses. Sometimes someone laughs, and my heart stops. For one moment, it sounds exactly like her. I turn around. It’s never her. Just a stranger who borrowed her sound for a second.
What frightens me most is this: I am not just forgetting how they sounded. I am forgetting how I sounded to them. When my mother said my name, it meant something different than when anyone else says it. That meaning existed only between us. Now it exists nowhere.
I tried something strange last week. I tried to speak in my father’s voice. To say things he used to say, the way he used to say them. My throat couldn’t do it. I don’t have the notes anymore. I am a singer who has forgotten the song.
People say the dead live on in our memories. This is supposed to be comforting. But memories are not safe places. Memories are museums where things fade. Where colors lose brightness. Where sounds lose clarity. Where the dead die again and again in small ways.
I keep her photograph on my desk. Her face will never change now. But photographs don’t capture voice. They don’t capture the way she hummed while cooking. The way she sighed when tired. The way she said “hello” when answering the phone—always surprised, as if she didn’t expect anyone to call.
My friend lost his father last year. He asked me when the forgetting starts. I didn’t know what to say. The forgetting starts immediately. You just don’t notice it at first. You’re too busy with grief’s louder sounds. The quiet theft happens underneath.
But maybe—and I have been thinking about this—maybe forgetting is not only loss. Maybe it is also transformation.
I cannot hear my mother’s voice anymore. But her voice changed how I hear everything. The way she laughed taught me to recognize joy in others. The way she comforted me shaped how I comfort people now. Her voice is not in my ears. It is in my responses. In my reactions. In the way I listen to the world.
She is not preserved. She is absorbed.
This does not stop the sadness. Last night, I lay in bed trying to remember her singing. She used to sing old songs while doing housework. Simple songs. I knew all the words once. Now I know none. The songs are gone. The voice that carried them is gone.
I cried. Not loudly. Just tears rolling down. Missing something I cannot even fully remember. Grieving for a sound that exists now only as an absence.
But this morning, I heard a child calling for his mother in the market. “Ma!” The exact sound. The exact need. And I felt something move in my chest. Not my mother’s voice. But the echo of what her voice meant. The feeling of being a child who knew someone would always answer.
That feeling hasn’t faded. That is what remains when sound disappears.
I don’t have her voice. I have what her voice did to me. I don’t have his stories. I have the wonder his stories created. The original is lost. The effect survives.
Maybe this is enough. Maybe this has to be enough.
Tonight I will try again to remember how she said my name. I will fail. I will feel the loss. Then I will say someone else’s name with the same love she used. And in that moment, something of her will continue.
Not her voice. But its purpose.
The sound fades. The love echoes.
That is how we carry the dead. Not by preserving them perfectly. But by letting them change us imperfectly. Forever.