"Preserving voicemails helps modern grieving process" by Beth Teitell | Globe Staff, November 20, 2013
If grief has a modern form, mourning the lost voicemail is surely it. The very technology that allows bereaved friends and relatives to feel, if only temporarily, closer to the departed can just as easily sweep away that connection.
There are ways to permanently save voicemails, but most people do not think like archivists. Messages disappear in system upgrades. They are deleted by companies intent on keeping subscribers’ inboxes within preset limits. They go missing during carrier-to-carrier switches. Sometimes they are there, somewhere, but wrongly believed irretrievable.
Within the past decade, voicemail has become reviled as a time waster in the age of texts and e-mail. But at the same time, holding onto a lost loved one’s voice has become so important that many people save and resave messages for years to prevent automatic deletion. Others pay to keep alive a dead relative’s phone contract so they can listen — and listen again — to the outgoing message.
“I called her phone every day, sometimes multiple times,” said Tom Clancy, 44, who looked forward to being alone at some point during his day so he could hear his late mother’s cheerful “Hey, it’s groovy Grammy.”
“I felt for some reason she’d call back, even though I knew she wouldn’t,” said Clancy, a bartender and student in medical dosimetry at Suffolk University, who took joy in hearing the messages his mom’s friends left on her machine after her funeral. “It was like getting a hug.”
But his mom’s phone belonged to the company she had worked for, and after a year, the Braintree construction firm, completely unaware of the phone’s significance, asked for it back.
“Sometimes I smell someone wearing her perfume and that brings her back a little,” Clancy said, “but that voice, you can’t replace it.”
That power of the human voice is recognized by lay people and professionals alike....
The psychiatry department says it brings you back to what was good in the relationship, but the whole thing feels a bit morbid to me.
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