The voice you will want back

Picture a man in his fifties who has never deleted one voicemail. Illustrative, but you probably know someone like him. It's eleven seconds long, from his mother, from 2017: "Hi honey, it's Mom, nothing important, call me back." He's moved it across three phones. Once a year, on her birthday, he plays it in the car.

Eleven seconds, nothing important. It may be the most valuable file he owns.

Nearly half of us already have this regret

In 2022, YouGov asked 6,090 American adults about this. 47 percent said they regret not recording or documenting a conversation with someone close to them who has since died. Only a third had recorded such a conversation, and most hadn't. And 44 percent said they'd like someone to preserve conversations with them.¹

That's a big, representative poll, and it's about as close as survey research gets to measuring a lump in the throat. Most families mean to do it. Most don't, because there's always next month.

I know this one personally. My father died right around the time my first daughter was born. We had good conversations in his last week. I still keep thinking about everything he could have passed on.

“I was inspired to create this product because of the death of my father.”

Patrick Donahue, on The Aging Well Podcast

I said that at the very start of an episode of The Aging Well Podcast this month.² It is still the most honest answer I have to why Porchlight exists.

Holding on is normal now

For much of the twentieth century, the standard advice about grief was to "let go": work through it, detach, move on. That changed in 1996 with a book called Continuing Bonds, which argued from research that keeping a connection to someone who has died is normal and often healthy, not a sign that grief has gone wrong.³ Talking to them at the grave, keeping their sweater, playing their voicemail on their birthday: these are ordinary ways the bond carries on.

A sociologist who interviewed bereaved people about the digital traces of their loved ones, the texts, voicemails and videos, found that people take real comfort in them. She also found something she called the fear of second loss: the dread that a phone will break or a platform will shut down and take the voice with it.⁴ That was a small qualitative study, and I want to be careful. Nobody has shown in a trial that listening to a recorded voice improves grief. What the research does show is that people value these recordings intensely, and are afraid of losing them.

The fear of second loss is real. The answer is copies the family owns.

The voice is the part a summary can't save

Families usually have the facts somewhere. Dates, places, the outline of a career. What they almost never have is how the person sounded telling it: the pause before the punch line, the accent that never left, the word only they used. That's what the man in the car is playing on his mother's birthday. As I said on a podcast this month, "Your voice is who you are."

The Dignity Therapy research is relevant here too. Bereaved relatives of people who left a legacy document said overwhelmingly that it helped them grieve and would remain a comfort.⁵ That was a written document. A recording keeps the words and the voice saying them.

Recordings die too. Plan for it.

Here's the uncomfortable part. Digital recordings aren't permanent. They live on phones that get lost, in accounts that get closed, and on services that get sold. I grew up on MySpace, and when the company migrated its storage years ago, a huge archive of uploaded music was lost for good, including songs from my high school years. On the podcast I put it this way:

“Nothing is set in stone, but paper lasts longer than computer.”

Patrick Donahue, on The Aging Well Podcast

So if you record someone, plan for the recording to outlive whatever app made it:

1. Get the original files. Not just a link to a streaming page. The actual audio files, downloaded.
2. Keep two copies in places the family controls. A computer and a drive, or a computer and a shared family folder.
3. Print the words. A transcript on paper, or a printed book, is the copy most likely to be on a shelf in fifty years.
4. Label everything. Who's talking, when, and what about. "Audio 0347.m4a" means nothing to a grandchild in 2060.
5. Tell people where it is. A recording nobody can find might as well not exist.

What to record, if you only get a few

If you are not sure where to start, these are the recordings families tell me they treasure most. None of them takes long.

• Their name for you. Ask them to tell a short story about you as a child. You'll get your name in their voice, and a memory you may not have.
• A how-to. How they made the pie, fixed the fence, tied a fly. Their instructions, in their words.
• A story they always told. The one everyone rolls their eyes at. It will be the one you want most.
• Advice. "What would you tell your great-grandchildren?" People are often surprisingly direct.
• A song or a laugh. Even thirty seconds of them singing along, or laughing at a joke, is something you can't get back later.

Do it while it's still easy

About half of assisted-living residents are 85 or older, and more than four in ten live with dementia.⁶ Voices change. Memory changes. The relaxed, funny, long-story version of someone is often there for a shorter window than families assume. That's not a reason to panic. It is a reason to start this season instead of next year.

You don't need special equipment. Our guide to recording a parent's voice explains how with any phone.

When the voice is already changing

Some families read this and think they have already missed the window. A parent's memory is slipping, or their speech has slowed, and the long funny stories don't come the way they used to. Record anyway. A voice saying a few words, a laugh, a song they still know all the way through: these are worth keeping, and they are often still there long after the long stories have faded. The Cochrane review of reminiscence in dementia found no evidence that it harms people living with dementia,⁷ so gentle, short sessions are a reasonable thing to try.

Keep the pressure off. Don't quiz. "Do you remember?" can feel like a test. "Tell me about" or simply playing an old song and seeing what comes is kinder. And remember that other people hold stories too. Siblings, old friends and long-time neighbors can record what they remember about your parent, so the story is still told, just by more than one voice. We wrote about that in life stories when someone can no longer tell their own.

Where Porchlight fits

Porchlight was built by someone who wishes he had more of his father's voice. A resident answers questions read aloud on a tablet. Every answer is kept as the original audio and a transcript. The family gets a private page where they can listen and download the recordings to keep their own copies, because we don't want to be the only place a voice lives. They can send a voice note back that the resident hears. And there's an optional printed memory book, because paper lasts.

If you have someone whose voice you'd miss, the best time to record it was years ago. The second best is this week, with whatever you have in your pocket.