“My mother was sick for most of my life. She had nineteen years of treatment for Hodgkin’s disease. But she was the kind of mother that would come home from chemotherapy, vomit in the bathroom, and then still cook dinner for all of us. And she did this while getting a PhD in clinical psychology. She just loved being a mother. Even after the chemotherapy destroyed her ovaries, she adopted two more children. She passed away I was twenty-five. Shortly after she died, I realized that I couldn’t remember her voice. I’ve just never been an oral person. It was maddening. It felt almost disrespectful. I had all these old videos of her, but they were silent. So I thought I’d just never know what she sounded like. Then last night, my sister found a small cassette in an old box. It was from my mother’s answering machine. And she picked up the phone during one of the recordings. It was a month before she died. She was so sick at the time. But she said to the person: ‘Nicholas is coming to visit me, so I stayed up late baking, and I’m waking up early to clean.’”