The loudest voices

If you follow me on Instagram, you might remember during the 8–27 challenge when I wrote about voices.

After Jesus was betrayed, he stood before both Pilate and Herod, who found no fault in him, certainly nothing worthy of death. They wanted to set him free, but it says in Luke 23:23 that the Jews “were instant with loud voices … and the voices of them … prevailed.”

Jesus’ own disciples had already fled, so there was no one there to defend him. No one to be on his side. No one to counteract the loud voices. The loudest voices were the only ones that mattered.

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I’ve been spending my weekdays with my mother, caring for her while my dad is in rehab. That means a lot of time wandering around her house, waiting for her to get ready in the morning. Things take a little longer when you’re 88.

Going to my parents’ house is like visiting the museum of my life, especially because my mother does not throw anything away—not in a hoarder kind of way, but she has kept a LOT of the little mementos from my 62 years on earth. On the kitchen windowsill she has the little glass bunch of flowers I bought for her on my fifth-grade trip to Williamsburg, Virginia.

The stuffed bunny made by Great-Aunt Mabel sits on the bed in the guest room, atop the goose-down-filled comforter made by Great-Aunty Ann, who saved the goose down from birds her husband shot until she had enough to make this comforter. Can you imagine the patience required? That was a whole different lifetime.

There is a can on the dresser in the guest room that a student made for my dad many years ago. He was famous for giving what came to be known as “canned speeches” to his classes, sharing general advice for life. I was in his chemistry and physics classes, and I heard quite a few. So many of his former students still remember them and talk about them today.

There are photographs of my family members four generations back, and a picture of Carl I., the first in my dad’s family to come to America through Ellis Island. They even have a photocopy of the page in the book where he was registered. His vocation is listed as shoemaker and he was from Vienna, Austria.

There is the watercolor painting of my grandfather’s farm, the one on which my mother grew up and where I spent so much of my childhood. The painting was done when he was still a dairy farmer.

Eventually he switched to vegetables and had a farm market up on the highway. My brothers and cousins and I would walk across the fields to the market, where Aunt Ethel would give us a bag of cherries for the walk back to the house. If we took a shortcut through the rye, my cousin Mark’s eyes would swell almost shut and we thought it was the greatest. Well, maybe not Mark.

As I was wandering around the living room last week, I came across a picture of my grandparents plus two of my grandfather’s sisters—my great aunts Ethel and Ann—on a trip to see the cherry blossoms in Washington, DC.

Aunty Ann always wore a hat and a dress, never pants. She was quite proper like that. Those four people were foundational in my life. We spent a lot of time with them when I was a child; definitely every holiday, but also a lot of times in between. They are a large part of who I am, how I value family, and why it is so easy for me to see the Lord as the giver of life and all things good. I learned so much from them. They are all long gone.

While I was looking at their photo, I remembered each one of them. I could hear my grandfather’s voice telling me not to go in the barn because I might get hurt in there. And stay away from the pond. I heard Aunt Ethel’s voice laughing. I heard Aunty Ann’s voice telling a story about her husband, Uncle Warren.

Then I looked at my grandmother, smiling as she always was, and I realized I could not hear her voice. I stood for a long time trying to bring it to mind, wanting to hear her saying something, anything.

I can remember things she said. She would make up funny words that we all still use today, like herditerary instead of hereditary. She was once putting on lipstick before we left the house; she would swipe it on, then blot with a tissue. Are you old enough to remember when that was the way women did it? She commented, “Put it on, take it off,” and giggled at how silly it was.

I remember when she told me about having a lot of cash in the farmhouse during pick-your-own strawberry season, so she would put it in a brown paper bag marked “parsley” and stash it in the freezer. I remember her telling us about her mother, Great-Grandmom Newman, saying, “You’ve got to know more than a dog to learn him anything,” and “You can get used to anything. You can even get used to hanging if you hang long enough.”

But I don’t remember her voice. I can’t hear the sound of it in my head like I do the others, and that has made me sad. It’s like grief hitting all over again, many years after the fact. She—and all the others of that generation—played such a huge role in forming me into the person I am. They live on in me and I don’t want them to be lost to time.

Then I remembered a CD my dad gave me a long time ago. At one holiday, he set up a recorder in the living room. No one knew it was there. Daddy just turned it on and recorded all the conversation for about a half hour. And I can hear them all. My grandparents, the two great aunts, our family friend Stella of the cheesecake fame, Aunt Mary and Uncle George, the cousins.

What a gift—the voices from my past. The loudest voices that still prevail, still speaking into my heart and mind the blessing of a loving family and the goodness of God.