My mother died some time ago, peacefully, in her sleep. She didn’t even know she was sick. It came as little surprise anyway, for she was nearing her mid-eighties and had long ago made peace with the looming end. She left behind myself, my three sisters, two cats, and my father.
My sisters were scattered to the winds, spread throughout the world. Doris was in London, Isabel was in Spain, Dominique was in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My father and I were still here at home in a little suburb on the outskirts of Orlando. My father lived in our childhood home, and despite my busy work schedule, I visited him weekly. My sisters hadn’t seen mom or dad in seven years before mom’s funeral. Mom did everything for dad. She was his cook, his friend, his cleaner. After he retired, dad wasn’t useful for much more than a joke, and it got worse when he started showing signs of dementia. Mom got cancer for the first time after that, and she started recording.
She recorded cassette tape after cassette tape of stories from her life, about her youth in Baltimore (having come to America after her parents fled the Nazis), about her meeting and falling in love with my father, and about how she felt watching each of her children growing up. She didn’t want my father to ever be without her. She beat the cancer and lived another 15 years, but she kept the tapes. Before she died, I digitized them and put them on an iPod for dad. Every time I visited, he asked for mom. I’d play him one of her tapes. When we weren’t listening to her voice, he’d call out requests to her and little silly questions, and either I or his nurse would respond, but when we weren’t there, he’d call for her anyway.
“Katrina”, my dad would beckon, “what’s the name of the man in my cowboy movies?”, but no one would respond, and then dad would call me, tell me about it, and ask if I knew why mom was mad at him. It was breaking his heart, and it happened four times a week. I had to do something to help dad. I couldn’t move in with him, he refused to ask me for help. He would tell me “that’s your mom’s job, kid”. No matter what I told him, I couldn’t get him to understand that mom was gone. I installed cameras in his house, and I would listen to him ask mom for things all day. I had to know if he was asking for something important. It quickly became clear that everything dad asked mom was either very basic questions like “Katrina! What year did Back To The Future come out?” or “Katrina! Could you turn on the lights for me?”. I remarked to Doris on the phone one day that it was a shame mom’s name wasn’t Alexa.
So it seemed like a miracle when I saw the newest brand of smart speakers, a new brand that allowed you to set the wake phrase to any three syllable word or phrase. “That’s neat”, I thought, as I scrolled on the phone in my father’s guest bathroom. “Katrina, could you change the TV to CNN?” my father said from the living room. It suddenly hit me.
Katrina.
He might not even know it wasn’t her. I did more research into these new speakers, and they had an AI voice training feature. It would allow you to upload clips of someone’s voice and generate an approximation of their voice for the speaker’s virtual assistant features. The more recordings you had of a voice, the better and more authentic the voice would sound. I had one hundred hours of mom’s voice, and I was going to give it back to my father.
It worked spectacularly. My father was happier, he was remembering the days a little better, and I didn’t feel like I had to constantly check in on dad. After a few weeks, I stopped checking the cameras, I didn’t call him every night- I didn’t feel like my dad needed as much attention, because as far as he was concerned, mom was back. They had never really spent a lot of time in the same room, so when dad called for Katrina and mom’s voice came out of the kitchen, it was like she was really there.
It was Mother’s Day last week, and my girlfriend wanted me to come with her to brunch and meet her mother. Unfortunately, this would mean missing my Sunday visit with dad for the first time since mom died. He had been doing so much better. It felt like he was ready and could handle a weekend without my visit. His nurse always came an hour after me anyway, he would only be alone an extra hour, and he had what he thought was mom.
An hour into my drive with my girlfriend to her parent’s house in Pittsburgh, I looked at my phone to see six missed calls from dad’s nurse. I called her back immediately. She was at the hospital. Dad had suffered a heart attack and died. He hadn’t called 911 on his cell phone. He hadn’t used his senior alert button. He was dead when the nurse found him. She found him in his recliner. Mom had died in her sleep. Had dad been so lucky? Out of morbid curiosity, I pulled up the camera recordings from his living room.
There dad sat, alive, ten minutes after I was supposed to have arrived at his house. He sat straight up in his chair and his face and arms fell limp. I could see his mouth move. His final words? I unmuted the video.
“Katrina, I’m having a heart attack, call an ambulance!”
And my mom’s voice came in, full and joyous: “I’m not able to help you with that”
“Katrina, I’m dying!”
“I’m not able to help you with that, try asking me to turn on the lights”
The End