The Ghost of Christmas Past

When my sister, the eldest of the three of us, was just six weeks old, my mother's mother was killed in a tragic accident. As a child, I knew her only from the picture in my grandparents' house of her standing behind her father as he held my sister. Over the years, my mother and I have talked about her a lot - how she made excellent cakes and loved shoes and had the kind of hair everyone envied and was just five feet tall but full of spunk. And still I do not know her, but I think of her often and love her in my own way, as an equal an opposite reaction to my grief over her absence.

This summer my mother and sister helped clean out some things from my aunt's house and stumbled upon a bag of old eight millimeter film reels from their childhood. My sister took them to have them transferred to DVD. Emptying the bag at home, she also found a lone cassette tape marked as "Elsie's Voice" which she had transferred to CD.

Tonight she presented my mother and her sister with the CD transfers, still simply marked "Elsie's Voice." Both were overcome, and I was suddenly overcome, too, at the magnitude of the gift - the chance to hear their mother's voice again after it being lost for so many years. Sometimes, we have the strange opportunity to see our parents as ourselves. See them as the children of their parents as we are the children of them. In one heartbreaking moment, I saw her crying as I would cry myself, to get a gift so great as the sound of my mother's voice after the passing of time had made it a mere whisper.