Rachel E. Watson

I recently "met" someone who died before I was born. My paternal grandmother, Donna Marie Watson.

In this digital age, it's easy to take for granted the comparatively recent luxury of recorded sounds.

The first known voice recording was produced on a phonoautograph in 1857. It was more than another century before audio recording became a practical capability for the average American household.

Now, it's as ubiquitous as the smartphones in our hands. It's a marvel, then, that not all that long ago, hearing your deceased relative's voice would have been impossible.

Donna Marie Watson (then Hammond), center, is shown with her two younger sisters, Mary and Pat, circa early 1940s. (Photo from Suzanne Shaw)

My Grandma Donna died in October 1982 of complications from diabetes. In 1979, after she had lost her vision, she enrolled in a School for the Blind at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

My Aunt Kathleen describes it as a "drab place with cinder-block walls," which mattered only to sighted visitors such as my aunt and my dad. They didn't really want to leave her there on the first day; according to my aunt, they wiled away time afterward just sitting by the river, contemplating the sorrow they felt over putting her in a boarding school. They were just 20 and 21. Grandma was 49.

The good news is Grandma learned a lot while she was there. Her instructors showed her how to use tape recorders to "write" letters to family members, which she then mailed in place of written communication.

In the mailers in which the tapes were enclosed, the instructors included directions for family members to record over the cassettes with new messages for the students to listen to in return. Aunt Kathleen said she always hesitated to follow the directions because she didn't want to lose Grandma Donna's original recordings.

So, instead, Aunt Kathleen saved the tapes all those years. She recently had a friend convert a couple of the "letters" from analog to digital so the rest of the family could enjoy listening to Grandma Donna.

I was astonished by how familiar and comforting her voice sounded, and how much her tone and inflection is a perfect mixture of my three aunts', her daughters', voices.

As the tears formed in my eyes over the miracle of "meeting" a woman I've always missed, I thought about how she must have been feeling:

• Handwritten letters were the norm, so it must have been a big leap of faith for her to switch to a taped-letter format to communicate with her grown children. She is recorded sounding nervous that she must speak to an empty room, taping a one-sided conversation.
• Did she worry that she wouldn't be able to edit her "first draft" in the same way that you can do when you're using a pen and paper or typing the letter on a typewriter?
• Did she wonder why the instructors were having her practice this skill instead of phone communication? Was she already contemplating her mortality and hoping to leave part of herself behind?

Thank you for reading

Note: This blog entry is Part I of a series. Check back here for the concluding chapters.