A week or two ago, one of my therapy clients was talking about regrets related to her late mother, which of course stirred up memories and feelings for me about my mom, who died from complications of cancer in 2020. After that therapy session and a few other coincidental things that were bringing up grief for me, I suddenly realized that I may have old voicemails from my mother in my phone. I am not sure what prevented me from realizing that prior to recently, but I immediately started searching in my phone, and sure enough, there were a few messages from her in my “Deleted Messages” folder.

Because I hadn’t realized the voicemails were still there (I regularly delete messages and didn’t know they were still stored in “Deleted Messages”), I hadn’t heard them since my mother left them in 2018, 2019, and 2020. I listened to a couple and was flooded by sadness, grief, and longing to talk to my mom again. One message in particular, from New Year’s Eve 2019, was so painful to hear, as in it my mom said “2020 sounds pretty good.” She had said similar things a few times around the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020, as the prior year had been challenging due to her declining health, contentious U.S. politics, and other things, and she was optimistic that 2020 would be better. Little did she know that 2020 would bring the COVID pandemic and her further decline and death from multiple myeloma. It was one of the worst years ever for our family.

I often think of my mother and wish I could call her, but hearing her voice in those messages was so powerful. It took me right back to the moments when she left the voicemails, bringing up memories of small day-to-day things and “bigger” events, both good and bad. It got me thinking about how profoundly sound can trigger emotions.

A Little Science

There are a few reasons auditory stimuli are emotionally evocative. One is that the human brainstem is hardwired to respond to certain sounds for survival reasons–think of the jolt of fear you get when you hear a crash in the middle of the night that wakes you from a sound sleep. So, sounds can trigger fear, anger, love, and other strong feelings that can help us react.

Another reason is that we have “mirror neurons,” brain cells that are activated both when we perform a task (e.g., talking about something personal while tearing up) and when we observe someone else performing the same task (e.g., seeing someone else cry while telling us something). Mirror neurons allow us to feel emotionally connected to others.

Additionally, the ways in which our brain stores memories create this strong connection between sound and feeling. We are conditioned to associate certain sounds with certain times in our lives. Also, one type of memory called “episodic memory,” which has to do with long-term memories about specific experiences we’ve had, is often vivid and emotional, allowing us to re-experience things we’ve done. The hippocampus, a part of the brain, is involved in storing, processing, and retrieving long-term factual and spatial memories, and it is also a part of the limbic system, which controls our emotions and our fight-flight-freeze reactions.

Reflecting on Sound and Grief

It’s so interesting–and sometimes very difficult–how sounds and other stimuli can trigger strong feelings and grief. Anyone who has lost a loved one knows that a seemingly innocuous or trivial activity, like watching a rerun of a TV show that has nothing overtly to do with the person we’ve lost, can cause us to be flooded with emotion: We suddenly remember watching the show with our lost loved one, or someone in the show is wearing a sweater that reminds us of the person. Given that unrelated stimuli can bring strong feelings, I guess it should be no surprise that hearing my mother’s voice and particularly listening to messages she left in the last 8 months of her life would stir up a ton.

So, I’m sitting tenderly with my emotions and memories and have tried to give myself time to listen to the messages again when I was feeling more prepared. Be kind and gentle with yourself if you are also experiencing grief and missing someone close to you. My heart is with you if you are holding grief, too.