Hearing voice of the one you love can be medicine for hurting heart

By David McElroy · October 24, 2018

Humans seem to be programmed to have a deep need to hear the voice of someone we love, even if we don’t consciously know that.

A voice can be healing, not just in a symbolic ways, but a literal way, too. At Northwestern University, psychologist Theresa Pape experimented with patients in comas. She split coma patients into two groups which were similar in their degree of seriousness. Each person is the test group had the voice of someone he or she loved played repeatedly in his or her hospital room. The control group received only routine treatment.

Pape found that the patients who heard the voice of a loved one came out of the coma more quickly than the very similar patients in the other group. Something about the voice of love helped bring them back to conscious life.

I’m thinking about this tonight because of a recording I stumbled upon. There was nothing momentous about what she said. She wasn’t even talking about love or the sort of thing we like to remember about such relationships.

But her voice reached across time and space and pierced my heart.

It wasn’t her specific words. It wasn’t the content. It was just the sound of her voice. And I played it again. Then again. And again.

This sent me on a search for other odd snippets that might have her voice. I found several. Some were recent. Some were from before I even knew her. And even though she isn’t in my life anymore, I couldn’t tear myself away from listening to her voice over and over.

I’ve fallen in love before without seeing a woman in person, but it’s always a voice that confirms what my heart already knew. When I hear a woman’s voice, I seem to know far more about her than I should.

I wish I still had recordings of my family from when I was young. We had cassette tape recorders very early, mostly because my father used them in his work. So we made a lot of tapes of ourselves. I can remember recording hours and hours of my thoughts when I was young. I’d give anything to hear what I sounded like and what I talked about.

I wouldn’t like everything about myself then and I would hear things in all of us that I think would sadden me now.

I wish I had recordings of my parents. I wish I had recordings of my grandparents. My grandfather used to tell me amazing stories of his life growing up as a poor country boy. I can still hear his voice in my memory, but I’ll never hear it in my ears. (He was a brilliant and educated man, though he never went past the sixth grade in a school.)

I wish now that I had recorded mundane slices of life with people all along the way. I think that would be useful today in helping me to faithfully reconstruct the truth of what really happened as I slowly became the person I am today.

You know these movies — mostly old science fiction films — in which someone’s voice opens a door or vault? I don’t know whether other people’s hearts function the same way, but a voice can activate something in my heart and open it.

For me, the right voice is a key that slides into the hardened lock of my heart and opens it right up, almost against my will. The lock on a front door can’t resent the key which matches the lock and opens the door. Neither can my heart resent the voice that opens the lock on my heart completely against my will.

There aren’t many voices which matter to us, but we ought to listen to them more often. We need to pay attention to them while we still can.

I need love and understanding and affection in my life, but I also have a serious need for a calm and soothing voice — not just some random person, not a radio or television personality, not whoever sits at the desk next to me.

No, I have the need for one voice. Whether I like it or not, whether it’s rational or not, whether it’s helpful or not. For better or worse, I still need her voice, at least for now.

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A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

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