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 resist the key which matches the lock and opens the door. Neither can my heart resist 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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Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It hasn’t happened yet, but there’s a possibility that I might be taking in a fourth feline. A couple of months ago, a cat-loving neighbor asked whether I’d seen a “tuxedo cat” hanging out in the neighborhood. I hadn’t, but this guy eventually wandered past my house a few weeks later — and we haven’t been able to find evidence that he has a home. I’ve been giving him water and food for the last week and he finally let me pet him two nights ago. He’s purred for me two nights in a row and he let me take a low-quality selfie with him Thursday night. Tonight, though, he let me pick him up and bring him inside to look around. This went surprisingly well, as you can see from this photo. I don’t know whether he’ll be joining the family, but I’m certain that Alex, Oliver and Sam would vote no, at least until they get to know him. I’m trying to make certain he doesn’t have a home, but if he does join us, what do you suppose his name will be?

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

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