THE FLASH DRIVE

“I was so bereft in my new motherlessness that the significance of what I’d been handed didn’t register.”

On the last night of my mother’s life, I gazed at her bony frame wishing I could lay my head on her shoulder without hurting her. “I’m going to miss telling you everything,” I said, gulping. I was nearly 40, still called her Mommy and relied on her yoga-teacher calm for daily guidance. “You still can,” she said in a hoarse whisper. And I realized: Even more than I would miss talking to her, I’d miss her talking to me.

Five days later, my parents’ house—well, now just my father’s—was teeming with people after the memorial. A woman I didn’t know slipped me a small gift bag containing a card and a silver and blue flash drive. I was so exhausted and overwhelmed and bereft in my new motherlessness that the significance of what I’d been handed didn’t register.

For the next two and a half months, the flash drive sat in the box where I’d stashed all the sympathy cards and gifts while I busied myself trying to do right by my mother. I brought her mother—now daughterless—to live upstairs from me in New York. And I commuted from New York to the Connecticut cottage we’d rented for July and August after my mom told us she wanted a final summer at the beach with her grandsons. Before she died, in May, she’d said, “Go play in the sand for me.” My boys, ages 2 and 4, played. I sat writing thank-you cards and arranging Bubbi’s cable service and audiology appointments.

Finally, 77 days after my mother spoke her last words, I plugged the flash drive into my newly inherited laptop—and was promptly blown away. Preserved in 190 audio recordings was her singular voice. Not the sickly rasp of the end but a velvety tone that simultaneously projected enthusiasm and calm. I had known that, for four years, until the cancer took over, she’d taught a weekly meditation class at Yale Law School, where one of her yoga students was a professor. I hadn’t known the classes were recorded. 

Mouth literally agape at the beach house dining table, I clicked on a file called “Heart Healing,” a favorite of the techniques my mother had taught me. “As you inhale, breathe in the love and the light from the universe to your heart center. Exhale and fill your heart,” she said. My body flooded with familiar comfort. She sounded as though she was speaking to me. “Inhale any pain, sorrow or darkness from your heart to the crown of your head. Exhale it out to the universe.” 

My mom knew pain and sorrow: Her father had led a double life for nearly two decades, having three kids with his former secretary while married to Bubbi. Yoga and meditation helped her make peace with the betrayal. (She loved the Sanskrit word swaha, which she understood to mean “offer it up to the sacred fire,” or surrender, let it go.) She practiced for 35 years and taught for 16. She used to watch my breath and prescribe me meditations to ease energy blockages she perceived. Now here she was, still offering to absorb my hurt. Eager to remain her student, I clicked the play button almost daily and spent whole sessions in tears.

Eventually I decided to use the gift not for meditation instruction but for solace. My sister and I listen to simulate a visit, or when we need guidance or a good cry. Bubbi, who died 30 months after her daughter, could never bear to hear the recordings, but they soothe my dad to sleep every night. And nearly five years in, they continue to soothe me. My mom’s physical absence (no more daily phone debriefings or Thursday sleepovers with her insisting that sofa cushions in the hall is a fine way to spend a night) is easier to bear with her wisdom still present. She was right. I can still talk to her. And she’s still talking to me.

—Sara Pam Neufeld

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Sara Pam Neufeld is a former journalist now working on a memoir; she lives in Astoria, Queens, with her husband and two sons. Every month, subscribers to her free newsletter receive access to one of her mom’s meditation recordings.