Copyright 2024 by Jack A. Urquhart

March 8, 2024: For Dillon on what would’ve been the 45th anniversary of his birth.

For years, I kept recordings of your voice — tapes dating back to preschool and cassettes passed on by your childhood speech therapist. On one, I remember you stammered heartbreakingly, “I-can’t-get-my–words–out.” A condition that lingered, I think, even after you’d conquered your vocal dysfluence.

Later, the recordings were more surreptitious: you and your sister captured at play — she sing-songing to her Trolls and Pretty Ponies, you in a frenzy of onomatopoeia, kabooming, and kapowing with your Transformers and Ninja Turtles. All this was years before I splintered the family (and so much more). But those records are lost now, the accidental detritus of a half-dozen, haste-driven cross-country and state-spanning moves.

Still later, I kept an archive of your voicemail messages on my cellphone. Such a lovely, vaguely drowsy cadence to your young man’s voice — as if you were awakening from or just before falling into sleep. A full register lower than my own, it was — musical and distinctly masculine — more like your maternal grandfather’s than anything I could’ve bequeathed.

I recall your penchant for hyperbolic messaging in the winding trail of our separate ways — I, on one side of the continent, you, on the other, lamenting “our Colorado golden days of yore.” How strange, I remember thinking, that you, so dismissive of pretense, would employ flowery, derivative language. But then, your own words always came with difficulty, didn’t they?

There were dozens of your rambling messages on my phone, some longer than our actual connected conversations. Sometimes, in the aftermath of your passing, I would play them back in private, desperate to recapture that small part of you. Until, in a blundering, thick-fingered moment, I deleted the entire file and sat inconsolable in the wake of your second death.

Nowadays, your voice is lost to me except in dreams. But you do not visit me there as often as before. Perhaps you’ve moved on — on to new enterprises? I do not know how things operate where you are. I only know I loved you not long enough or well enough to prolong your stay here. And that I hope someday to hear you speak again from across the ever-diminishing distance between us, “Hello, Dad.”

Such a lovely, vaguely drowsy sound, your voice, dear son.