The recording we never made
My mother died of cancer in 2009. I have recordings of her voice, but not one of her praying the Rosary. She was a hospital chaplain, a woman who spent her working life praying with people at the end of theirs, and praying was the thing she did most. In 2009, capturing a voice and being able to find it again years later simply wasn’t something an ordinary family could do.
The idea came from a friend. Janet Miller, now a member of our development team, had recorded her own family praying the Rosary together, and when I heard those recordings I could not stop thinking about them. Around the same time there was a great deal of talk about praying the Rosary alongside celebrities. All I could think was that I would rather pray it with my aunt: my mother’s older sister, and the voice still on this earth that sounds most like hers.
There is a second absence, and it is the one families tend not to see coming. I would give anything to have recordings of my own children praying the Rosary in their young voices. Children’s voices change without anyone noticing, and nobody warns you which year was the last one that sounded like that. Both of those recordings were possible, once. Nobody thought to make them.
So this is not really an app about technology. It is the thing I wish someone had handed our family twenty years ago, and it is built as much for a family in the middle of raising children as for one that has already lost somebody.
