She Has Not Deleted Her Mother’s WhatsApp Messages. Her Phone Broke Last Year and She Almost Lost Them All.

Nadia’s mother died in March 2021, on a Thursday morning, in a hospital room that Nadia was not allowed to be in because of the visiting restrictions at the time. She sat in the car park below for four hours with a cold cup of coffee and waited. A nurse she had never met called her mobile to tell her. She sat in the car for another hour after that before she felt ready to drive herself home.

She has thought about that phone call most days since.

Her mother had been a frequent WhatsApp user in the years before she got ill. Voice notes, mostly. Long meandering ones about things she had seen on the news, or the neighbours, or a recipe she thought Nadia should try even though Nadia had told her several times she did not really cook. She sent photographs without any explanation — a flower in the back garden, a sunset she happened to catch through the kitchen window, once a biscuit she thought looked funny. Nadia would reply quickly, usually while doing something else, one eye on her laptop. A few words. A thumbs up. A laughing emoji. She was always busy. She was always about to call back properly later.

The last message in the thread is from February 2021, five weeks before she died. A voice note, forty-one seconds long. Nadia has listened to it many times but not recently. She knows what it says. She does not always have it in her to hear the voice.

Last autumn her phone started failing. The screen would freeze mid-use, the battery dropped from full to flat in under an hour, and one morning it simply would not turn on at all. She took it to a repair shop on the high street and the man behind the counter told her the motherboard was going and she would most likely need a new handset. Before he said anything else about costs or timelines, she asked whether everything on it could be transferred to a new phone. He said it depended on the extent of the damage. She explained about the voice notes, and the photographs, and what they were. He said he would do everything he could.

She stood on the pavement outside the shop afterwards and noticed her hands were shaking.

She has thought about that a lot since. The shaking. She had lost her mother. She had learned, slowly and imperfectly, to carry that. But the thought of losing the voice notes was something else entirely, and she could not explain the difference clearly, except that her mother’s voice was still in the phone and she was not ready for it not to be. The recordings were not her mother. She knew that. But they were the closest thing she still had to hearing her without having to try to remember.

Everything transferred. The messages are intact. She backed them up three separate times in the week that followed.

She is thirty-seven now. It has been four years. She still finds it difficult to describe what grief actually feels like from the inside, because from the inside it does not feel like sadness exactly. It feels more like weather. It is just there, most of the time, and some days it sits heavier, and some days she forgets to notice it, and then something small happens — a voice note, a shaking hand, a man in a repair shop saying it depends — and it is right there again.

She still has not listened to the February voice note since last Christmas.

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