In this final episode, I talk about my mom's final voicemail and life since her funeral. For months, I found myself reaching for my phone on Mondays and Thursdays, the days we usually spoke. The absence of her calls created a negative space in my routine where her voice had been. I would catch myself thinking, "I should tell Mom about this," before remembering she was gone. 

In the end, what remains when everything else falls away is the actual love we managed to create together, day by day, call by call, reaching across all the silences between us.

Thank you for joining me on this journey through "The Silence Between Hello." If you'd like to learn more about my work or connect with me, you can find me at jennyskoog.com or on Substack! The soundtrack for this podcast is called “The Way The Wind Blows” and was produced by Simon Jomphe Lepine. Special thanks to my husband James for his sound editing, encouragement, and inspiration throughout this project, and our pup Frankie, who snuggled in with emotional support.

In November 2019, three years before Mom died, I recorded a conversation with both of my parents at their kitchen table in Minnesota. It captures something different than the voicemails - the rhythm of their sixty-year marriage, my father's quiet presence, the ordinary moments that make up a family. Mom’s sense of responsibility for others' well-being was central to her worldview. It shaped how she mothered, how she participated at church, and how she approached marriage. Love, for her, was bound up with duty, with putting others first, with being perpetually available and attentive to needs.

The first time I heard mom forget who she was calling, I panicked. The woman who had dialed my number countless times over decades suddenly wasn't sure who was on the other end of the line. Or rather, who would be listening to her message later. I'd been noticing small changes in her memory since around 2017. Mom wasn't just forgetting details; she was losing the thread of her own actions, her own intentions.

In our family, physical affection wasn't common. I don't remember hugging my parents as a child. The standard greeting between church members was a handshake accompanied by the phrase "God's Peace." When I left the faith, the mutual greeting stopped, which created an awkward vacuum in familial interactions. In addition to new traditions like bear hugs in place of handshakes, my long-distance relationship with Mom required careful navigation. Calls every Monday and Thursday. Flowers. Handmade aprons. Gym sneakers. Saying "I love you," and hearing those rare words repeated back to me. All of it felt foreign at first, almost transgressive. But over time, it became our new ritual, replacing what had been lost with something more honest for both of us.

I've spent much of my adult life running from the limitations of small-town life. I fled to big cities, sought education, built a career. Mom's voicemails remind me that there's wisdom in the slow life. The constancy of her check-ins—her way of maintaining connection across our separate geographies—became the thread that kept us tethered through the years. Not the shared faith we once had, not the physical proximity of family, but these moments of reaching across distance to say, simply: I'm still here. I still care where you are. I still want to know how you're doing.

How do you tell someone you love that their deepest conviction—the organizing principle of their entire life—is something you no longer believe? At some point, I realized that I needed to disappear into the crowds of the world and begin my life. Start again. Maybe for the first time.

We often don't recognize the value of everyday communications until they're gone. These voicemails - mundane, repetitive, sometimes frustrating - have become precious artifacts of a complicated love.