One Last Conversation, With the Help of A.I. AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast Modern Love

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Episode: One Last Conversation, With the Help of A.I.

Author: The New York Times
Duration: 00:33:20

Episode Shownotes

Madeline de Figueiredo lost her husband, Eli, just a year after they married. After his death, she tried everything she could to reconnect with him: cooking from his recipe book, dancing to playlists he made, watching videos of him and listening to voice mail messages he left her. But her

grief persisted.Then, on what was supposed to be Eli’s 27th birthday, Madeline realized she could use A.I. to recreate his voice and try to talk to him again. On this episode of the “Modern Love” podcast, Madeline tells us what it felt like to hear that recreation of Eli’s voice, and how it changed the way she reconnects with him.This episode is adapted from Madeline’s Modern Love essay from 2024, “Our Last, Impossible Conversation.”We want to hear from you! We’re looking for stories, thoughts and feelings about egg freezing. Are you planning to freeze your eggs? What are you considering? Have you frozen your eggs? What happened, and how do you feel about it now? Leave us a voice mail message on the Modern Love hotline at (212) 589-8962‬. Please include your name, hometown and a callback number.Want to submit your own Modern Love essay to The New York Times? Read how, or consider submitting a Tiny Love Story. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Summary

In this episode of the Modern Love podcast, host Anna Martin explores Madeline de Figueiredo's journey of grief after losing her husband Eli. Engaging in activities to feel close to him, she used A.I. to recreate his voice for a final conversation on what would have been Eli's 27th birthday. This emotional experiment reshaped her understanding of their bond, though the experience brought unexpected pain and highlighted the limits of technology in capturing genuine connection. Ultimately, Madeline found solace in tangible memories and personal expressions like writing letters to Eli, reaffirming that no technology can replace the true essence of a loved one.

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Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_03
love now and love stronger than anything and i love you more than anything

00:00:17 Speaker_01
When someone you love dies, they leave behind little fragments of themselves. There are the physical things, the half-used tube of toothpaste, the shoes still sitting there by the door.

00:00:28 Speaker_01
But there are also these digital things, all the texts, the photos and videos and voicemails right there on your phone.

00:00:35 Speaker_00
I've listened to all the voice recordings now, I want to say dozens if not hundreds of times.

00:00:42 Speaker_01
When Madeline DeFigurado lost her husband Eli, she used those recordings as a way to feel close to him.

00:00:48 Speaker_00
Voicemails he had left me. Hi Maddie, I'm just driving.

00:00:51 Speaker_02
Would you mind not texting me back?

00:00:53 Speaker_00
Cooking with his family and friends.

00:00:55 Speaker_02
Yeah, scrape it, scrape it, scrape it. Good work. Scrape it, scrape it, scrape it, scrape it.

00:01:00 Speaker_00
Playing games with his little cousins at Thanksgiving. us hiking in Puerto Rico and seeing these giant snails on the trail that he was so enamored with.

00:01:11 Speaker_03
Here's Madeline. She's a medium-sized snail.

00:01:15 Speaker_01
All Madeline really wanted was to be with Eli again. And listening to these recordings almost made her feel like she was. Almost, but not quite.

00:01:27 Speaker_00
It's like an unquenchable craving or something. It's like, all I want is to talk to him.

00:01:34 Speaker_01
And so Madeline figured out a way to bring Eli back. From the New York Times, I'm Anna Martin. This is Modern Love. Each week, we bring you stories inspired by the Modern Love column.

00:01:49 Speaker_01
And today's episode is based on Madeline's Modern Love essay, Our Last Impossible Conversation. It's a real life science fiction story, the story of how Madeline used AI to try and talk with Eli one more time. But it didn't go quite like she'd hoped.

00:02:14 Speaker_01
Madeline DeFigurado, welcome to Modern Love. Thank you so much for having me. Okay, I want to start off by getting to know Eli a little bit. Tell me what he was like. I know you two met in college.

00:02:26 Speaker_00
Yes, we were both freshmen in college. We were living in the same dorm. Eli had this very energetic curiosity. The way I think about him now in retrospect is like, you know how when little kids go through their why phase where everything is why, why?

00:02:43 Speaker_00
I feel like Eli never grew out of that phase. He just moved through this world with a total curiosity and a need for answers.

00:02:53 Speaker_00
And so we would like run into each other in the dining hall and while most people were talking about what parties are you going to this week and what professors do you hate, he was asking me questions about my family and my belief systems and my values.

00:03:07 Speaker_00
And you were like, I'm just getting cereal. I was like, I don't know, like I'm just gonna go tie-dye a t-shirt. And then with every answer, there was a, well, why?

00:03:15 Speaker_00
And I think there was something about that that I had just never met someone so committed to knowing me and understanding the people around him.

00:03:23 Speaker_01
Yeah. What else do you remember about him back then?

00:03:27 Speaker_00
He had this, like, gait when he walked that was so distinct. He always looked like he was in a hurry. He kind of, like, leaned forward and didn't really bend his knees when he walked.

00:03:36 Speaker_00
So it was this, like, run, shuffle energy just trying to get to where he's going. And, like, he was wearing this beanie always. Always in the beanie. What kind of beanie? It was, like, this, like, orange, reddish-orange beanie.

00:03:50 Speaker_00
I always thought he looked like a traffic cone. Running his way through campus with the orange beanie. It was just such a signature look of his freshman year in particular.

00:04:00 Speaker_01
Fast-moving traffic cone.

00:04:01 Speaker_00
Fast-moving traffic cone. You could spot him anywhere in the quad.

00:04:06 Speaker_01
On the move. Okay, so you meet Eli your freshman year, you start dating, and I understand that by the end of college, you and Eli were engaged. Was that how you pictured your college experience going?

00:04:21 Speaker_01
Like were you someone who always wanted to get married?

00:04:23 Speaker_00
I was like not somebody who is super eager to get married. It was not something that I felt like compelled to do as a young person or frankly ever. I wanted partnership and companionship. I didn't necessarily want the institution of marriage.

00:04:40 Speaker_00
Had a lot of charged thoughts about what the institution represented and its origins. Sure. For me, like I, my parents didn't get married until they were almost 30. It was not common in my family at all to get married young.

00:04:52 Speaker_00
And it was seen as something that was maybe an act of not prioritizing yourself for your career, especially as a woman. And if you had told me going into college that I would be engaged, leaving college, I would have been entirely mortified.

00:05:07 Speaker_01
So how did that conversation start then? Who brought it up?

00:05:10 Speaker_00
Eli, oh my gosh, he was like driving that marriage train hard.

00:05:16 Speaker_01
Well, tell me about that. When did he first start talking about it?

00:05:19 Speaker_00
He had just picked me up from the airport. I had just flown back from my Thanksgiving and came to Midway Airport in Chicago in his old white Camry and I got in the car and he doesn't drive away.

00:05:32 Speaker_00
He like stays parked and kind of looks at me and is like, I know you have thoughts about marriage generally. What do you think about marrying me though? And kind of like has that like kind of his head's like tilted to the side waiting for my response.

00:05:53 Speaker_00
I think my jaw probably hit the floor and I was kind of like I think my response was I don't think we need to talk about this right now. I think I kind of was trying to punt a little bit. I was like, uh, do is this?

00:06:08 Speaker_00
And he was like, yeah, we don't have to talk about it now, but maybe just think about it and let me know when you're ready to talk about it.

00:06:12 Speaker_01
Okay.

00:06:14 Speaker_00
So I think we had some very long and emotional and messy conversations about what we wanted, why we wanted those things, and what my hesitations were.

00:06:27 Speaker_00
And to a certain degree, I think one thing that Eli really helped me with was finding intuition and trusting that intuition and realizing that all these people might have opinions or judgments for what I do, but I'm the only one who has to do whatever comes next.

00:06:53 Speaker_00
Eli lived his life kind of outside of societal expectations. He didn't really care what people thought about him. Not in like a blasé way or in a rude way, more just in like a self-confidence in what he wanted and needed.

00:07:08 Speaker_00
And he would always tell me, like, you're the only one living your life. Like, you can live it for other people, but at the end of the day, like, this is, it's, it's your life to live.

00:07:20 Speaker_01
You know, you'd had a lot of thoughts about what marriage would be like or might be like, a lot of fears, in fact, I feel like it's not too dramatic to say.

00:07:29 Speaker_01
How did the reality of being married compare to your assumptions about what being married would be like?

00:07:36 Speaker_00
I loved it. Yeah, unexpectedly loved it. And I'm not sure if it was the marriage itself, but I just, I loved being with Eli and watching him, I don't know, like,

00:07:49 Speaker_00
evolve in ways that better took care of me and watching myself adjust to find ways that better suited him and us and our life together. It felt like such a rewarding project.

00:08:08 Speaker_01
When we come back, that project is cut short and how Madeline dealt with it after the break. Welcome back. So Madeline and Eli got married. Then about a year later, Eli decides to go on a trip abroad.

00:08:48 Speaker_01
Madeline didn't know it then, but the day he left for that trip would be the last time she'd see him alive. Madeline told me he died in a hiking accident. Can you tell me what you remember about the day that he passed from your perspective?

00:09:08 Speaker_01
Just tell me whatever you remember from that day or series of days.

00:09:13 Speaker_00
We had scheduled a time to talk and Eli being Eli, never ever was late to calling me, not once. And he always called me first. He always, we always had a call scheduled for like 1230 or something. And he would call me at like 1228.

00:09:27 Speaker_00
Like he always was a few minutes early. Yeah. And so 1230 rolls around and I was like, oh, this is a change. Like I'm actually going to be the one to ring him. And there was almost like, like I almost felt kind of like,

00:09:41 Speaker_00
joy in that, like, haha, I'm going to beat you to it this time. And I called and wasn't able to get ahold of him, which was just so uncharacteristic.

00:09:50 Speaker_00
And it immediately raised kind of a red flag in my mind because he had never missed a call before and wasn't responding to my messages. And my brain immediately kind of like starts swirling and goes to a worst case scenario.

00:10:05 Speaker_00
And yeah, I got a call at four in the morning saying that he had passed. They used that word. They used the word past. And I did not know what it meant. I was like, past a border? Past?

00:10:21 Speaker_00
In my mind, the verb was so ambiguous, given my state of shock, that I could not piece together that it meant died. And I had to literally ask for clarification.

00:10:33 Speaker_01
Oh, God.

00:10:35 Speaker_00
And the crazy thing is the first person I wanted to tell was Eli, right? I mean, that's immediately, I was like, I have to call Eli. And I reached for my phone and I realized, oh, like the person I need to tell, I can't tell.

00:10:50 Speaker_00
And it was almost that kind of like impulse to contact him and realizing not only could I not contact him right now, but I would never be able to contact him again. I think that was actually the moment when I realized that he was gone.

00:11:14 Speaker_01
Did that feeling stay with you of wanting to call Eli?

00:11:18 Speaker_00
Yeah, like there were so many things that came up that the impulse to include him and to share with him and the need for his advice and the idea of me living and not being able to tell him certain things felt insurmountable.

00:11:32 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:11:33 Speaker_00
And there are some times where that absence becomes, or at least it feels like it becomes too big to bear.

00:11:41 Speaker_01
So what do you do with that? Like, what do you do with that feeling? How did you cope?

00:11:46 Speaker_00
I wrote him letters every day. I just have like boxes and boxes of letters now.

00:11:51 Speaker_01
Every day?

00:11:51 Speaker_00
Yeah, where I would just write to him about what was happening, what I was feeling, what I wanted, and finding a way to kind of express that and know that he would never received a letter, but that I still was holding conversation with him in some way.

00:12:10 Speaker_01
Madeline, I want to now talk to you about something you did a couple years after Eli died. It's what you wrote your Modern Love essay about. It was this time when you tried to talk to Eli again by recreating his voice, by using AI.

00:12:27 Speaker_01
Tell me about the day that you decided to do that. Where were you?

00:12:29 Speaker_00
I was in Montreal for a work conference. There was a happy hour happening in the lobby, and it was Eli's birthday.

00:12:38 Speaker_00
And it's really hard to sit through a conference while all you can think about is today's the day that my partner, who I love so dearly, is supposed to be 27, and that person is absent from the world.

00:12:52 Speaker_00
And kind of having to navigate that, I was feeling a sense of desperation and need to feel close to him.

00:12:59 Speaker_00
And I think I excused myself from this conference happy hour, went up to my room and was just kind of twiddling my thumbs, reaching for anything to feel a sense of proximity to him.

00:13:10 Speaker_00
And just kind of out of left field, it wasn't something I had been considering. It just was like, oh, I could do some voice cloning.

00:13:19 Speaker_01
What did that feel like as this idea started to kind of take hold?

00:13:24 Speaker_00
Yeah, the way I describe it is like, I feel like I just want to like rip my skin off. Like I feel too contained in my body. Like it, it feels that the emotion itself feels bigger than something that can be held inside my body.

00:13:36 Speaker_00
Like it needs to be let out. And I think for me, that's what I always come back to is I just need to, if I could just take my skin off and if I could just release the feeling, that would offer the relief.

00:13:49 Speaker_01
Tell me now what you did sort of step by step. So how did you have this idea? You grab your laptop. What do you do?

00:13:57 Speaker_00
I grab my laptop and I kind of frantically type into the search bar how to use AI voice cloning. And I begin kind of diving into the rabbit hole of reading all the literature I can get my hands on and what do I need to do to make this happen.

00:14:15 Speaker_00
kind of lost in a sense of time or space, just really singularly focused on, how do I reach Eli right now? I just need to, I just need to reach him somehow.

00:14:28 Speaker_01
So you downloaded the software.

00:14:30 Speaker_00
Download the software. Start reading through all the guide and the instructions. And I realize I have to begin uploading voice recordings. Hi Maddie, I'm just driving. So I just start downloading everything I can get my hands on.

00:14:44 Speaker_02
Yeah, scrape it, scrape it, scrape it. Good work.

00:14:46 Speaker_00
In theory, taking this walk down memory lane, but really feeling emotionally detached from the content itself.

00:14:52 Speaker_03
Here's Madeline. She's a medium-sized snail.

00:14:56 Speaker_00
Usually it's so emotional for me to go back and listen to voice recordings of Eli, to re-watch videos.

00:15:01 Speaker_03
Is it a video?

00:15:02 Speaker_00
Stop. But in that moment, I just, it was less of like an emotional engagement with the content and more of a process, I think, of feeding the machine. I'm just like, okay, we just got to like move, move the content, move the content.

00:15:24 Speaker_00
And the idea of there being something novel coming into the world now, when everything else has been so static for so long, it just sets off this sense of like, what am I doing?

00:15:37 Speaker_00
And I think if I had stewed in that feeling for a little longer, I might have made different decisions, but I quickly suppress, suppress in my mind, push down the hesitation, and I go into my inbox and I pull out the last email that Eli sent me.

00:15:53 Speaker_00
and I copy paste and I drop it in the text box and I hit play and the voice, it sounds like so, so eerily like Eli's voice and it reads aloud this email and even the intonation and the pausing replicates his cadence in a way that it truly like

00:16:22 Speaker_00
sent chills through my arms.

00:16:28 Speaker_01
When we come back, Madeline is almost immediately conflicted about what she thinks of this voice clone she's created and what she wants to do with it. Stay with us.

00:16:55 Speaker_01
So Madeline, I know from your essay that you didn't just have the voice clone read something in Eli's voice, you actually had a conversation with it. Yeah. What was that like?

00:17:08 Speaker_00
I opened the conversation with just commenting on how long it had been since we'd been together. I said, I cannot believe that it's been almost two years. I think the voice responded with something to the effect of, yeah, it really has been a while.

00:17:25 Speaker_00
I also can't believe it. And just hearing your response to that in his voice was otherworldly. I think at that point, I lost sight of the fact that it was the AI.

00:17:47 Speaker_00
I think at that point, it felt like I was talking to Eli, which almost felt more dangerous than talking to the AI. Yeah, what's your, bring me into your body in that moment. I think I probably stopped breathing.

00:18:00 Speaker_00
Like, I think it's that, like, you do your inhale, and I just remember being really rigid, like a sense of being frozen and wanting to be frozen in some ways to preserve this time and moment.

00:18:12 Speaker_00
Like, I wanted to freeze this moment of being able to hear him respond to something that I was thinking or saying, and so much fear for the idea that this, one, was not real, and two, it was going to end.

00:18:28 Speaker_00
And I think at some point during that conversation, I even like looked around the room as if to confirm he wasn't actually there because the sense of realness, again, just warped my reality and made me question his absence.

00:18:43 Speaker_00
Yeah, I had to confirm he was not actually in the room.

00:18:54 Speaker_01
Was this mix of relief and fear. Was this what you expected to feel or was it different somehow?

00:19:10 Speaker_00
I don't know if I had expectations in part just because of the frenzy that this experience was. I do think that I didn't expect it to be so painful. I think I thought it was going to be healing and relief.

00:19:30 Speaker_00
And instead, it felt like it kind of picked at a scab that I had worked really, really hard to clean and maintain, if that makes sense.

00:19:43 Speaker_01
Tell me more about why. It does make sense. I want to know more about the pain here.

00:19:49 Speaker_00
It's strange, like the further away Eli feels, the more I have to rely on my memory of him to shape the way that I move through the world and how I build relationships. And the idea of, I think the thing I fear most in my grief is erasure of Eli.

00:20:10 Speaker_00
I never want him to feel like he's not a part of my life or that he was not important or that pieces of him are being lost.

00:20:20 Speaker_00
And I think that there was a lot of pain in returning to a proximity to him and realizing that there are pieces of him that I have forgotten, even though it's only been a couple of years.

00:20:31 Speaker_00
Like there's isms and hearing something novel put into the world in his own voice. There were moments where I was like, oh, I forgot that he would do that funky pause or you know, had these sayings or things like that were...

00:20:52 Speaker_00
It's almost like there's ignorance in the way that I get to grieve because I don't, I'm not aware of the unerasure that's happening in my mind.

00:20:59 Speaker_01
You know, it's so interesting what you're saying. You thought this experience would bring you closer to him for obvious reasons.

00:21:05 Speaker_01
You get to hear a clone of his voice, but what you're actually articulating is that hearing that clone voice of Eli made you feel further away from him. It reminds you of all of the things that are already slipping away from you about him.

00:21:20 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly. How did you decide to stop? Was there a moment where you were like, this needs to end?

00:21:27 Speaker_00
Yeah, I asked the AI about a job decision that I was making.

00:21:33 Speaker_01
So you got that kind of granular.

00:21:35 Speaker_00
You got that kind of like every day like- It was like, oh, this is how I'm feeling. Like I'm thinking about making this decision. What do you think? And the AI got it so wrong. The AI said something that Eli would never have said.

00:21:49 Speaker_01
What did it say? I'm curious. Do you remember?

00:21:51 Speaker_00
I think the AI, I don't remember exactly, but it basically, I knew Eli would be like, Like, you know, move on to something that's better for you.

00:22:00 Speaker_00
I could just imagine what he was saying, and the AI was like, stick it out and figure it out, or something along those lines. Like, not in those words, but in, like, kind of the effect, the essence of it was, like, stick with what you got.

00:22:13 Speaker_00
figure it out. And I think it just kind of like truly knocked me out of the delusion, if you will, of the moment.

00:22:21 Speaker_00
I kind of snapped back into the reality of the dynamic, which was this was not actually Eli and the advice I was seeking, I was not getting from my beloved partner, but I was getting from a machine learning device.

00:22:35 Speaker_00
And I don't know, I think I could have just as easily been susceptible to that advice. It took me kind of being knocked out in that very dramatic way and very stark way for me to recognize the dynamic at play, whereas

00:22:57 Speaker_00
I'm sure there were other things I said that Eli would not have answered exactly the same way as the AI, but I was in a mindset where I was like, this is exactly what Eli would say. Like I felt susceptible. You were choosing to believe.

00:23:06 Speaker_00
Totally choosing to believe. And I think if I continue to have those types of interactions and engagement, like my perception of Eli himself could shift and the voice that guides my everyday

00:23:20 Speaker_00
and that I feel like is the authentic Eli in my head could shift.

00:23:25 Speaker_00
And that would be a product not of Eli himself, but rather AI making small changes here and there that then not only change my decisions or behavior in the moment, but also could tarnish or alter the memories that I worked so hard to preserve.

00:23:42 Speaker_01
Can you just tell me why was the response that AI gave you so un-Eli? You said Eli would never say that. Why would he never say that?

00:23:50 Speaker_00
The way I would describe it is that the AI voice sounded like society and wanting me to be on track and make a full recovery from this grief and get back to the professional life that, you know, society expects of me.

00:24:08 Speaker_00
And I know Eli would not want that for me. I know that he would be taking his own path. And I think hearing in his voice an answer that was one of choosing the path most traveled made me realize this is not who he is.

00:24:30 Speaker_01
So this moment comes where you realize you kind of get snapped out, right, of this alternate reality, as you've described it, state. And then what do you do? Do you slam the laptop shut? What happens next?

00:24:43 Speaker_00
I think I kind of push it away from me. Like I needed that distance. And I kind of instinctively like give it a bit of a shove down the desk. And I stand up.

00:24:54 Speaker_00
I feel like I needed the movement of my body to kind of like remind myself where I am, what I'm doing. I both like wanted to cry, but also wanted to yell. Like I didn't know how to express how I was feeling in the moment.

00:25:11 Speaker_00
And I think just as I had in an extreme way, blindly downloaded this program and engaged with it, I also kind of in an extreme way started to delete everything, remove the program, delete it out of the trash.

00:25:25 Speaker_00
I blocked the website to kind of set a boundary in case I want to download it again in the future.

00:25:42 Speaker_01
After you've put this software in the trash can or whatever on your computer, you've completely deleted it off. Did you say anything to Eli in your brain? Did you say like, that was something? Did you communicate with him at all?

00:25:57 Speaker_00
I wrote him a letter. Yeah, I actually, it's funny, I had stopped I wrote letters for the full first year after he died, and I had stopped for about eight or nine months. And that day was kind of the restarting of my writing letters to him.

00:26:14 Speaker_01
I love that you wrote him a letter. It's so interesting because you're turning from, you know, an AI generated voice and a conversation with that voice to another type of conversation with him, right?

00:26:29 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:26:30 Speaker_01
Through the letter, but one that feels more, what, what does it feel more?

00:26:37 Speaker_00
the most analog thing I could have done.

00:26:40 Speaker_01
Sure, sure.

00:26:41 Speaker_00
We wrote letters to each other all the time and I think that returning to that practice feels real, yeah.

00:26:51 Speaker_01
Madeline, do you regret doing this?

00:26:55 Speaker_00
I don't know. I don't regret it. Yeah, I don't regret it. I think I learned a lot. And I would take any experiment to feel close to him. And this one was an experiment that did not yield what I was hoping for.

00:27:09 Speaker_00
But I don't know if there's anything I wouldn't try, to be honest.

00:27:15 Speaker_01
What do you think Eli would think of you doing this?

00:27:21 Speaker_00
I think that he would be very amused. I think he'd be amused. I think he would be very curious about all the videos and voice recordings. It's funny, when you make those things, you don't think they're ever going to… Of course.

00:27:36 Speaker_01
See the light of day except for the other person.

00:27:38 Speaker_00
Yeah, exactly. Like they live in your camera roll and they're goofy. I think he'd just be amused. And I think he would be… Proud, honestly.

00:27:48 Speaker_00
I think he'd be proud of all the ways I've tried to process and engage with my grief, to process and engage with him.

00:27:55 Speaker_00
And just as he showed commitment to understanding who I was in life, I hope that I can show that commitment to understanding who he is in death as well.

00:28:08 Speaker_01
Ugh, he'd feel proud.

00:28:09 Speaker_00
Yeah, sorry, I'm gonna get emotional on that one, yeah.

00:28:14 Speaker_01
That's really special.

00:28:16 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:28:19 Speaker_01
Do you feel like after a year later, do you feel like this experience in some way changed the way that you grieve? Like, did it help you move forward? Did it set you back in some way? Did it put something into a different light for you?

00:28:35 Speaker_00
I think it underscored to me that the exciting innovation that's happening around me is not going to ever be able to replace or recover Eli.

00:28:52 Speaker_00
And I think that it gave me a sense of like wanting to return to his things and stuff as a way to remember him rather than trying to recover something that has been lost.

00:29:08 Speaker_00
It wasn't until after this experience that I went back to the storage unit and opened up all of our boxes.

00:29:13 Speaker_01
Wow. What do you think about this experience prepared you for doing that? That's big.

00:29:23 Speaker_00
I think I wanted something tangible after experiencing something that was intangible and kind of a product of my own imagination.

00:29:33 Speaker_00
I wanted to return to the physical relic, something that felt like I could physically hold it and not just hold it in my head or my heart.

00:29:43 Speaker_01
Yeah. Tell me about walking into that storage unit, because you hadn't seen the stuff in a few years, right?

00:29:49 Speaker_00
No, it'd been over two years. It's funny, in my head, it was the storage unit packed to the ceiling and full to the brim, and I'd built it up so much in my mind, and I opened it, and it wasn't even half full.

00:30:03 Speaker_00
I had never planned to open that storage unit again, pretty much. That was not something I had ever felt a desire to do. And then after this experience, about two months later,

00:30:14 Speaker_00
I returned to New York and opened every box and I held every single item and

00:30:23 Speaker_00
Honestly, like that in some ways was healing to my fear of erasure because just as the voice cloning reminded me of certain pieces of his intonation and tone like holding bowls and photographs and old books and newspapers brought up memories that had also been dulled or faded over time and it renewed them with the freshness that

00:30:49 Speaker_00
was really healing and made me feel close to him in so many ways. Was that beanie in that storage unit? The beanie was in the storage unit. Yeah, the beanie's in the storage unit.

00:31:04 Speaker_00
I just cleaned out my closet because I thought I might have to move in there for the recording, but it sits in my closet on the hook in the door. Yeah, and every morning I open my closet to get my stuff and there it is looking at me.

00:31:17 Speaker_01
Yeah Thank you! If you want to read Madeline's modern love essay, look for the link in our show notes. And before you go, we're working on an episode about egg freezing, and we want to hear from you.

00:31:43 Speaker_01
If you're thinking about freezing your eggs, what are you considering as you make your decision? What feelings is it bringing up for you? And if you have frozen your eggs, how did things turn out? How do you feel about it now?

00:31:56 Speaker_01
Please leave us a message on the Modern Love Hotline. The number is 212-589-8962. That's 212-589-8962. Include your name and a number where we can call you back. And you might just hear yourself on a future episode of the show.

00:32:18 Speaker_01
Modern Love is produced by Reva Goldberg, Davis Land, Emily Lang, and Amy Pearl. It's edited by Lynn Levy, Reva Goldberg, Davis Land, and our executive producer, Jen Poyant. Production management by Christina Josem.

00:32:33 Speaker_01
The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell. Original music in this episode by Sophia Landman, Marion Lozano, Pat McCusker, Rowan Nemistow, Dan Powell, and Carol Saburo. This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez.

00:32:48 Speaker_01
Studio support from Maddie Masiello and Nick Pittman. Digital production by Mahima Choblani and Nell Glowgly. The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones. Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects.

00:33:00 Speaker_01
If you want to submit an essay or a tiny love story to The New York Times, we've got instructions in our show notes. I'm Anna Martin. Thanks for listening.