By Jae-Ha Kim
Chicago Sun-Times
March 1, 2001
You can’t press it into a scrapbook or frame it. But voicemail messages offer the gift of forever–something Lynn Petrak cherishes. Petrak has one of the last messages her mother left for her before she died six years ago.
“Right after she died, hearing her voice again comforted me so much,” says Petrak, 31, of LaGrange. “It was the first message that I would hear when I went into my voicemail system. Later, after my children were born, I found myself playing the message for my children, who had never spoken to their grandmother. They were able to associate a voice to the photos they had seen of her.”
“There is something about hearing a loved one’s voice that is incomparable to anything else,” says Natalie Ochsner, Ameritech’s consumer messaging director. “A lot of people will save a child’s first message. Some will save a succession of messages from a boyfriend or loved one.”
