Having heard your fathers voice all your life, you think you will never forget how it sounds. You take it for granted; he was always there for you with soothing advice when you needed it or with silly jokes sometimes (when you needed that, too). And he called regularly on the phone and left a message whenever you couldn't answer. Suddenly you realize that it's not him doing the calls anymore but his wife, and then you realize that it must have been the early stages of dementia keeping him from being himself. Now in his later stages he forgot how to talk almost completely. He wouldn't know how to speak the words, and I'm unsure whether he knows what to say anyway.
Someone in another post published the last three voicemails from his mother before she couldn't do any more calls. That was very sad to read, but also gave me the idea to look for old voicemails from my father. Fortunately my iPhone didn't delete them, and I found also three last messages by him. The oldest is from Christmas 2019, and the last one from August 2021. I made a backup copy and have his voice from better times preserved for later.
Originally typed on paper an posted on: