Six months after my older sister, Emma, passed away, I woke up one morning to realize that I could no longer hear her voice in my head. I scrolled through my phone, desperate to find a video or an old voicemail, but there were none. I was left feeling guilty for not being able to recall the sound, and I was angry at myself for all the times I had hit “delete” instead of “save” when she left me a message.

Emma had been diagnosed with stage-four colon cancer five years earlier. At the time, she was given only six months to live. From that point on, every moment we had together was precious, and we tried to focus on the present, not letting ourselves think too far into the future. It never occurred to me to take iPhone videos or save her messages in order to preserve the sound of her voice for later. Part of me was still holding on to the hope that I would have plenty of time to collect more memories — and footage — with her. She probably wouldn’t have been an eager participant in filming, anyway. She was weak and embarrassed by how the cancer had affected her appearance. She had sores in her mouth from chemotherapy that made it hard for her to talk or laugh.

After she was gone, what I really longed for was a pre-cancer recording. To hear her voice when she was healthy and happy, the way I wanted to remember her.

Here’s what I did remember: Her tone wasn’t high-pitched or low-pitched, just somewhere in the middle, like mine. Emma didn’t have an accent when she spoke English, but you could tell the Spanish language was her first. When she said certain words, like salmon, she couldn’t silence the L. If she used a Spanish word or phrase, like enchilada or Carlos Santana, within an English sentence, she over-enunciated the Spanish. Then there was the occasional mispronunciation of big or unfamiliar words, like the time she yelled at her son, “Ryan, stop disbehaving!” Or the time she called the Star Wars characters “the jetty” instead of the Jedi.

I could no longer hear Emma’s laugh, even though laughing was what we did most of the time. The best laugh usually arrived when we watched frat-boy comedies like Wedding Crashers or Superbad, or when the family sat around the dining room table making fun of one another; that was the only time Emma's voice would get high-pitched. She made a "tee-hee-hee" sound, and her red-brown eyes would shrink until they looked almost closed, and she would put one hand on her chest and bend over in a fit of infectious laughter.