But I didn’t have an extra hour. For whatever reason, time seemed to speed up when my mom died. I wasn’t able to keep on task or finish projects as quickly without her there. Before, she had always been able to stop my spiraling procrastination, telling me to work for half an hour, then turn off my computer and go to bed. Without someone to give me that guidance, I felt lost.And so I began making imaginary phone calls. If I had a bad day at work, I’d take out my phone and tell my mom exactly what had happened. Walking on busy sidewalks, I sounded like any other twentysomething leaning on her mom. No one else knew there was nothing but silence on the other end of the line.Here’s the weirdest thing: The more I talked, the more I began hearing her voice — her real voice — in my head. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think this was a supernatural connection. Instead, the act of pulling out my phone and organizing my thoughts in a conversation that I would have had with her became a tool to access my memory of her. Dealing with a tough assignment? What I needed was to talk it through, to hear the words pile on top of each other, to be reminded of the best, mom-approved solution: Get it done and go to bed.I’m sure sometime in the near future, technology will exist that will make it possible to have an unlimited stream of recordings from a loved one, and programs will exist that can make it almost seem like you’re talking to them. Having a bad day? Press one for you’ve got this platitudes. Need to complain about your boss? Press two.But I also know, if something like that existed, it wouldn’t be her. The electronic ephemera she left — the voicemail, the emails stacked in my inbox that I still sometimes search through, the fact that LinkedIn still suggests that she and I connect — are only the tiniest glimpses of who she was as a person.Still, I wish there was more. I wish I had the voicemail congratulating me on the day I got my dream job, a happy birthday voicemail, even a shut-your-laptop-and-go-to-sleep voicemail. I wish I had everything she said saved and permanently stored. But I also know that no tech tool, be it now or one in the future, can bring her back. And despite the lack of voicemails, I’ll still always be connected to her.I’ll continue to save that message — probably forever. And I'll also probably keep up the imaginary phone conversations. It turns out, that while the cloud is great, your own memory is sometimes the best way to access a loved one — especially when you need her most.