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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.
But there are also these digital things.
All the texts, the photos and videos and voicemails right there on your phone.
I've listened to all the voice recordings now.
I want to say dozens if not hundreds of times.
When Madeline De Figueiredo lost her husband Eli, she used those recordings as a way to feel close to him.
Voicemails he had left me.
Hi Maddie, I'm just driving.
Would you like not text me back?
Cooking with his family and friends.
Yeah, scrape it, scrape it, scrape it.
Good work. Scrape it, scrape it, scrape it.
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.
There's Madeline. She's a medium -sized snail.
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.
It's like an unquenchable craving or something.
It's like all I want is to talk to him.
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.
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 A .I.
to try and talk with Eli one more time.
But it didn't go quite like she'd hoped.
Madeline De Figueiredo, 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?
Yes, we were both freshman 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 every thing is why, why?
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.
And so we would 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.
And you were like, I'm just getting cereal.
I was like, I don't know, like, I'm just going to go tie dye a t -shirt.
And then with every answer there was a, well, why?
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.
Yeah, what else do you remember about him back then?
He had this like gate 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.
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.
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.
Fast moving traffic cone.
Fast moving traffic cone.
You could spot him anywhere in the quad 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?
Like were you someone who always wanted to get married?
I was like not somebody who is super eager to get married.
It was not something that I felt compelled to do as a young person or frankly ever, I wanted partnership and companionship.
I didn't necessarily want the institution of marriage.
Had a lot of charge thoughts about what the institution represented and its origins.
Sure. For me, my parents didn't get married until they were almost 30.
It was not common in my family at all to get married young.
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.
So how did that conversation start then?
Who brought it up? Eli, my gosh, he was driving that marriage train hard.
Well, tell me about that.
When did he first start talking about it?
He just picked me up from the airport.
I had just flown back from my Thanksgiving and came to Midway Airport in Chicago and his old white Camry and I got in the car.
And he doesn't drive away.
He 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, kind of his head's tilted to the side, waiting for my response.
I think my jaw probably hit the floor.
And 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, 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.
So I think we had some like very long and emotional and messy conversations about what we wanted, why we wanted those things.
And what my hesitations were.
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 judgements for what I do, but I'm the one who has to do whatever comes next.
Yeah. Eli lived his life kind of outside of societal expectations.
He didn't really care what people thought about him, not in like a laissez -e way or in a rude way, more just in like a self confidence in what he wanted and needed.
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, it's your life to live.
Mm -hm. 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.
How did the reality of being married compare to your assumptions about what being married would be like?
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 evolve in ways that better took care of me and watching myself adjust to find ways that better suited him and us in our life together, it felt like such a rewarding project.
When we come back, that project is cut short, and how Madeleine dealt with it after the break.
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Welcome back. So Madeleine and Eli got married, then about a year later, Eli decides to go on a trip abroad.
Madeleine didn't know it then, but the day he left for that trip would be the last time she'd see him alive.
Madeleine told me, he died in a hiking accident.
Can you tell me what you remember about the day that he passed from your perspective?
Just tell me whatever you remember from that day or series of days.
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.
We always had a call scheduled for like 1230 or something.
And he would call me like 1228.
He always was a few minutes early.
So 1230 rolls around and I was like, oh, this is a change.
I'm actually going to be the one to ring him.
And there was almost like, like I almost felt kind of like joy in that.
Like, I'm going to be you two at this time.
And I called and didn't wasn't able to get a hold of him, which was just so uncharacteristic.
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 start swirling and goes to a worst case scenario.
And yeah, I got a call at four in the morning saying that he had passed.
They used that word, they used the word passed.
And I did not know what it meant.
I was like, passed a border passed.
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.
God. 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, I need to tell, I can't tell.
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.
Did that feeling stay with you of wanting to call Eli?
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.
Yeah. And there are some times where that absence becomes or at least it feels like it becomes too big to bear.
So what do you do with that?
Like, what do you do with that feeling?
How did you cope? I wrote him letters every day.
I just have like boxes and boxes of letters now.
Every day? 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 receive the letter, but that I still was holding conversation with him in some way.
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.
Tell me about the day that you decided to do that.
Where were you? I was in Montreal for a work conference.
There was a happy hour happening in the lobby and it was Eli's birthday.
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.
And kind of having to navigate that, I was feeling a sense of desperation and need to feel close to him.
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 and just kind of out of left field.
Like it wasn't something I had been considering.
It just was like, oh, I could do some voice cloning.
What did that feel like as this idea started to kind of take hold?
Yeah, the way I describe it is like I feel like I just from like ripped my skin off.
Like I feel too contained in my body.
Like it feels the emotion itself feels bigger than something that can be held inside my body.
It needs to be let out.
And I think for me, that's what I always come back to.
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.
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? 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?
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.
So you downloaded the software, download the software, start reading through all the guide and the instructions.
And I realized 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.
Yeah, scrape it, scrape it, scrape it.
Good work. In theory, taking this walk down memory lane, but really feeling emotionally detached from the content itself.
Here's Madeline. She's a medium sized snail.
Usually, it's so emotional for me to go back and listen to voice recordings of Eli to rewatch videos.
Is this a video? 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, OK, we just got to like move move the content to move the content.
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?
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 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 sent chills through my arms.
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. 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?
I opened the conversation with just commenting on how long it had been since we've been together.
I said I cannot believe that it's been almost two years and I think the voice responded with something to the effect of yeah, it really has been a while.
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.
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 stop breathing.
Like I think it's that like 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 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 was going to end.
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.
Yeah, I had to confirm he was not actually in the room.
Was this mix of relief and fear, was this what you expected to feel or was it different somehow?
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 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.
Tell me more about why it does make sense.
I want to know more about the pain here.
It's strange. 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 feel most in my grief is a razor of Eli.
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.
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.
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 had these sayings or things like that where it's almost like there's ignorance in the way that I get to grieve because I'm not aware of the on a ratio that's happening in my mind.
You know, it's so interesting what you're saying.
You thought this experience would bring you closer to him for obvious reasons.
You get to hear a clone of his voice.
But what you're actually articulating is that hearing that cloned 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.
Yeah, exactly. How did you decide to stop?
Was there a moment where you were like, this needs to end?
Yeah, I asked the A .I.
about a job decision that I was making.
Huh. And so you got that kind of granular.
You got that kind of like every day like it was like, oh, this is how I'm feeling like I'm thinking I'm thinking about making this decision.
What do you think? And the A .I.
got it so wrong. The A .I.
said something that you would never have said.
What did it say? I'm curious to you remember?
I think the A .I. I don't remember exactly.
But basically I knew that I would be like, like, you know, move on to something that's better for you.
I could just imagine what he was saying.
And in the A .I. I 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 and figure it out.
And I think it just kind of like truly knocked me out of the delusion, if you will, of the moment.
I kind of snapped back into the reality of the dynamic, which was this was not actually A .I.
And the advice I was seeking, I was not getting from my beloved partner, but I was getting from a machine learning device.
And I don't know, I think I could have just as easily been susceptible to that advice.
Like I... 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 I'm sure there were other things I said that Eli would not have answered exactly the same way as the A .I.
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.
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 every day and that I feel like is the authentic Eli in my head could shift.
And that would be a product not of Eli himself, but rather A .I.
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.
Can you just tell me why was the response that A .I.
gave you so un -Eli?
You said Eli would never say that.
Why would he never say that?
The way I would describe it is that the A .I.
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.
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.
So this moment comes where you realize you kind of get snapped out 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? 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.
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.
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.
I blocked the Web site to kind of set a boundary in case I want to download it again in the future.
After you've, you know, 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 like did you communicate with him at all?
I wrote him a letter.
Yeah, I actually it's funny I had stopped.
I wrote letters for the full first year that 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.
I love that you wrote him a letter.
It's so interesting because you're turning from, you know, an A .I.
generated voice and a conversation with that voice to another type of conversation with him, right?
Through the letter.
But one that feels more.
What? What does it feel more?
It's the most analog thing I could have done.
But I'm sure sure we wrote letters to each other all the time.
And I think that returning to that practice feels real.
Madeline, do you regret doing this?
I don't know. I have no 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.
But I don't know if there's anything I wouldn't try, to be honest.
Hmm. What do you think Eli would think of you doing this?
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 course see the light of day except for the other person.
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, 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.
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 and death as well.
Ah, he'd feel proud.
Yeah, sorry, I'm gonna get emotional on that one, yeah.
That's really special.
Yeah. 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?
Does it set you back in some way?
Did it put something into a different light for you?
Hmm. I think it underscored to me that the exciting innovation that's happening around me is not gonna ever be able to replace or recover Eli.
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.
It wasn't until after this experience that I went back to the storage unit and opened up all of our boxes.
Wow. What do you think about this experience prepared you for doing that?
That's big. I think I wanted something tangible after experiencing something that was intangible and kind of a product of my own imagination.
I wanted to return to the physical relic, something that felt like I can physically hold it and not just hold it in my head or my heart.
Tell me about walking into that storage unit because you hadn't seen this stuff in a few years, right?
No, it'd been over two years.
It's funny, in my head, it was the storage and it 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.
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, I returned to New York and opened every box and I held every single item.
And 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 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.
I wish 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 opened my closet to get my stuff.
And there it is looking at me.
That orange beanie.
Madeline, thank you so much.
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.
If you're thinking about freezing your eggs, what are you considering as you make your decision?
What feelings is a bringing up for you?
And if you have frozen your eggs, how did things turn out?
How do you feel about it now?
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.
Modern Love is produced by Riva Goldberg, Davis Land, Emily Lang and Amy Pearl.
It's edited by Lynn Levy, Riva Goldberg, Davis Land and our executive producer, Jen Poyant.
Production Management by Christina Joseph.
The Modern Love theme music is by Dan Powell.
Original music in this episode by Sophia Landman, Marianne Lozano, Pat McCusker, Rowan Nimisto, Dan Powell and Carol Saburo.
This episode was mixed by Daniel Ramirez.
Studio support from Matty Massiello and Nick Pittman.
Digital production by Mahima Chablani and Nell Gologli.
The Modern Love column is edited by Daniel Jones.
Mia Lee is the editor of Modern Love Projects.
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.
