You might recognize a handwriting whose owner’s voice you can no longer summon.

Handwriting survives in a way voices do not. You can see a loop or a slant and know instantly whose it was, decades on, while the sound of them has thinned out until you cannot summon it at will. Different traces of a person decay at different speeds, and the one that lasts is often not the one you would have chosen.

If someone matters to you, keep a recording of them talking, even a dull one. And if you have lost a voice, the objects that still carry them are worth handling rather than storing away. What remains is arbitrary, and it is still genuinely them.