Utah – Jared Buhanan-Decker’s son will never know his mother, who died during complications of childbirth earlier this year.
But, with the help from the internet, the Utah man’s request to “hear her voice again” became a reality for both him and their newborn son.
James Francis (JJ) Buhanan-Decker was born via emergency C-section, with a bleak prognosis after his 30-year-old mother, Sharry, died and he was left without oxygen.
“In the almost 10 years we were married, we spent like six nights apart,” Jared Buhanan-Decker told Zoomin.TV USA. “And the day that was supposed to be the happiest days of our lives ended up being the worst day of my life.”
As Buhanan-Decker tried to cope with the emotions of gaining a child and losing his spouse, he discovered a number of lullabies and songs his wife had made in an electronic file format he was unable to access.
So, in July, he turned to Reddit, also known as “the front page of the internet”and asked for what he called an “odd request.”
He posted that his life had “been hell the last two months” and all he wanted to do was “figure out if there is any simple way to convert these (files) into MP3 or another more user friendly format?”
He went on to plead with internet users as he shared a picture of his late wife, “I just want to be able to hear her voice again. Thank you.”
Proving that the online world isn’t full of trolls, one Reddit user posted, “I’ll have this done in an hour.”
Other Reddit users offered to not only recover the audio tracks, but volunteered their time to mix in a guitar accompaniment.
“Good job Reddit. Faith in humanity restored,” one user posted.
Sharry was able to upload a number of songs to YouTube before her death, but her husband said he would “love to be able to listen to the songs she didn’t quite finish.”
An example that shows you can’t judge a Reddit user’s heart by their handle (which includes three non-FCC appropriate words stuck together), one individual provided several technical audio edits to the mother’s songs to give her husband a number of variations.
People of the subreddit “audio engineering” truly came together for this man.
“Four months ago, I was being told that JJ might never walk, be blind, have severe learning disabilities or a host of other ‘worst cases’ but now many of the specialists say they never need to see him again. He is an amazing little guy. JJ is super smiley, quick to give anyone a cute big grin,” Jared wrote on the blog on Oct. 9.
People have also helped raise more than $44,000 for the father and his son on a GoFundMe page.
JJ will never meet his mother, but he will surely be able to see and hear who she was – thanks to what humanity was willing to do in the face of tragedy.
