#Woman relives day with dead mother through Google Maps

Despite the limitations of physics, this daughter managed to turn back time.

UK-based writer Sherri Turner has struck a chord on Twitter after sharing her experience of vividly reliving a day with her deceased mother — thanks to Google Maps’ photo archives. 

“I look at my mum’s old house on Google maps street view, the house where I grew up. It says ‘Image captured May 2009’,” Turner wrote this month in a poetic tweet recounting her experience finding the tiny digital preservation of her mom’s life. “There is a light on in her bedroom. It is still her house, she is still alive, I am still visiting every few months on the train to Bodmin Parkway.”

Turner’s mother passed away around four years ago, but she brought her back for a fleeting moment this week when she discovered the Street View feature. The fact that the light was on made “it a little bit more something that you feel like you’ve stumbled across rather than something you’ve made happen,” she told Recode. 

In the tweet thread, which has racked up over 300,000 likes, she goes on to describe the once banal but now touching details of her and her mother’s day together, reliving it like it was current day.

“Her little pink car will still be in the garage, but I will have taken a taxi from the station and when it arrives she will be standing in that doorway, smiling and waving, smaller than the last time I saw her. We will play Scrabble and watch Tipping Point and there will have been no pandemic, no other deaths, no as-yet-undiscovered illnesses. And I won’t know how perfect it is and I wouldn’t go back and say, even if I could, because sometimes it’s best not to know,” Turner wrote. “I take a Screen Print of the house, with the light on, because it won’t last forever, and one day the Google van will go back down that street and replace her house with someone else’s and though there may be a light on in the window it won’t be her.” 

The Street View feature has existed since 2007, and Turner is far from the first person to rediscover a dead loved one using it in the years since.