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Man moved to tears listening to recovered voicemail from late wife

"It's just a wonderful, wonderful sound that I thought was lost forever," Stan Beaton said when he heard his late wife's voice.

By Kate Stanton

LEEDS, England, Jan. 29 (UPI) -- Get ready to break out the tissues.

Stan Beaton thought he'd never hear his wife's voice again, after a voicemail message she recorded was deleted by the phone company last December.

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Beaton, a 68-year-old retiree from Mirfield, England, lost his wife to cancer in 2003, but kept their answering machine message so he could continue to listen to her speak.

"In the early days [I listened to it] quite often. Basically, it came to the point when if I felt low then I would listen to it," he told BBC Radio Leeds in a video that went viral on Thursday.

But the message disappeared due to technical work by Virgin Media. Beaton was heartbroken.

"Sadly, it disappeared. I was absolutely devastated by it, but also extremely angry," he said.

Beaton got in touch with the phone company, whose engineers spent three days searching for his lost message.

In the video, Beaton hears his wife's voicemail message for the first time since thinking he'd lost it forever.

"It's just a wonderful, wonderful sound that I thought was lost forever," he said.

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