I’ve just left the 1970s behind and
am not ready to skip ahead to the early 1980s, so I guess I’ll write. Yes, I’m still reading old letters. Mom kept everything, including the extra
carbon copies she made of her letters to us “kids.”
She would be glad to know how
impressed I am by her organization.
Occasionally, I run into a letter or memento filed in the wrong year,
but I figure those were filing mistakes in her much later years. I can imagine her taking a couple folders
from her file cabinets into the living room where she could read with the aid
of her lighted magnifier. Maybe it is
sad that I am tossing out most of the cards and letters and mementos, but at
least I take photographs (especially of notable envelopes addressed in creative
ways).
When I started this project however
many weeks ago, I should have noted the date as well as kept a log of the order
in which I’ve been reading. I’ve bounced
around between decades as far back as the 1940s and as recent as the 1990s. I’ve read letters penned by my grandparents,
aunts, uncles, mother, cousins, and siblings.
I’ve looked at newspaper clippings, baby announcements, and handmade
cards. I’ve discovered that whenever my
sister (who was two years older than I) made a card for Mom, I made one as
well, copying whatever creative idea she used in a more childish form: things like messages written in code or with
accompanying treble clef line that showed off our understanding of notes, measures,
and notations to good effect—except for a melodic line.
I read through the late1940s letters
written by Humphrey, Mom’s youngest brother, with the terrible knowledge that
he would die in a 1949 flight training accident before ever reaching his 21st
birthday. I still wonder whatever became
of his fiancée, Helen Bates, whose first name he initially misspelled as Helene
in his rhapsodies about her to his parents.
Before that was my great-grandmother’s death in early 1946 following a
lengthy illness that appears to have been Alzheimer’s. I learned that my mother
(Priscilla) and grandmother (Dana) were very close. Frances Dana (my great-grandmother) was a
difficult and demanding woman even before the dementia, and Dana struggled in
her full-time caregiving for her mother.
Priscilla helped out when home from Oberlin College for Christmas break,
and Frances Dana’s last words were spoken to Priscilla: “Be good.” It tugs at my heart that those were some of
the last words my mother spoke to me a few days before she died.
In Grandma Dana’s letters of the
early 1950s, I could see a gradual deterioration. Those letters stopped around 1952. Eventually, she was diagnosed with
Parkinson’s Disease and died in 1962.
Because I never had the chance to know her before she became silent,
reading her letters to my mother made her real to me—what a loving, energetic,
capable woman she was! And how much like
her my mother was!
The early 1960s contained their own
measure of nostalgia, too, with the aforementioned cards and notes we four “kids”
made for our mother. It took me a long
time to learn how to spell “from” correctly:
my little cards and notes to Mom, including one in which I told her that
my sister had slapped me that day, ended with “form Janis.”
On
November 10, 1962, came a huge, unexpected loss: Grandpa died from a massive heart
attack. I miss him still. Therein lies the problem of getting immersed
in old letters: reliving old losses and seeing the impact of those times in
letters and cards. One memento I could
not toss was the guest book from Grandpa’s funeral. The opening pages, filled in by a funeral
home employee I am sure, were written in a beautiful cursive script. Naturally, the guest signatures were mostly
unfamiliar names from my grandparents’ wide circle of friends.
I believe I will save the recording
of later, letter-preserved memories for another time. But I will say this: I have experienced profound comfort in the
company of my dead relatives.
