Leaving Love Letters Now for After I’m Gone

Shortly after my mother’s death, right before the pandemic lockdown, I began to notice that not only was I missing her, but I was missing all the years of lost opportunities I had had to ask her questions about herself. What was it like to go through the Depression? How did she feel about me when I was a child? What was her favorite color? How was it different for her raising my older sister than raising me?

Why didn’t I ask my mother these questions? Part of this was because, as a teenager, I was sure the world revolved around me. Later, as a young adult, I was busy making my own way, and my mother’s stories about what she had done in the same situations—or worse, what she would do if she were me—annoyed me to no end.

And now I miss her every day. I search for her presence. I dug through all her old papers just to see her handwriting, which seemed to reverberate in my fingers when I touched each letter. I found a list of questions I had asked her for research in a book about a 1950s Jewish Housewife, Is This Tomorrow. Every answer made me want to know more about her, made me distraught with myself that I had not thought to ask. No, she had not wanted to be a stay-at-home wife, but being a working one made her suspect. No, she had not loved my father, but she had married him anyway and stayed married despite his brutality. No, she knew nothing about sex. At the time I received these answers, I was laser-focused on my book research. Looking at these answers now, I feel the loss deeply. I still have so many questions! I wish she had left me more.

I began to think about my own son, what he knows, and wants to know, about his parents. He’s in his 20s and very much in the center of figuring out his own life. Like many 20-year-olds, he doesn’t ask us much about our lives, and I admit, I’m given to tell him anyway, because I now know that knowing about a loved one is a connection he can bank on, if not now, then later. Because what if something happened to me right now? I wouldn’t want him like me, wondering about my mother, wishing I had asked her more questions about our life together, about her life on her own. But I didn’t want to smother my son with stories, either.

Printed or on a computer, letters are a legacy of love

Caroline Leavtt

So, I had an idea. I started writing him a letter about myself, and about him, the parts he’s not so interested in now—when he was a baby, when he was a toddler—but he might be interested in later. I wanted to tell him about the parts of his life he might not know, the parts of my life that he might want to know later, too. Yeah, I know, this is a movie trope, someone finding a letter meant for them after the letter writer has died. It always makes me cry. It always makes me wonder why everyone, including me, just cannot say these things out loud to the person while we are both alive. It also makes me know that sometimes, having these words after we are gone is a real solace, a real connection, a reminder that love never dies, tangible proof of just how much the person you loved had loved you. I wanted my son to know that I was a person before I had him, I was a person after he left the nest, and I will still, in some way, be a person to him even after I’m gone, because of that letter.

I have the letter file up on my computer. I’ve told my son it’s there and he can choose to read it or not. I wrote about how wild I was as a teenager. I wrote about how I knew the night he was conceived. I wrote about how I still look at him and think: how amazing is this human? I write about things I remember that he might not—how, at five, he was shy about attending an acting class he had wanted to go to, but he refused to quit even though we told him he could. His staying every week, inching closer and closer to participation until he was the star of the class, was an early hint of what an extraordinary person he was—and is.

And then, even though I cannot imagine anything about me that my husband doesn’t know, I began writing him a letter, too, a file up on my computer. Because I know in the deepest moment of grief, there I’ll be, on the page, reminding him how lucky I was to find him.

Every month, I return to those letters, to my son, to my husband. I want to make sure I say everything I need to. But I know, too, that it is also a way of still being around. I want both my son and my husband to have something of me after I was gone that told them how much I loved them. I wanted them to have something of themselves, too, that told them how I saw them.

Because these letters really are love letters. And isn’t that the most important tangible memory of all?