What I learned about grief reading my dad’s letters to my late mom as he lay there dying
It took all her courage, but Barbara J. Ferraro read the wartime letters aloud to her father as his body withered, and finally understood
Fifty-nine letters, bound by a brittle rubber band, saved in a dresser drawer for a half-century. Letters sent by my father to my mother at her family home in Chicago during World War II, written in his own hand on US Navy letterhead, the precise print of an engineer, angled slightly to the right.
Yellowed on the edges but otherwise pristine, each tucked in its envelope with care. Personal letters, private letters, too painful to touch.
I could not even look at the letters for 30 years, let alone read them. They sat on a wardrobe shelf in a dusty box marked “Mementos of Mom” until dad’s final year on earth, after the death of his second wife.
