Never again.

Almost 10 years ago, I performed a whole “cleansing ritual” that included burning love letters from the beginnings of a teenage romance. I felt that carrying them with me through adulthood was obstructing the open space in my life where new love and new experience might move in. Eight years after that ritual, I gave birth to a little girl — her father the very author of those same letters I’d burned so many years before, never believing they’d ever be significant to anyone ever again.

I wish, wish, wish I had those letters today — even though my husband and I are divorcing. I wish I could wrap them back in their ribbon and save them for my little girl so that she might know, one day, how much her daddy and I loved each other.

Words are sacred. Letters are landmarks and touchstones. I would no sooner destroy another letter than I would advocate the banning of a book. I am glad you chose to save your father’s letters, even knowing how painful it is for your mother. I believe we grow through pain, even if we don’t realize it for some time after the hurting stops.

My sympathy and condolences for you and your family.

I’ve got boxes of papers – stories, songs, poems in one state of completion or another. I know that some of them are really lame. I know that some of them are really wonderful. And I know that some of them could be really hurtful if they were ever read by the people at whom they were directed. I’ve meant to go through them for years, now – to compile the useful and interesting into something worth reviewing, and to weed out the things that should be gotten rid of, but I haven’t yet and I don’t know if I ever will. That means that if I die in the near future, my toddler son may inherit a glut of information both relevant and not, and he’ll have to interpret it on his own to decide what it means to him and to his perception of me. Or someone may go through it before him and edit what he sees. Or it may all be thrown out. I haven’t left instructions, and I’m not sure that I ought to.

But I know that I have always sought to understand my parents and ancestors as if they were my contemporaries. I want to know how they looked and acted when they were rebelling against their parents, when they started their careers, when they found the people they would eventually marry. I know I will inherit the house I was raised in, with its half-century of memorabilia from two generations before me, and I don’t want anyone else to decide what of it I get to know about them from it.

My father met and had two children with a woman shortly after my parents divorce. We’re all fairly sure the affair began before the marriage ended, but he’ll never admit to it. Years, YEARS, later, after they’d broken up and she disappeared with my two brothers and left him to marry the woman he is still married to today, I found all her old letters and pictures. He’d kept them all, also stashed away…cards, the boys drawings, naughty pictures, all of it.

I still have them all.

Sure, my perception of his life is partial, but that partial’s impact on my life is total. And so I keep them, because they are a part of my father and therefore my history.

Cherish them, Cath.
Mr Lady´s last blog ..Cuarenta

I don’t think that’s necessarily a good attitude, and maybe there are things that I wish I had written about, and maybe that’s a tragedy; that I don’t remember what I don’t write down and those feelings fade into the background.

I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but I have a rule. And I don’t write things down unless I’m hypothetically okay with someone else someday reading them.
Miss Grace´s last blog ..Mira.

Love that you accept / respect a glimpse into your father the man.

I have a chest filled with snippets of my past that I hope will make my daughter laugh and question and wonder about.
lia´s last blog ..-