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Mourning the loss of love letters for our children
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Published: March 12, 2009
After my wife and I met during my senior year at Appalachian State, we began exchanging handwritten letters and cards at every opportunity. We'd relive late-night drives on a snow-covered and officially closed Blue Ridge Parkway or early morning jaunts to find the Brown Mountain lights.
We'd reminisce about my pedaling furiously up a campus hill with Cary Anne perched precariously on the handlebars of the mountain bike, or recall her steely nerve crouched down in a narrow cave passage while thousands of bats flitted by us on their way out to dinner. We were quite the epistolary couple.
All the notes, letters and cards we've exchanged over the years have been saved in shoeboxes and stored in our attic. Recently, we've added 18 handwritten pages from one of my uncles, and we're expecting more from a second uncle detailing memories of their and my father's childhood. All of this we take out and share with our children from time to time, as our parents did with their correspondence. We'll sit together as a family in the dim attic and read our letters, expounding on this or that. These times give our children a better sense of the history we have together, and tighten the warp and woof of our family.
Even in these pleasantly nostalgic moments, though, I've found something to fret about. The way in which recent generations' interpersonal history is recorded is changing — and not for the better. I hope I'm mistaken, but my impression is that there is a distinct move toward the digital.
E-mail and texting are being used even more often to convey personal thoughts. Sure, greeting cards are still going strong, but those rarely contain more from the sender than a line or three of added sentiment.
I'm afraid the days of letters and notes written by hand and in Standard English are sadly slipping away. And who keeps e-mails longer than a year or so, anyway? E-mails can be printed out, but even with a wealth of fonts to choose from, a heart-felt lament for an absent love, typed in Times New Roman and printed out on sterile white printer paper, loses a little something. The decline and death of the written word makes me pensive. I worry that my grandkids may never know the pleasure of rooting through old shoeboxes or chests and stumbling upon bundles of handwritten letters sharing news of the family: births, deaths, marriages or just passing the time.
My children will be technologically savvy and electronically literate. I have no objection to that. But I also want them to write. Not just compose. And to remember that for thousands of years a handwritten letter, its script perhaps shaky with emotion or age, was unsurpassed for emotional intimacy, irrespective of the thoughts expressed. I want them to cuddle up on the floor with their own children, years from now, and feel the history and emotions contained in a love letter, written in a parent's hand.
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