My brother recently found a treasure of letters sent to him over decades by our mother. He’s called me with insights about what she was thinking during different stages of her marriage to my father, which lasted more than fifty years.

Those years were not always easy. Our father lost work a couple times in life, and ventured into some get-rich-quick schemes that required questionable investments that exhausted their savings and forced our family to move. My mother’s letters show initial hopeful support for my father. But they also exhibit hints of worry that dad had been swept up in things that weren’t so promising as they were full of promises.

Life lessons

Those lessons have stuck with me the rest of my life. And while I’ve made a few stupid decisions on my own, I was able to provide a stable family situation through thick and thin. We moved by choice one time when the kids were in 5th and 1st grade. That’s about the perfect age to do so. Plus they both needed their own bedrooms.

I moved again out of that house a year ago. Recently while talking with my son, we covered the subject of that move and he said something really important to me. “Dad, I know that wasn’t sustainable living there…” What he meant was… the fixed dynamic of keeping that house intact after the passing of my wife was neither practical or logical.

His comment was so appreciated. While it was one of the hardest things I’ve done in life to clear out that house, it also taught me that there are few things that we truly need to keep in order to be happy and healthy within our own spheres.

Catharsis

Because earlier that year, I’d had the responsibility of cleaning out my late father’s house after he passed away the previous October. There were reams of old things to go through, and we surveyed what should be kept or thrown out. Several large dumpsters filled and we broke down multiple useless cheap computer desks using sledge hammers and a few whacks. Each was a catharsis of sorts, for the difficulties we’d overcome and how life whacks you if you sometimes don’t whack it first.

It’s funny how a single paragraph from a single letter can set off so much contemplation. But when it’s a letter from the past, that can have special portent. About things long ago, and things happening now. Letters from the past have a way of bringing about revelations in the present.

Christopher Cudworth’s book The Right Kind of Pride is available on Amazon.com.