“I’m pushing sixty now, but I find that the conversation with one’s parents doesn’t end with the grave.” — John Lahr, Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr
My mother used to say you never really know what’s going on in someone’s marriage until they divorce. With my parents, I knew plenty and wished I didn’t. I had a bad habit of reading my mother’s journal entries and knew when she thought my father had hurt her feelings (there was no debate here — they fought at the dinner table in full view of my brother and me). My parents were articulate, intelligent and ambitious. But the qualities that attracted them to each other in 1961, when they met in front of the Tower of London, also drove them apart. They both craved praise and being the center of attention. It’s hard for two people like that to occupy the same house, let alone the same marriage.
My dad was often angry and occasionally suicidal, prone to temper tantrums and verbal tirades; he was also a successful radiologist who could be loving, perceptive and hilarious in print and person. My parents fell in love, married, divorced and married other people. In the waning days of their marriage (my father’s first, my mother’s second), my father hand-wrote letters to my mother. He passed away in 2005. Toward the end of his life, he also wrote letters to my brother and me.
In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, my mother visited. She had been cleaning out her house and found a pile of letters my father had written to her in 1981, the summer she moved out.
Did I want them? She asked. I wasn't sure. On the one hand, who wouldn’t want to read the private letters of one lover to another, recording the demise of their relationship? On the other hand, if these people are your parents, maybe you don’t. I said, maybe.
The next time my mother visited, she did not bring my father’s letters. Instead, she brought letters from her father. Grandpa Sam was a wonderful man and a prolific letter writer. I had dozens of letters from him. He typed them on his green manual typewriter, sitting at the desk in his den in Brooklyn. Grandpa was a math teacher-turned-stockbroker whose letters offered homilies on how to live, love and invest. I was grateful for everything he had written to me, but he was my mother’s father, not mine.
"Thanks," I said as my mother stood in the doorway, "but where are Daddy's letters?”
"Oh," she said. "I have to go through them. I'll bring them next time.”
Had she forgotten to give them to me — or had she decided that the intimate notes my father had written her weren't appropriate for sharing?
My parents had been through a lot together: My father attempted suicide when I was two. Though he recovered, he remained volatile and could be brutal in his verbal dealings with people and often insulted my mother, my brother and me. Between my junior and senior years in high school, my mother moved out. At the end of the summer, she moved back. While she was gone, my father got busy writing her letters.
The next time she came over, she handed me a manilla folder filled with letters.
Receiving and reading correspondence from people long dead can give you a jolt and a thrill. There was my father’s handwriting — pointy, unpunctuated, barely legible, black chicken scratch. One side of the manilla folder said, “1980 RGZ Hospitalization.” My mother had a hysterectomy in 1980 — my father's indifference to her afterward precipitated their separation — so my mother's initials and the word “hospitalization" made sense.
After my mother left, I went through the letters. Here was my father at his sweetest and best: adoring, contrite, candid and pleading for my mother to return.
The first note was from 1974 or 1979 (it’s hard to tell the difference between my father’s 4s and 9s), years before my mother moved out. My father penned it on one of my mother’s personalized note cards, bordered with Bonwit Teller’s iconic purple violets:
Dear Ruthi,
Some day I’ll have my own stationery but the statement will be the same,
You are a beautiful person wife lover & Mom,
You are easier to spend time with than anyone I know.
These years have flown by and have been my best,
Together we have made a great life for ourselves & kids.
You are the secret ingredient to this working mixture.
My great love.
The second note, written in black pen on a cream card bordered with red polka dots, was from the summer my mother moved out:
Dear Ruth,
As you have departed from me I know now how much I love you
If I had had the sense to return your desire for support & affection early on — I now know it would have enriched me a thousand times
Losing you is to lose my hold on what i love — To lose you is to lose Mike & Laura this little family of ours is my sanctuary & the source of my emotional nourishment
I understand that for you these avowals of love & cries for reconciliation are too little & too late — my heart demands that I try desperately to win you back to my side—
There is a chance for us — you & me Babe I fight for this chance as I fought the demons of my illness — when you were young & Laura a tiny baby. I think often of my desperation during my illness — you & Baby Laura called me back from that ABYSS
My thoughts about my rejection of your appeals for communication & affection have made clear to me —my fear that loving you openly would result in your demeaning me — how fearful I was to reveal my love for you.
Now as the twilight of our marriage too quickly moves to the permanent Darkness of Divorce & Despair I still owe Mikie & Laura what I can give
I offer you me — the me you once loved & cherished & made love to with giving & joy — I offer myself because in my heart both of us can be happier permanently together than alone
Babe, give us a chance — come home & let me love you
Did I really want to crouch near the fiery center of my parents’ volcanic relationship? As a writer, yes. But as a person trying to get on with my life, long after my parents’ marriage had combusted and my father had died, I wasn’t sure. The heat of my father's yearning and grief was so hot, and who wants to read about their parents’ sex life? Plus, I knew my father was skilled in his ability to “write contrite.” I also knew his words didn’t always match his deeds and that he was writing what he probably had never had the courage to say.
In addition to the letters, my mother shared my father’s handwritten journal entries. They showed self-awareness that I rarely saw him express in real life and were written on stationery from the hospital where he ran the radiology and nuclear medicine department. “To lose a person you love — by abusing the person you love,” he wrote. "Ruth really loved me for a long time … I want so much to love someone.”
A few weeks after I graduated from high school, my parents’ marriage, always a minefield, finally blew up. My father moved out and, within two years, married someone else. My mother’s boyfriend moved in. Fourteen years later, my father attempted suicide again. He shoved a 12-inch carving knife into his chest and survived. He and his second wife eventually divorced.
In the summer of 2004, when he knew he was going to die from complications from lymphoma, my father wrote to my brother and me and voiced his regret: “For many years your mother & I were true teammates & had a great time together & with our two great kids.”
Words can be both weapons and tools. In his letters, my father used words to seduce, cajole, heal, remember, bless and understand. Letter writing was how he articulated his mess of feelings. He could be a handful, but reading about his love for my mother and his early adoration of and gratitude for her allowed me to consider what might have been if he had allowed himself to be vulnerable in real life and not only on paper.
I told my therapist about the letters. “Maybe if my parents had only written letters to each other, like some 18th-century novel, they might have stayed married,” I said.
“That sounds like fiction,” my therapist replied.
She’s right. There was no way my parents could have stayed married. There was too much mental illness involved. But I wonder what might have been if, in an alternate universe, my father’s written words had more frequently matched his spoken ones. In his letters, I feel his love for my mother and us. All these years later, that is the part of him I want to remember.
Have any of you ever read letters written by your parents? Let us know in the comments below.
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Photo illustration by Barbara Gibson
Follow Article Topics: Relationships