I Answer His Letters in My Head
Our correspondence continues; only the postage has stopped.
My grandfather has been dead for three years, and I owe him a letter.
That is not a metaphor. Somewhere in whatever accounting the heart keeps, there is a ledger, and on that ledger I am behind. He wrote last... He always wrote last. Even dying, he managed to write last, which would have delighted him, because he was a man who treated correspondence the way other men treat arm wrestling.
We started when I left for college in 2004. He did not trust email, and he especially did not trust me on the phone, where he said I performed a version of myself he found exhausting. So he sent a letter instead, two pages, blue Bic pen on yellow legal paper, opening with a complaint about his neighbor's wind chimes and closing with a question: What are you reading, and is it any good, and would I hate it?
I answered. He answered my answer. Nineteen years. Roughly a letter a week, minus what he called the intermissions. Marriage, divorce, one miscarriage I told him about before I told my own mother, because it is easier to say a terrible thing to yellow paper than to a face. He never once replied to bad news with advice. He replied with the wind chimes, the diner waitress who called him Professor, whatever the dog next door had destroyed, and then, in the last paragraph, one sentence that showed he had understood everything. After the miscarriage his last sentence was: The garden did nothing this year either, and I have decided to love it anyway.
He died in February, of the ordinary conspiracies of an old heart. I flew home, I carried the coffin, I gave the eulogy everyone said was beautiful, which is what people say when they mean short.
And then, about a month later, standing in line at the pharmacy... I caught myself drafting a letter to him in my head.
Dear Gramps. The pharmacist has a tattoo of a swallow on her wrist and I have been in this line long enough to name it. You would say I am wasting my life in lines. You spent forty years in a union hall; you have no standing on this.
I did not decide to do this. It simply continued, the way a wheel keeps turning after the engine dies. Something notable would happen, or something tiny, which to him was the same thing, and the letter would begin composing itself: salutation, complaint, small marvel, question. I answered his letters in my head in the shower, on the highway, in a meeting about budget projections while wearing my listening face.
For a long time I told nobody, because there is no good way to announce that you maintain a postal relationship with a dead man.
Here is the turn, and even now my hands slow down typing it.
Last spring, my grandmother finally let us clear out his workshop. Under the bench, behind coffee cans of sorted screws, was a green shoebox with my name on it in his blue Bic. I assumed keepsakes... Report cards. The newspaper clipping from when I won the spelling bee and he told everyone at the diner for a month.
It was letters. Fifty two of them, addressed to me, stamped, sealed. Never sent.
They were dated from 2011, the year he and I did not speak. The year of the fight, which began over my divorce and what he said about it, and calcified the way fights do in families where everyone is a champion at writing last and a coward at writing first. Twelve months of silence, until my mother staged what she called an intervention and what was actually just Thanksgiving.
All that year I believed he was silent.
He was not silent.
He was writing me every single week, licking the stamp, and putting the letter in a shoebox instead of the mail.
I read all fifty two in one night, on the floor of his workshop, in my coat. The first few are furious. The middle ones bargain. And then, around June, they give up being about the fight at all and just become his letters again: wind chimes, waitress, dog, and a last sentence that understood everything. The one dated the week of my birthday says: I have decided I was wrong, which is easy to write when you are not going to mail it.
He was never silent. Silence, it turns out, is sometimes just a letter with no stamp brave enough to carry it.
I have thought a great deal about why he kept them. He was not sentimental about objects; this was a man who threw away his own retirement plaque. I think the writing was the part he could not stop, because the writing was the love, and the mailing was the pride, and pride was the only muscle in his body stronger than his heart. I wrote about forgiveness for the first time that month, and what I learned is that I forgave him years before I found the box. The box just told me he had been asking.
So now the correspondence continues, and only the postage has stopped, on both ends.
Except I have escalated. The letters in my head started demanding paper. There is a drawer in my desk, and in that drawer there is a shoebox, because apparently this is hereditary, and in that box are my replies. I write him on yellow legal paper, blue pen, because form matters, he taught me that. I tell him the pharmacist's swallow tattoo. I tell him his great granddaughter exists now and screams like a union man. I tell him what I am reading and whether he would hate it. He would hate almost all of it. I can hear the exact register of his hating it, and hearing it is the point.
One of those unsent replies eventually became a poem, almost by accident, the way a long walk becomes a destination. It was his last sentences that did it, those single lines at the ends of his letters, which I finally recognized as poems he refused to admit to. I cleaned mine up and entered it into a monthly poetry contest, mostly so I could tell him about it in the next letter. It placed third.
In the letter, I told him it won.
He would have checked... He cannot check. There have to be some advantages.
People who know about the shoebox worry about me, gently. My sister asked if writing to the dead keeps the wound open. Maybe... But I have read fifty two letters' worth of what happens when you love someone and refuse to say so on paper, and I am not interested in that inheritance. I keep a page about love bookmarked next to one about grief because I no longer believe they are different rooms.
They are one room. The furniture just gets rearranged in the dark.
Last week, my daughter watched me writing at the desk and asked who the letter was for. I said, your great grandfather. She asked how it would get to him, and I gave her the only true answer I have.
It already has. That is the strange economy of this correspondence: nothing is delivered, and nothing is lost. He wrote last for nineteen years. He is not going to start losing now. But every week I answer anyway, salutation, complaint, small marvel, question, and somewhere between my pen and the shoebox, in that gap where the postage used to be, I can feel him reading over my shoulder, already drafting his reply.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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