The letter

My wife and I attended a memorial service yesterday for our friend Dave’s mother, who passed away at age 95.  

Dave spoke at the service. He said that, as he was going through his mom’s papers, he found a letter she had saved that he had written on her 65th birthday. In it, he told her how much he loved and respected her, and how grateful he was that she, of all the mothers on earth, was his. He said it summed up what he wanted to say, and read it to the audience. It was a beautiful tribute.

Dave’s children won’t be able read letters like that at his memorial service. Nor will yours or mine. Nobody writes letters any more. They email. They tweet. They text. They post to Facebook. But they don’t put their sentiments on paper, a medium that, unlike digital media, endures. All those electronic communications between you and your loved ones are going to be – have almost certainly already been – lost forever because they were deleted or simply disappeared. Can you imagine your son or daughter standing up at your memorial service and saying, “I was going through my dad’s thumb drives and found an email I sent on his 65th birthday he had downloaded and saved?”  

The same holds true for photographs. We recently consolidated hundreds of family photos that were stashed around the house in drawers, boxes, and cabinets. There were hardly any from the year 2000 on, the year we bought our first digital camera.

I made a slide show for my son’s wedding rehearsal dinner, a photographic retrospective from the day he was born. I had, perhaps, 10 photos from his high school graduation until now to choose from, even though we’ve taken, probably, hundreds, on the increasingly sophisticated digital devices we have acquired since then. I have no clue where those photos are, or if they even exist.

My favorite book, “The Children of Pride,” is the chronological compilation of a trunkful of letters someone found in a New Orleans attic – letters between members of a family before, during and after the Civil War. It is a fascinating insight into the psyche of an aristocratic, pious Georgia family who, as the war began, was confident that God was on their side. By the end, when they had lost everything, they had changed their tune. It’s the best history of the Civil War I’ve ever read (and I’ve read a lot of them). And it is real, thanks to those letters.

Just think of all the history in the form of digital correspondence and family photographs that will be unavailable to future chroniclers of our times. What a loss.

My son spent the summer of his twentieth year backpacking around Europe. Every few days he would send an email from an internet café excitedly explaining what he had seen and done, and where he was going next. I saved them all, intending to print them out and give them to him some day. The company that took over mine changed email providers without warning and – poof – they were gone. Along with emails from my mother I had always meant to print out but never got around to it.

You may find it strange I’m using an electronic medium to bemoan the loss of words and photos printed on paper. It’s not. This blog is meant to provide a brief respite in your day or week and to give me a forum to say whatever I feel like saying. It’s not worth saving.

A letter is. Write one today to someone you love. It will make his or her day and, odds are, it will be saved.

After that, print out meaningful emails and photos you have been intending to save and put them somewhere safe. Someday they will be found by someone who will cherish them because they were important to you.

And who knows?

You just might be providing materials for your own memorial service.



Want to learn more about "The Children of Pride: Selected Letters from the Family of the Rev. Dr. Charles Colcock Jones from 1861 to 1868?" Read about it here: http://www.amazon.com/The-Children-Pride-Selected-1860-1868/dp/0300040539/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1364135320&sr=8-1&keywords=the+children+of+pride.  It's a long read – over 700 pages – but you'll savor each and every word.