I had wanted to hear from her for so long that I didn't trust myself to open the envelope. I was getting married in a month, and I had so many questions for Mom about the guest list and the menu and what she thought about the non-Christian-non-Hindu-but-spiritual ceremony I was planning (intermarriage being something she'd shocked the family with when she married my father).
But even if I found the courage to stare down her familiar handwriting and write back, Mom would never respond. She died a decade ago, when I was 23. Which was why it was all the more extraordinary when a month before my wedding, a box of her love letters arrived on my lap.
My mother met my father on a blind date in Boston in 1978. Dad was living in Massachusetts and Mom in New York, so they wrote letters to keep each other warm during the Blizzard of '78. I grew up hearing about the words that convinced Dad that she was "The One" but had never seen them, so when my mother died, I hurricaned through our house in search of them…and found nothing.
The love letters now in my possession are not addressed to my father, though. They are addressed to her college ex, written when she was 19 and 20 and 21, just shy of the age I was when I lost her.
Reading someone else's love letters feels illicit. Reading your mother's love letters to a man who is not your father, downright traitorous. But a dead letter is undeliverable. Unreturnable. There was nothing else to do but keep reading.