You can fit a surprising amount of life into a box.
In our case, there were hundreds of letters, many still inside their original envelopes. They began in 1959, when Carol and I were teenagers and had no idea where life was going to take us. We were simply two young people falling in love.
I was 16 when we started dating. Carol was 17. She was smart, beautiful, funny, and already thinking seriously about becoming a nurse. I was shy, awkward around girls, and not exactly setting the academic world on fire. Somehow, she liked me anyway.
Our first date was a Luther League hayride. I managed to miss a perfectly good opportunity to hold her hand when she told me her hands were cold and I offered her my gloves instead. Thankfully, Carol gave me another chance.
She would give me quite a few.
When Love Arrived in the Mailbox
The letters became especially important when life separated us.
After two years of college in Chicago, I transferred to the University of Illinois in Champaign to finish my mechanical engineering degree. Carol was still completing nursing school. Suddenly, the person I wanted to see every day was about 150 miles away.
Long-distance telephone calls were expensive. A postage stamp was four cents.
So we wrote.
Almost every day.
I wrote about classes, studying, what was happening around me, and how much I missed her. Carol wrote about her days too. Some letters were several pages long. Others didn’t need many words. During particularly difficult stretches of engineering school, sometimes all I could manage was a simple message telling her I loved her.
Those letters became part of how we stayed together while we were apart. I wanted Carol to know I was thinking about her, and seeing one of her envelopes waiting for me gave me exactly the same feeling.
We Kept Every Piece We Could
Neither of us thought we were creating a record of our lives.
We just kept the letters.
Over the years, that box moved with us. Wherever we lived, it had a safe place. The first letters dated back to our teenage years, and there were hundreds of them. Carol also kept scrapbooks filled with photographs, cards, clippings, and little pieces of our life together. One of the first was appropriately labeled “Dating to Marriage.”
At the time, those things probably seemed ordinary. A ticket from somewhere we had gone. A photograph from a dance. A letter written because one of us was lonely.
But ordinary things change when enough years pass.
They become evidence of a life you actually lived.
The Teenagers Became Husband and Wife
Carol and I dated for almost five years before marrying in June 1964.
The letters had belonged to the years when we were wondering what the future might look like. Marriage gave us the answer, although certainly not all at once.
There were children to raise, careers to build, homes to make, problems to solve, family members to care for, celebrations, disappointments, and countless regular days. We didn’t stop being the people who had written those letters. We simply grew older together.
The young woman who once wrote that she missed me became my wife and the mother of our children. She became a hospital nurse who spent more than thirty years caring for people when they were frightened, injured, sick, or dying.
And the shy teenager who could barely figure out how to hold her hand somehow got lucky enough to spend most of his life holding it.
Reading the Letters Without Carol
Everything about the box changed after Carol died in June 2015.
One day, during those terribly lonely months, I finally went into the bedroom closet and brought the letters down.
I started reading.
There was Carol again. Not just Carol as I remembered her near the end of her life, after thirteen years of fighting breast cancer, but Carol at 17, 18, 19, and 20. Carol missing me. Carol teasing me. Carol telling me about nursing school. Carol writing words she could never have imagined I would still be reading more than half a century later.
I cried while reading them. Of course I did.
But I smiled too.
That box held something grief could not completely take away. Her handwriting was still there. Her thoughts were still there. The girl I first loved was still speaking from those pages.
What a Box of Letters Can Hold
When we wrote those letters, we had no idea they would one day tell the beginning of a story that lasted nearly 56 years.
We weren’t trying to create a lesson about love. We weren’t writing for readers. We weren’t preserving our words for a book.
We were simply trying to reach each other.
Perhaps that is why the letters mean so much now.
They remind me that a lifetime is built from small moments that rarely feel historic while they are happening. A first date. A four-cent stamp. A nervous kiss. A letter written late at night because you miss someone.
Years later, you realize those small things were the life.
Carol was my teenage sweetheart, my wife, my best friend, and the love of my life. When she died, the person was gone from the room, but our story was still everywhere. And some of the best parts of it were waiting quietly inside a box.