What would be part of your life review?
Parts that stand for the whole
Last week, my dad handed me a stack of letters from his dad, a grandparent I never got to know because he died of a heart attack when my dad was five.
“Thought you might like to read these,” he said. “I made copies for my sisters.”
“I can take one of the copies,” I said.
“No, take the originals,” he said, then looked at me for a minute. “Just be sure to give them back.”
My dad was trusting me with a treasure. And now I know things I never thought I would, like that my grandpa had nice handwriting and a nice disposition. He was a cogent and expressive writer. He was in love with my grandma and told her so. It’s a small stack of letters, but I feel like I know him now. I can see Harry Steiner organizing his socks drawer as neatly as his lines on the page.
A snapshot really can stand for the whole.
Which makes me think about life reviews. This month, my book club is reading After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond by Bruce Greyson. Apparently, people who come close to death often really do have their lives flash before their eyes. But in the retelling, they tend to zero in on a few moments. They talk about seeing these quotidian incidents from multiple perspectives—their own and everyone else’s involved—and going on to live better lives because of it. Seeing a small piece of their life clearly helps them see it all that way.
These letters from my grandpa are a snapshot. The full set spans just a few months—between October 1947 and February 1948, when my grandpa is working at an aircraft factory in East St. Louis and writing to my grandma, his wartime sweetheart. They met at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs before he was deployed and reconnected when he returned. He’s writing these letters while my grandma is in Bode, Iowa, taking care of her sick mom, in the lead up to their Valentines Day marriage. Once they marry and move together to Marshalltown, Iowa, the window into their lives closes.
But even a small window can be revealing:
As a single man without much money, my grandpa went out to buy Christmas cards to mail out.
Sunny weather made his mood sunnier.
The war did not turn him hard. “Squeeze Gary for me,” he wrote. “I could write more business-like cards and never call you anything but Miss Larson and never say ‘I love you.’ But you’re like me. I like lots of mush.”
He was humble. “Even when I look in the mirror,” he wrote, “I don’t see what you see. Guess I’m a very lucky fellow.”
He was an optimist. “Just keep that little chin up now, honey, because there’s good in everything.”
My dad says these letters are all he has of his dad’s voice. He has so little.
And also, he has a lot.
I’m experimenting with cadence for this newsletter over the coming months. I’ll be back in three weeks, on Friday, April 4.
Thank you so much for these special thoughts about your grandfather, my father! You captured things about him that I might have thought about but hadn’t put into words. This is all very heart warming for me and dearly appreciated! We both found the letters amazing!
I love this. I have cartons of artifacts — letters, photos, newspaper clippings my Aunt Mary saved, love letters from Uncle Chuck to Aunt Millie (Mary’s sister) — that are a family history archive. I am guessing, too, that your grandfather and my uncle knew each other at Fort Carson. Enjoy your brief hiatus.