Letter from the past

Yesterday's mail brought a handwritten note (one of those relics from the past) from a cousin in Florida with an enclosure.

In his note, my cousin said he had found the enclosed with some old pictures and said "I don't know why in the world I would have this."

It was another note, although typed (my mother typed a lot of letters), from my mother to my dad's sister -- my aunt and my cousin's aunt.

My dad had four sibling -- three brothers and one sister, and this cousin's father is one of those siblings. They are all now deceased.

I know exactly why my cousin ended up with this letter from my mother. That group of siblings and their mother would pass letters around. If one of them wrote one that contained  information that would be of interest or newsworthy to one of the others, or to all,  they would simply mail it to another sibling, and that sibling might continue and mail it to another.  

They were at times a rowdy bunch and would not have been above saying something disparaging about one of the others, so hopefully the letter-forwarding didn't happen in those instances. But I well remember this practice.

So I'm confident that's how my cousin ended up with this. My aunt, the original recipient, certainly wasn't going to make an expensive long distance call to update her brother with news, but she decided she could spring for a stamp (which at the time cost 13 cents) to keep him in the loop.

(They were also a frugal group, so some serious deliberation about this would have occurred in the mind of my aunt).

It was the content of the letter that most interested me. Some background is in order.

In 1975 my father was diagnosed was throat cancer -- cancer on his vocal cords. I was between my junior and senior years in high school. He and my mother traveled from our home in south Arkansas to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Clinic in Houston, where he went through several months of radiation treatment.

Interestingly, one of his brothers (another of the aforementioned siblings), who lived in West Texas, received almost the identical diagnosis at the same time, and stayed in Houston for treatment at the same time. They both got apartments, as I recall, in a complex owned by the clinic for short-term patients to live in, with their wives. Since their treatments were not debilitating, my dad and uncle both got jobs at the apartment complex as maintenance guys.

The ending to this episode was both my dad and uncle went into remission and, after a few months, both went back home and resumed their lives. That's oversimplified, but it's what I remember.

Within a couple of years, my uncle's cancer returned and he had to have a total laryngectomy, in which his voice box was removed. After that he had a permanent trachea and had to learn esophageal speech. I saw him a handful of times after that, and it was fairly remarkable how well he did with it. His new way of speaking resembled his former voice, although it was extremely "breathy" and he had to take numerous small breaths in order to speak. Again, this is oversimplified, but what I remember.

My dad continued having checkups, and in the fall of 1978, his cancer also returned. He was scheduled for a laryngectomy in November. This was during my junior year of college.

That's where the letter from my mother comes in. She tells my aunt in the letter the date of the surgery and when they will be going to Houston. There is no date on the letter, but I'm guessing it was early November, as the surgery was scheduled for Nov. 13th.

She had obviously talked to my aunt on the phone a day or so before writing the letter, as she apologizes "for the way I must have sounded." She goes on to say that she had spent most of the day crying, and had stayed in bed. According to what she told my aunt in the letter, she told my dad he was going to have to let her have a day "to fall apart."  

She went on to say she was OK now. My dad's attitude was great, she said, so she knew she was going to be OK too. He had told my mother he would learn to speak again, and would depend on his brother to help him with that. He planned to keep his business going, she said.

Since I was away at college, I was not involved in the day-to-day of this. I got my information from phone calls and also from letters she would write. I was only an hour's drive away, and I think I went home on a weekend before they went to Houston for the surgery.

What struck me in this letter was my mother telling my aunt how she needed to "fall apart" and spend the day in bed, crying. I can't adequately express to you how unlike my mother this would have been, and how hard this must have been for my father. In my mind, she always represented the height of strength, courage and optimism and I would have been shocked had I known at the time that she had spent a day in bed -- "falling apart," no less. She just wasn't the fall-apart type.

But with the wisdom that only comes from years, I now know this was probably a healthy exercise for her. She didn't know what the future held, and she was scared, so she needed some time to process. She didn't do it for days or weeks, she did it for one day. She then got out of bed and moved on with life. I know her faith sustained her.

When I shared this with Wife, and told her what my mom had done all those years ago, she simply said, "Good for her."

It's as if she knew (through some type of woman's code????) what a spouse, especially a wife, would have needed to do for herself under the circumstances.

"Huh," I replied to my wife, in a wondering manner.

The postscript to this story is the best part. My dad had the surgery as scheduled, and when the surgeon got to his voice box, he discovered he could retain a portion of one vocal cord that was not affected by the cancer. He had only a partial laryngectomy and did not have to learn esophageal speech.  His voice was raspy for the rest of his life, but he could talk naturally and clearly until the day he died, 31 years later.

I am grateful to my cousin for passing along this treasure to me. It warmed my heart and I definitely learned something from it.