Preparing for a relocation that will happen…at some point, I’m tempted to throw the majority of our belongings into the street and set fire to them.
Not, however, my personal correspondence. I have kept the cards and letters I’ve received going back 40+ years. These mean a lot to me, as they contain memories of events that have not been recorded any other way. In a sense, they tell a part of the story of my life and a part of the stories of the lives of the people who sent them to me. I do reread them on occasion. They aren’t just sitting in a box in storage.
In the days following my father’s death in February, my mom and I found a stack of cards and letters I had sent him over the years. Some of them were more than twenty years old. He kept this stack on a table next to the chair where he passed most of his waking hours in the months leading up to his passing, among a bunch of other stuff so it wasn’t easy to see unless you were looking for it, and he had obviously reread the cards and letters numerous times. Dad and I didn’t have the closest father-daughter relationship, so it surprised me that he kept all of that and even looked at it on a regular basis. Knowing this has opened my mind to the possibility that with the passing of time he saw things differently than he did when I was younger, and it’s made me realize that perhaps I should also.
It’s not up to me to decide if other people should save or toss personal correspondence in their possession. Every situation is different. In my own case, I don’t see myself doing it. I’m aware this will leave something for someone else to deal with after I die and whoever that is* may not care about their contents at all, but these cards and letters mean so much to me that I can’t just get rid of them.
*We have no children, nieces or nephews [he’s an only child and I have one childless sibling], so who will go through our belongings after we die is, at this moment, anyone’s guess :woman_shrugging:t2:
