My father was long gone and I was an only child, so it was left to me to clean out my mother’s house after she passed away. I got rid of the majority of her things in an estate sale, donated almost everything else to Goodwill, then just had a few boxes of her personal effects left to go through afterwards. I tackled those one rainy afternoon on our living room couch while my wife was visiting her sister with our newborn son.
I made phone calls to cancel memberships and accounts, flipped through tattered photo albums, then began sorting through a shoe box of old letters, many of which were faded with age. I skimmed most, but paused when I got to one whose envelope had a return address from a military base in Vietnam with a 1968 postmark date. The two small sheets of bluish airmail stationery were scrawled in uneven script and signed by a man whose name tugged at foggy, distant memories. Its greeting said: “My Dear Wife”.
The first portion of the letter consisted of his passionate expressions of love, adoration, and longing for my mother. The second shifted abruptly to how much he abhorred and opposed the war, how angry and bitter he was about having been drafted into it, and how inhumane and morally corrupt the conflict was in which he was compelled to participate. It concluded by saying that “not an hour goes by in this cesspool of a foxhole when I don’t take your photo from
my helmet, gaze at it with hope knowing that we’ll be together again very soon, and kiss it with the fervor and devotion I feel for you. Until then…Te amo, mi amor!”
My forehead furrowed as I lowered the letter to my lap. My mother had offered only a few terse words when I pressed her over the years about her first husband, how he’d been killed in the war, and that he’d been infantry platoon mate of my father’s. I’d known nothing more about their relationship nor its history, depth, or ardor, not even after my father finally left for good when I was nine. This was the first I’d been aware that he’d died in a war he didn’t believe in or that he was close to returning home safely to her from it. I was suddenly thunderstruck at the realization of how cataclysmic that confluence of circumstances was to our personal histories and identity.
My wife came through the front door then carrying our son. Our eyes met, she stopped still, frowned, and said, “What is it?”
I managed to lift the pages. “Found this among my mother’s things. It’s a love letter from her first husband before he was killed in the Vietnam War. It says he was about to be discharged and sent home.”
Her eyes widened. She muttered, “Wow.”
“I can’t believe it.” I blew out a long breath. “I mean, had he made it, I’d never have been born. And you and I would have never met, gotten married, had a baby. Just think.”
My wife looked down at our son in her arms, then back at me, before saying, “That is pretty random, all right.”
“I don’t know.” I cocked my head, considering. “Seems to me more about how incredibly connected we all are.”
She sat down beside me, shrugged, and said, “Two sides of the same coin.”
I heard myself say, “Maybe so.”
Our son stirred, and she jiggled him gently. Something like awe had overtaken me. I put my hand on his chest, and just as gently, she covered it with her own.