Love Letters

My heart settled heavily on the harsh reality of what had become of my grandparents’ home. Grandma was gone, all ninety years of her. As my mother and I combed through the closets and dresser drawers in their bedroom, my insides knotted. The house felt so still. So full of Grandma’s absence.

I tried to keep my usual bright smile for Grandpa—the one that had earned me the nickname “Bubbles”—but it felt forced now. The longer Mom and I sifted through Grandma’s things, the more everything felt mechanical. It was as if grief had dismantled our hearts from the task, leaving only our bodies to complete the work. It had to be done, and we were the ones Grandpa had appointed to do it.

As Mom and I worked, Grandpa kept rising and sitting back down again in the curved wicker chair next to the bed. Each time, he would fidget with the coins in his pockets, pace a few steps, then offer some small, hollow gesture of instruction—his way of keeping busy while his heart quietly broke.

Mom and I folded each item with care and packed them into cardboard boxes I’d gathered from our family’s supermarket that Grandma and Grandpa had founded together. Back then, they had nothing but each other and a monumental dream. She’d believed in him so completely that she’d gambled everything they had to see his vision through. What began as a single store blossomed into a thriving corporation, but she never sought the credit. To her, the success was his—and their love was the true reward. The thought that nearly a century of Grandma’s extraordinary life, and the extraordinary love she had found with Grandpa, could fit into a few dozen boxes felt impossible...and unbearably sad.

At Grandpa’s request, Mom and I labeled everything: item, count, and estimated value, all scrawled on a yellow legal pad with a capless black pen. The clothing would be donated to the disaster relief fund, auctioned off at a quarter of its worth, and the proceeds given to those who needed them most.

To me, though, these weren’t just clothes from department stores. They were memories. They held laughter, holidays, Sunday mornings, and moments no auction could ever measure. I remembered Grandma wearing them: the green-and-red Christmas vest with gold buttons she wore one Christmas Eve at my cousin Stacy’s; the chocolate-and-black checked suit she wore to brunch after church; the mint-green gown from my mom’s second wedding; the cream polyester pants she wore to lunch with me the Thursday before she passed; the cat socks she loved so much that she wore them into oblivion; the sensible shoes she wore when her ankles swelled; the handmade scarves; and her jewelry.

All of her jewelry was willed to my mom. I marveled at the pieces—some real, some costume—but all of them, in their own way, magnificent. There was enough to fill a thirty-six-gallon box—and we did.

At the bottom of one drawer, hidden beneath satin and wooden jewelry cases, tangled necklaces, and tarnished pillboxes, we found them—quiet, untouched for more than fifty years.

Love letters.

There must have been nearly twenty of them, tied with a faded royal-blue ribbon, just like something out of an old black-and-white film. But this was real.

Mom reached for them, her face mirroring my awe. Then she passed them to me, and I cradled them like something sacred. The envelopes were soft and yellowed, their pencil-written addresses still legible in my grandfather’s neat cursive. Each bore a worn one-, two-, or three-cent stamp and a circular postmark: 1948. He had written them while courting my grandmother, only months before they were married and expecting their first child—my mother.

The ache in my chest lifted. My eyes drifted to the wedding photo hanging beside the dresser: my grandfather holding her close, their young faces radiant with joy. Then I looked to the newer photo—lines of age tracing their faces, gray hair overtaking the black and blond—but their eyes, their smiles, were the same.

I began to cry. Not from sadness, but from gratitude—for their love, for the proof of it in my hands, for the knowledge that two people could build a life so steadfast and real that no passage of time could erode it.

Their love wasn’t a fairytale—no dragons, no knights, no castles in the sky. Just devotion. Quiet, enduring, human devotion. The kind that, if two people are lucky enough to find and keep, they should consider themselves the luckiest souls on earth.

When I handed the letters to my grandpa, tears filled his warm brown eyes. He took them gently, smiled through his grief, and said, his voice trembling, “I’m going to read these—all of these. And I’m going to cherish every word.”