A few months after my father died in 2007, his second wife gave me a box filled with letters he'd received while in the Air Force in the late 1960s, most of them from my mother. I didn't have the time or inclination to start reading them until four years later on the bus ride home from defending my master's project.
The letters date back to September 1968, when my father was 27 and my mother was 24. I found their banter charming in its humor and optimism, but bittersweet because I knew the story would end in a divorce 20 years later. But the letters provide me an invaluable glimpse at an upbeat side of my parents I vaguely knew about but rarely saw firsthand. I get to read my mother, who in the late 1970s converted to Protestantism and swore off cursing among other fun activities, use deliciously salty language. And I get to see my father, later plagued by chronic depression, happy for a while. Most importantly, I got to see the human sides of two people who both died before I got the chance to know either of them.
I've always believed that, regardless of what your relationship with them is like, your parents are a crucial part of your identity. Having lost both my parents too early (My parents both died of cancer, my mother in 1995 at 51 and my father in 2007 at 65), for years I had the vague sense that there was more to my parents' lives than what I experienced for the brief amount of time all three of us were on the planet. These letters let me see who my parents were before they were my -- or anybody else's -- parents.
