The Third Letter
Meeting my shadow
Note to reader: This is part of an ongoing series about the life of my youngest son, Charlie, who died in July 2022. It’s a love letter to the unspoken places of childhood, generational trauma, mothering, parenting, divorce, and grieving. Most of this series is behind a paid paywall for now. If you are new here, you can start at the beginning. Or with the previous week. Thanks for being here.
Butch and I fixed many homes but we never really tried to repair our marriage. We lived together for over a year as we worked through the details of a divorce. Our four children were under the age of eight, and we both wanted to hold on to our family as we let go of each other.
In ten years, there were so many losses that I wasn’t even sure what the problem was until one day a year after the dead baby and a year after the anonymous letter telling me what an awful wife I was to Butch, another letter arrived in the mail.
The long white business envelope was addressed to my husband. I stared at the envelope; the handwriting looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I put the letter down when the kids came into the kitchen. Sam (8) and Willie (5) wanted a snack, Lucy (7) wanted art supplies, and Charlie (almost 3) just wanted me. Earlier in the day as I was busy, Willie who was four kept saying my name. “Mommy, look at this,” he said. “Just a minute,” I replied trying to finish some paperwork for a project I was working on.
A minute later, Willie’s tiny voice spoke again, “Mommy, I want to show you something.” This time instead of putting him off, I walked from my desk at the edge of the kitchen to the door frame where he was standing. We had only been in the house a year but we had added lines on the door frame as a growth chart, to mark the height of the kids on their birthdays just like we had done at other homes. Willie had drawn a red line on the door frame about two feet off the floor. “Would baby James be about this tall now if he had lived?”
It’s moments like these that both break and make you as a mother, as a human. It’s a choice to change the subject, or to erase the line. Instead, I sat down on the floor next to Willie and took the red Sharpie and wrote the date and the name James. “Yes, that’s about how big he would be,” I said. “Thank you for adding him.”
It was late in the day and I put the children on a couch in the living room to finish watching Homeward Bound, their favorite movie that we had started earlier in the day. The kids fit together on the sofa like four little sardines in a tin. I loved their connection to each other. Then I went back into the kitchen and picked up the letter addressed to Butch. Whoever wrote the mailing address was not in a rush; every letter looked perfectly formed. I turned the envelope over. No return address. I glanced at the clock knowing he would be home soon, and then I slowly slid my finger along the seal of the envelope and pulled out a thick bundle of white paper. At the top of the first page in large handwritten letters it said, Read & Burn.
Dear Butch, it began.