Dear Readers,

When I first married, I wrote letters home. Now no one writes letters. I take the box of letters that my late husband and I wrote to each other and read a few dozen. He was a terrible writer, an electrical engineer!

Neither of us knew what we were getting in for. We just signed up as most people do, blithely optimistic. Little did we know how wrong our lives would go.

The letters do show a very strong desire on the part of both of us to be good marital partners. He kept that more than I did. He always loved me, but at times I wondered what I had gotten into. He was in his head most of the time and try as he might, he was not the most romantic guy in the world.

So I tried to change him. No luck at all. But he never tried to change me. Our lives went on and throughout the loss of our daughter, we never questioned our marriage. It was the container that held us. But it could not offer us solace when the grief became a daily experience.

Faith in God did not help relieve the grief either and we both felt alone in these years of testing. The letters are just about hope for the future. We were blissfully ignorant. After all, only other people lost children.

And then, of course, Bob died in 2004. It is just in the last few years that the grief has dwindled down. It is, as they say, manageable. My writing has been responsible for much of this. I string words together and fling them onto the internet. No one writes letters anymore.

Love,
Vicki