I recently moved, and in the process of unpacking I discovered a thank-you card from an old friend’s mom: in it, she thanks me for singing “Danny Boy”* at her husband’s funeral mass. A few years ago, she herself passed away. Every now and then I come across her note, and I just can’t bring myself to throw it away. It meant a lot to me when she sent it, and I guess it means more now that she’s gone, even though I hardly ever see/talk to that friend anymore.
I don’t have any other correspondence from dead friends/loved ones.
I might suggest that you “print it” to a PDF (using something like CutePDF) and burn a couple CDs with it, just to be sure. It sounds like it means a lot to you to have it & after a few email accidents, I know its better to have a copy stored somewhere else.
I don’t have any correspondance per se, but a friend of mine whom I’d fallen out of touch with some years ago passed away almost exactly a year ago. After I’d found out in a rather unexpected way, I went searching for the old online absurdist humour articles and homebrew magazine stuff we were involved in with a bunch of other folks. Although it’s a little harder to google than your average web page without knowing just the right keywords, I nevertheless found a cache of our old material – stuff I myself no longer had copies of. I even found his more recent hobby’s web page (regarding urban exploration, and nothing at all to do with our “babble days”), though of course when I’d found all this a month had gone since his passing, sadly, but I was at least able to post my own brief memorial on his infiltration website.
My father died in 1996. Around 2003 I was getting rid of some old junk and came across an old answering machine that used the mini cassette tape and just for fun I plugged it in to hear what I could hear. If the answering machine picked up first it would record the conversation and I happened to catch a large chunk of a conversation my father and I had back in 1996.
Yesterday, while cleaning out a closet at my grandma’s house, I found a birthday card. An old birthday card. I brought it out to have my mom look at it, and she told me that it was from her, to me, on my first birthday, some 43 years ago. I couldn’t throw it away. So, I saved it, and packed it away in an old cedar chest that will be moved into my bedroom soon.
I’m a packrat when it comes to pictures, old forgotten letters and cards and things of that sort.
I also found a picture of my grandmother’s grandmother…the only problem with the picture, is that it is a picture of her grandmother IN HER COFFIN.
After finding that one, I found several more pictures of dead family members in their coffins. Oy. But, that’s something that they did back then. I don’t know if it’s a popular thing these days, but I’m not in habit of taking pictures of expired relatives in their coffins! The ‘tradition’ will end with me!
My mother is 95 and almost completely blind. She is also a packrat. Every once in a while, she gets a bee in her bonnet about wanting me to “look through” some of the stuff in the storage locker.
Last Friday, we were over to visit and she wanted me to look for something that she remembered being in one of the boxes. I found it; it was in a shoe box stuffed in the corner of one of the larger boxes. She asked what else was in the shoebox. I had to tell her “Aw, just some old letters.”
They were letters of condolence about my brother’s death. He died under exceptionally tragic circumstances and she had saved all of those letters. Most of them were from people that I have thought about in nearly 30 years, and it was rather strange reading some of the letters.
I kept a check that my grandmother gave to my husband, for $25 for his birthday. She wrote it a couple of weeks before she died suddenly. It has the date and her signature, of course, along with “Happy Birthday Henry” in the comment area.
I also have an empty cardboard fruit box in my garage that has her name written on it in her handwriting that I can’t bring myself to throw away.
I’m in the midst of cleaning out my house in preparation for moving and trying to get rid of as much stuff as possible. I keep coming across cards I got from my late wife which are are being placed, unread, in a separate box until I decide I’m ready to deal with them. And I know that somewhere in the basement I have several boxes of family papers which I’m certain include the guestbook and condolence cards from my Mom’s death, and possibly also my Aunt & Grandmother.
I’ve kept Christmas and birthday cards from my grandparents. It’s interesting to see Grandfather’s style get more minimalistic as the years go by - the earlier ones say “Dear Carol, from Grandfather”, the later ones simply say “Grandfather”. I guess he felt like he didn’t have time to waste?
I have a habit of hoarding old Christmas cards (Too lazy to make a list, I put them in with my decorations when I pack up each year; the next Christmas when I unpack the decorations, I use last year’s cards to jog my memory of who I need to send cards to this year. After that they are supposed to go in the bin but some years they don’t make it and I find them shoved in a drawer several years on, by which time they have acquired “sentimental value” - at least until I go on a ruthless cleaning spree) so I have some from relatives who have passed on. I found Great Uncle Frank’s 2004 card when I was writing out my 2005 cards, and I was very moved - it simply said he looked forward to seeing me at the family reunion in March. Our family reunion ended up being pushed back twelve months and he passed in the May, so we never did meet again. I can’t imagine ever throwing that one away. It will probably end up filed with my family tree documentation (that stuff is either going to be a goldmine or a nightmare for someone someday when I join Uncle Frank and the others at that great reunion in the sky).
An elderly relative saved letters from my great great grandmother and gave them to me a few years ago. They are treasured possessions. The grandmother passed away in 1921 and the letters are from circa 1919 to just a month or two before her death. Knowing how important they are to me makes other family letters take on a new significance; today’s short note from Aunty Whatsit about the mundane happenings of her family is tomorrow’s genealogical treasure… the trick is keeping it safe for the next 50-100 years.
I have, on my old cell phone, a text message from our own Persephone, that she sent me shortly before she died. I can’t bear to throw the phone away, even though it’s completely useless on this continent, because I know that text message is on it.
Not from the person himself, but I have a letter that I’d written to an online friend which was returned by his sister with a handwritten note explaining that he’d died. I run across it every so often and think about tossing it but never do.
I have many such notes and letters! I have letters, not necessarily from dead people, but letters written to me 30, 40 years ago, when I was a child. They’re history! Boring history, maybe, but they’re my history and reflect the people who were important to me at the time (boyfriends, penpals) and who will always be important to me (grandparents, other relatives). My father died when I was 25, so of course I cherish anything written I have of his. I love looking at his signature in many of the books I have that were his. More pleasing are the notes he made, which I left in the books. I wish I had more letters from my grandmother. In them she describled simple daily occurances – things I don’t think people write down much any more.
My grandfather died in mid December (1997), and my family and I went out of state for the funeral. When we returned we found the Christmas card that he had sent out to us in the mailbox. Must have mailed them out only a day or so before he died.
For Christmas my grandparents would send us all gifts, and would often write a long note to each and attach to the gift. They must have completed this before he passed away, because I found a long note in my grandfather’s handwriting attached to my gift that year.
The worst story along those lines I’ve heard was in my previous company, when one of our colleagues died in a motorcycle accident. The HR manager had to go into his email account and let correspondents know what had happened.
One mail he found was a personal one, that simply said “Haven’t heard from you in a while. What’s up - are you dead?”
I recently took some boxes of my old stuff from my parents’ house, and amongst them were old Bar Mitzvah cards and camp letters from my recently-deceased paternal grandfather, as well as some less sentimental from now-deceased great-uncles and the like.
A few days after my wife’s grandmother died, my wife received a birthday card from her that had (obviously) been mailed shortly before the death.
I have a love letter some young man named Jim wrote to my mother when she was still in high school, dating approximately 1960. It was a very sweet note hinting that he was worried she’d fall for one of his buddies while he was at sea.
With the note was a page where he’d written her name out in all sorts of scripts. Big bubble letters, letters written in vines and flowers, letters made with tiny little hearts. Covering a page. So sweet.
I don’t know if Jim is still alive but my mother passed away thirteen years ago and I still hold on to this letter. My teenage daughter loves to take it out and look at it sometimes mostly because she is named after my mom but also because it’s just a little piece of sweet innocence about a woman she only knew as her poor sick grandmother.
Yeah, every once in a while I come across something my mom wrote me. She died about 2 1/2 years ago. It’s weird. All sorts of emotions bubble up. She had dealt with a long illness, but we weren’t expecting her to die so suddenly. She went in her sleep, and my poor dad found out when he woke up next morning, in the same bed. :eek:
It also probably didn’t help that I didn’t really start the grieving process for two years afterward, due to certain circumstances in my life at the time.
And I was going through the phone book in my cell phone this weekend, and I found a few old numbers for people that have died. (One just last April. A friend who died of cancer. I couldn’t go to his funeral because my grandmother’s was the same day.)
Crap, this is getting maudlin. I think I’m going to go into another thread.
A few years ago another friend’s mom died unexpectedly, and I went up to Pittsburgh to stay with my friend so she wouldn’t be alone at her place. Her stepfather and brother (and his fiancee) were around, but they were all staying at her stepfather’s place. My friend had been doing mostly ok, no major breakdowns or anything, until one morning when we were supposed to meet everyone for breakfast before going over to the funeral home: we were running a little late, and while I was getting dressed my friend called her stepfather to let him know. I came out of the bedroom to find my friend sitting at her kitchen table and sobbing. I asked what happened, and she looked up at me and said, “I don’t have any recordings of my mom or her voice … I forgot about the damn answering machine.”
That’s so funny: the same friend from the story with the answering machine took a few pictures of her mother in the coffin! She told me she planned to do it, and asked me if I thought it was too morbid. She said that she just had this feeling that she really wanted a picture of her mom in her coffin, but she was worried what people would think. I told her not to worry one bit, that it was her mother (we both knew that her brother would understand), and that she should do whatever she thought she needed to.
I haven’t kept any cards, but my grandfather did that, too! In fact, sometimes he gets confused about who he’s sending the card to (he’s 91) and I’ve even gotten one or two that were signed “Uncle Victor.” You’ve inspired me: if I get one from him for my birthday next month, I’m keeping it. He’s my last living grandparent, and won’t be around much longer.
When I was little (like grade school), my mom worked nights for a while and we used to write notes to each other. I’d write a note to her and leave it on the music stand in my room before I went to bed, and when I got up in the morning her reply would be on the back. I’ve kept most (if not all) of them, and I have no plans to get rid of them. The “newest” one is now easily 20 years old. I can’t imagine how much they’ll make me miss her when she’s gone.
That happened to one of my mom’s friends! His wife died suddenly, and in their bed (and young: she was only 42 or so). There is no good way to discover that your spouse is dead, but that’s gotta be right up there among the top worst ways.
You’ve inspired me: if I get one from him for my birthday next month, I’m keeping it. He’s my last living grandparent, and won’t be around much longer.