Family Matters

Five weeks, now. We're still cleaning up, sorting out, picking up the pieces. There's an astonishing lot to be done, afterwards.

She saved every letter I ever sent her. Every dashed-off note; every five minutes' scribbled thought; every rushed and hasty and off-the-top-of-my-head word. She saved them all.

I am not sure why this surprises me. I guess I saved every letter my Dad ever sent me, too—which, over the course of forty years, amounted to about four pages. And this from a man who wrote reams about history and politics, albeit most of it never published.

I've tried looking through my email exchanges with her. It's all clipped, short, trivial; very of the moment, but with little flavor. I still have old messages from her on my voicemail, as well. I can't bring myself to delete any of them now, but I know that eventually, like everything electronic, they'll either fade away or vanish in a software upgrade.

My company is moving into a new building next week. In preparation for the move, I've had to clean out my office. In the back of a drawer, I found a To-Do list from September, 2006. The first three items were work-related. The fourth item was, "Write more letters to Emily."

Seeking insight, I tried rereading Our Town, by Thornton Wilder. Bad idea. While I vaguely remembered the gist of the final act, I'd forgotten that the focal character is named Emily. If you don't understand the reference you should read the play, but for me, it was crushing.

Why is it that we writers find it easier to write for this vague, anonymous, collective entity, "the audience," than to the people closest to us, who share our lives? More to the point, why do we find it more urgent to write for strangers than to those we love?

Sorry, no answers this week. Only questions.

Let's talk.

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FAMILY MATTERS posts at 7 a.m. each Sunday and is dedicated to serious discussions of marriage, family, children, human sexuality, and all the other things that writers ignore when they cocoon in their offices and try to create fiction. This series will run until we either run out of things to talk about, solve all the problems in the world, or you tell me to shut up and go get some professional therapy. If you have a question you'd like to ask or a topic you'd like to expound upon, send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com and we'll work it into the queue.