Essay: A parting gift

By Paul Carrier

My mother, Rita (Archambeault) Carrier, always was generous. She showered family and friends with gifts, cooked up a storm for guests, made charitable contributions to many causes and, for decades, supported her church with weekly donations. 

Mom died in December 2010, almost eight years after my father passed away. But even death did not bring her legacy of sharing to an end.

My mother and father began dating before he was drafted into the Army during World War Two. They did not get married until 1946, after he had returned from the war. Mom once told me that she and her fiancé exchanged letters regularly while he was overseas. In fact, she said she wrote to him every night during the war.

For years I had a vague notion that those letters were stored in Mom's attic. So in January 2011, about a month after she died, while my wife Liz and I were at Mom’s house in Massachusetts, going through her belongings, I went upstairs to see what I could find.

My parents lived in that house for more than 50 years, so I had my work cut out for me. For a solid hour, I searched dressers and cabinets and chests and boxes, without turning up any sign of the letters. I began to wonder if I had imagined that they were in the attic. Perhaps Mom had destroyed the letters after revealing their whereabouts, to keep them from prying eyes once she was gone.

After taking a break downstairs, I headed back up for one last round before Liz and I wrapped things up for the day. For some reason, a box that had escaped my attention the first time around caught my eye, although it did not appear promising. A label in my mother’s tiny, meticulous hand identified the contents as “embroidery, patterns, etc.”

Lifting the lid, I discovered something else entirely: wartime letters, dozens of them, from my mother to my father, some handwritten, some typed, mostly in the form of V-mail. I know it was only my imagination, but for a moment it felt as if my heart had stopped.

The cache was not complete. Many of mom's letters were missing, and there was no sign of the letters my father sent home to her. But even with those omissions, that box contained a priceless trove.

Having placed the letters in chronological order, I’ve been reading and transcribing them. My mother’s perfect penmanship and precise, always correct, language are immediately recognizable, but it is the content of the letters that makes them so remarkable. They give me the odd sensation of meeting my mother, not only before I was born, but even before she was married, back when she was still Rita Loretta Archambeault, a single woman in her mid 20s who worked in a bank and still lived at home with her parents and three younger siblings.

Some of the letters are in English, but others are in French; both of my parents grew up in French-speaking homes in Massachusetts. In one such letter, dated Jan. 24, 1943, and addressed to “Cher Leonide,” my mother writes, in French: “I was very happy that you told me my French letters have been easy to understand, and interesting. As they please you and I now have a few minutes to myself, I thought I would spend them with you.”

And so she did, day after day, year after year. My father saved at least some of those letters and brought them home with him when he was discharged from the Army in 1945. Presumably, he returned them to my mother for safekeeping, and she placed them in a dark green Manhattan shirt box. There they remained until, almost a month to the day after mom's funeral, I found a parting gift from her atop a dresser in the attic.