The folded page wasn’t a birthday card, and it wasn’t an apology either. It was written on the same kind of paper she’d always kept beside the telephone, and the first line said she’d been afraid that if she told me the truth while she was alive, I would spend the rest of my life trying to make her change her mind. She wrote that she’d loved me every day, but she’d been taught that saying it made a person weak, and by the time she understood what that silence had done to me, she didn’t know how to undo forty years of it. Then she explained the cards. She had written them all during one winter when she knew she wasn’t going to get another chance, and she stamped every envelope because she had planned to mail one each year after she was gone.
The reason she never mailed them was the part I couldn’t understand until I reached the middle of the letter. She said she’d made a deal with herself: if I ever came to her house and told her I knew she loved me, she would give me the whole box. Until then, she wanted me to have the possibility that maybe there had been something she couldn’t say, because she believed hope was better than certainty if certainty only arrived at the end. She wrote about things I’d forgotten — the blue dress I wore when I was nine, the time I broke a window and blamed the dog, the night I came home from my first job crying because I’d been fired. She remembered every one of them. And beside each memory she’d written the same sentence: “I loved you then, too.”
I got to the final paragraph and had to put the paper down because the handwriting suddenly changed. It became shaky, almost like the old woman’s handwriting on the 1980 envelope, and she said there was one thing she’d never told me because she was ashamed of how frightened she’d been. She said that when I was born, she’d written a letter to her own mother asking what kind of woman could look at her child and feel so much love but still be unable to say the words. Her mother had written back, and she’d kept that reply for decades. The last line of my mother’s letter said she’d finally opened it after I was grown, and what it said was only seven words — words my mother had carried with her for the rest of her life: “Then tell her before she thinks otherwise.”
