Having told my kind commenters that I would post further about my Dad in an effort to answer their interested questions, I now feel a certain challenge emerging. It's a challenge for me, and a challenge for The Phoenix. Having read the letters all through again - 73 in all, not 150 as I wildly estimated after reading them the first time - and catalogued them after a fashion (numbered, recorded dates and addresses, summarised, tagged), I wait to see what the next step might be.
One step will be to select a few to take and read to my mother in a couple of weeks' time when I visit. I mentioned them to her on the phone when I'd just begun to read them for the first time, and she was very interested, in fact quite excited to hear about them. She had not been aware of their existence. As I progressed through the letters, there were more and more that touched on matters I didn't feel inclined to discuss with her, so another difficult decision is - is it my job to be the censor? After all I could just let her have them for a while, and let her make of them what she will. On the other hand her resilience level has dropped to something of an all time low, and I fear they might upset her in ways she'd find hard to manage alone...
Then there's what I've stirred up in myself by reading them and, paralleling this, your interest kind readers. I'm digesting and pondering. Watch this space.
2 comments:
How did you come to have them?
S found them in my Dad's desk, when we were clearing his flat - Dad must have found them amongst my Granny's stuff. I can't remember at what point S passed them on to me, but in the first few years after he died certainly.
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