The last letter

When I was a young child, I used to write to my relatives in India often. These letters often began very similarly: “My Dear ___, How are you? Everyone is fine here. I hope that everyone is fine there. I hope to come visit you soon.” And so on. My mother would often prod me to write these letters, and without her nudge, I probably would have never written them.

The last letter I wrote to my grandmother never reached her, which is something I will probably regret for the rest of my life. I was a fourth year medical student, and learned from my mother than my Ajee had fallen ill and was in the hospital. Her condition was critical, and my mother would be leaving in a few days to fly to India and see her. I knew the situation was grave and that she was probably dying. My mother made it to India in time to say goodbye, but because of the critical care unit’s policies on restricting family visits, she didn’t get to spend much time with my grandmother. The sorrow transmitted through the phone by my mother after my grandmother died made my heart ache, but it wasn’t till that my mother told me that she was unable to deliver the letter did I truly for the first time in my life, experience the empty emotion of regret.

My grandmother was constantly encouraging me to write. She often told me in between her asthmatic breaths, “Every day when you wake up, you must write down your dreams from the night.” She never really told me why. Perhaps she felt your dreams reveal your real dreams and hopes. Perhaps writing about your dreams is like writing fiction, and it provides you some respite from reality; after all, as an adolescent girl during World War II, she fled the Japanese invading her home country of Burma and walked through the jungles by foot to India, losing both of her parents along the way.

I can’t imagine what my grandmother would have thought of the electronic age of writing: blogging, emails, tweeting, and texting. After all, what can be beautifully expressed in cursive writing using a pen and paper becomes harsh, blunt, brief and impersonal on email. Electronic mail makes communication easy and global, but it also removes the excitement and thrill of opening a letter from your grandmother across the globe.

The art of letter writing, or any kind of writing with a pen/pencil and paper, I feel, is practically extinct. In fact, I just received an email, in which I assumed that the sender was harshly accusing me of not completing a patient task that I had completed weeks ago. This email incited anger within me. However, I responded to the email to understand the sender’s motivation: Was he accusing me of not completing my work, or was this simply a brief and impersonal email with no underlying negative connotation? It turned out that the latter was true. Today, he wrote back, “no offense meant. i know my writing style is very straightforward and brief. dont read any emotions into it.” But how, as a human being, can we separate a piece of writing from an underlying tone or emotion? Isn’t that what writing is meant to be: a composition of words and phrases that convey meaning and communicate feelings and emotions? Or must we always assume, in this age of electronic mail and Twitter status updates, that a message from someone is only meant for scheduling meetings, forwarding news articles or fulfilling a work-related task?

I’m very grateful to my mother that she made me write all those letters when I was young. Even though she had to expend a great deal of energy encouraging me to write, I will never forget the sense of satisfaction I had in completing a letter, mailing it to India, and receiving a response. Perhaps we may never be able to bring back the art of letter writing to this modern electronic age, but at least we could not only incorporate some of the etiquette of letter writing, but also the acceptance that within the seemingly innocent letters of the alphabet lies emotion that came from a human being. Perhaps my grandmother encouraged me to write down my dreams because writing is so much more than a grammatically incorrect and trite phrase on an email. It’s actually a meditation on processing and accepting yourself and your thoughts.