I tore open the next envelope.
Inside were dozens of photographs.
My mother sitting in a university library.
My mother standing beside an old car.
My mother laughing at a picnic table.
And Thomas was in almost every one.
I felt sick.
Had they been together?
Had my mother hidden an entire relationship from me?
Then I found another letter.
Before you misunderstand, your mother and I were never lovers.
Try Marriage Counseling
I actually laughed through my tears.
Even dead, Thomas seemed to know exactly what I would think.
Your mother saved my life.
The letter explained everything.
Nearly forty years earlier, Thomas had lost his wife and young daughter in a house fire.
Afterward, he stopped working.
Stopped answering friends.
Stopped caring whether he woke up the next morning.
Trace Family History
One winter night, he had been sitting alone at a bus station when my mother, then a twenty-one-year-old nursing student, noticed him.
Everyone else walked past.
She didn’t.
She sat beside him.
Bought him coffee.
And stayed for nearly three hours while he told her about the family he had lost.
My mother never tried to fix him.
She simply refused to let him disappear.
Your mother made me promise that night that if I survived my grief, I would someday do for someone else what she had done for me.
I stared at those words until tears fell onto the paper.
Plan Family Trips
