Tag: Letters

Love and Encouragement

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I’ve kept one letter from my cousin Phyllis. She mailed it to me in May 2016, shortly after reading From Fertile Ground, my first book.

Today would have been Phyllis’ seventy-ninth birthday. (She died in March.) So, this afternoon I found and pulled her letter from a large blue plastic container. It houses cherished family memorabilia, my first manuscript, and related items from 2016, when I published my book.

Phyllis was a reading teacher and tutor, a lifelong educator. Though we were nearly ten years apart in age, we were close in our early and late years.

But, back in 2016, Phyllis and I seldom corresponded. We traded holiday and birthday greetings. Nothing more. Receiving an unceremonious letter sent from her home in Missouri to mine in Illinois felt like a rare treat.

I recall opening the typewritten letter with anticipation. I soon discovered it was a message of congratulations and literary encouragement.

“Your book is a skillful blending of the lives of three distinct individuals, who are bound by heritage as well as the love of the written word in three genres: diary, letters, and book,” she noted.

She continued on. “Your book is your catharsis; your identity; your emotional statement in coming to terms with yourself and your life journey in reaching your epiphany … confident, calm, coherent in realizing all of us must ultimately accept who we are, before one can extend that message to others.”

And then, in closing. “Please remember, you are a composite of two proud families: Ferrell and Johnson. Perhaps, your next book will highlight the Johnson clan … You are a product of fertile ground with many chapters yet to be written and lived!”

Then, she typed and signed her name with love in blue ink. It stretched in cursive diagonally across the page.

***

We all need encouragement. Phyllis’ message to me–a fledgling author–was just the incentive I needed a decade ago to write my next book, Tales of a Rollercoaster Operator. It is, more or less, a nostalgic ride through the 1960s and 70s and, most certainly, a love letter to the deceased members of my Johnson family.

In that spirit, on Phyllis’ birthday it is fitting that I acknowledge her literary nudge and also remind myself of something. What my cousin gave me in a lasting letter is what I give my memoir workshop participants whenever I choose to teach another class. I give them encouragement.

Because I Still Remember

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Dear Dad,

Thirty Thanksgivings have come and gone. You wouldn’t recognize the world now. It’s not the one you left on November 26, 1993–much less the country you helped defend during World War II.

Despite some steps forward, life in 2023 is far more complicated, contentious, and fragile for most people.

Nonetheless, I count myself as one of the lucky ones. Thankful to be alive. Thankful for the love of family and friends. Thankful to remember you.

I met Tom about three years after you died. In my thirties, I didn’t imagine this sense of companionship and contentment in my later years … able to marry another man with a similar worldview and creative disposition.

Nor did I imagine living and writing in the warmth of the Sonoran Desert. Creating a life far outside the bounds of the Midwest existence I called home for nearly sixty years.

Over the past three decades, I’ve often reflected on your life, your troubles, your good intentions.

Whenever Tom and I watch the film, I Never Sang for My Father, I am reminded of the deep and treacherous waters fathers and sons navigate together.

We had our share of those moments, but I don’t see a huge resemblance between our relationship and the conflicts facing the two lead characters–frail father (Melvyn Douglas) and his writer son (Gene Hackman)–who never find common ground or the language to make their relationship whole.

There is a profound line in the movie that resonates and always leaves me in tears.

“Death ends a life. But it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some resolution, which it may never find.”

Thirty years later, I feel at peace as I recall our relationship in some unnamed, spiritual way. I feel it on certain occasions with my sons. Or when Tom and I commiserate over our personal losses.

Or as I consider my book of poems, which I published earlier this year. Or when I sing on stage with the Phoenix Gay Men’s Chorus and sense a ripple of emotion charging through my heart and lungs.

I can imagine how proud you would be to see how far I’ve come. You were always the first one to stand and applaud when I sang in high school and college. Thank you for that.

I never told you that I understood your struggle to be heard, even when your depression caused me pain. I observed both your successes and failures–your hopeful exuberance, love of family, health challenges, and bouts of unhappiness.

They have shaped my odyssey as a writer and given me greater compassion and empathy for the plight of the disenfranchised.

In 2023, I live about fifteen hundred miles west of St. Louis, far away from your grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. So, I won’t be able to visit your marble slab today, but this letter is better.

Rest assured–long after your final breath the day after that big meal with your sisters on Thanksgiving 1993–our sometimes-messy-sometimes-sweet bond still exists.

We will be father and son forever. That will always matter to me. Because I still remember.

Love, Mark

My father’s final resting place at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery south of St. Louis.