E-Mails to My Cousin

The computer is a very useful tool that we have all grown accustomed to using for a variety of reasons. But I never thought that it would connect me to a long lost relative.

As in many families, I lost touch with several of my cousins over the years. When we were children, we saw one another all of the time at family gatherings. Then we all grew up and went off to live our own lives. This is what had happened to myself and my cousin. Sadly, we met again at a family funeral. I went to the funeral and saw my cousin grieving for her loss. We spoke briefly and I knew that she was now living out of New York, so we exchanged e-mail addresses. I told her that I would like to keep in touch but I didn't know if I would ever hear from her again. We had not been in touch since we were teen-agers and now seeing one another at such a difficult time in her life, I did not feel that she would be up to staying in touch.

To my surprise, two weeks later I received her first e-mail. Where do we begin after all of these years? Well, my cousin began writing where we left off. Through the family grapevine, I knew some information about her life over the years. So the first several e-mails were about "catching up". I learned that she had traveled the world. I wrote back about my own life, which was considerably tamer. My travels were family vacations with my husband and children. We had chosen different paths since we were teens.

Once we were all caught up, we began to talk about her grief. She shared many intimate details with me. There were always at least a week or two before each of us responded to the other's e-mail. This gave me time to think of what to write. Since we did not speak on the phone or see one another, I only had the written word. I did not want to use cliches' so I carefully read my e-mails over and over before hitting the "send" button. I was hoping that I was helping my cousin in some way through a difficult time. I felt great relief when she told me that she found the e-mails very comforting because it gave her time to read them over again before she had to respond. She confessed that although her friends were well-meaning and tried to comfort her, the face to face called for an immediate response that she just wasn't up to giving at the time.

We continued to exchange e-mails for over a year now. We come from a large extended family and we discussed some of the issues that we thought were important and my cousin helped me to understand the family dynamics better. I could tell that she was dealing with her grief better as time went by. I could share stories with her that I did not share with some of my other cousins that I saw in person. When you are at a family gathering for a social event, you exchange pleasantries but you don't go into details about many things in your life. It is not the place nor do you have the time at a family social. But these e-mails gave me plenty of time to write about anything that I wanted. The more my cousin opened up to me the more I opened up to her.

I would like to make a trip out to see her some time in the near future or perhaps my cousin will fly into New York. But I am so grateful for the e-mails that we have exchanged and how we have come to know one another. I never imagined that the computer screen in front of me would lead me back to a family member that had been gone from my life for so many years.