GREENER PASTURES: Dead Letters in the Heart

Most of us have dead letters in our hearts. A dead letter is something we wanted, if not needed to say or write to someone, but we never really wrote or sent it. So that letter still sits in our hearts, unspoken, unheard.

Some of those letters may be quite old, yet continue to be quite meaningful, if we would but open and read them to ourselves.

Aging is a very different thing to the heart than to the body. Opening and reading a letter of thirty years ago can still have fresh power and poignancy.

I have letters sitting in my heart but never expressed. Even though their importance might have changed, even though I might be thankful that I didn’t send this or that letter, they still represent precious slices of my life. They contain memories of where I have been and how I felt there. I have dead letters to former significant others I never told what I really thought. They are just there, and I suppose will perish when I do. Then I imagine they will go to the final resting place of dead letters.

That being said, I have read or expressed many of the formerly dead letters in my heart. Such an unearthing has a surprising capacity to renew and restore our sense of wholeness and integrity. It can be healing to us, if not to a relationship.

I have often instructed people with unresolved issues about the living or the dead to write a letter to that person. I tell them that the purpose is not to send but to finally express their thoughts and feelings. What I do not say is that the letter has already been written within them; that rather than writing it from scratch they will discover the words just flowing out, the feelings and thoughts already being there, awaiting the releasing event of self-expression.

I recently walked with a couple through an earlier crisis in their marriage. What came out were significant sentiments each of them felt toward the other but never expressed. Instead they quietly, secretly distanced themselves from each other; they walked around rather than through the words they asked their hearts to store in silence.

A dysfunctional relationship is one where those involved do not talk about issues. Instead they write letters to themselves and hide them in their hearts. Unfortunately, neither they nor the other will ever learn the contents of their letters. We have to express, read the letters, to know what we felt and thought.

For many of us, letting a dead letter section continue to exist in the heart is preferable to opening and reading what we actually felt and thought. Rigorous honesty may be freeing, but it is also threatening. Opening a dead letter poses a risk, even if it might offer freedom from its constrictive weight upon the heart. It can prompt us to change more than we are ready or willing to change, to say nothing of the relationship the letter addresses.

If you want to get into touch with the dead letters in your heart, reflect on things you wanted to say to significant others but never did, things about pain or need or love. Note the sadness that surrounds whatever you never expressed. If you cannot or will not send a dead letter, at least open and express it; give it its rightful place or moment in your soul-life.