Stay in Touch with Loved Ones

It is important to get in touch with those you love, who love you. It is just as important to stay in touch with those you love, who love you. Life is all about getting and staying in touch with loved ones.

There are different ways of getting and staying in touch with loved ones. You can do so in person, on the phone, through letters and e-mails, in thoughts, in memories, even in prayers. All forms are important and somehow needed to get and stay in touch.

Though my mother passed on in 1982, I have never really lost touch with her. She remains present in my heart and memory. Love is stronger than death; love never ends. Love stays alive and keeps on evolving, even if a face to face meeting is no longer possible. How interesting that as I continue to grow, not up but old now, my understanding and appreciation of my mother – and of other loved ones present and past – evolves as well. I see her differently and I think better now.

I recently came across letters my mother wrote me while I was at boot camp at Paris Island, South Carolina, in the Marine Corps. I saved them, and years ago I carefully bundled them into a memorabilia box. I opened that box to find something else I wanted to retrieve. And there they were, the “Hal and Millie” correspondence of 1963.

I picked up the bundle and felt their weight and their significance in recording a defining slice, a brief but memorable period of my life. I opened the bundle and began reading, and remembering. It wasn’t only my mother I was getting back in touch with; it was also the young dreamer I used to be, whose life was opening ahead of him with so many possibilities from which to choose.

Even though my mother is deceased, reading those letters now was still like getting letters from home, a home I cannot return to, but which nevertheless lives on in the treasure trove of remembrance.

I read the letters from two perspectives: the present and the past. In the present, I saw my mother and myself so differently than when the letters were written and exchanged. I saw them through the eyes of maturity and experience, the eyes with greater clarity, compassion and appreciation, especially for the passion of my youth.

At the same time, I enjoyed remembering how I felt in boot camp, what my mind-set was. It was like putting on a suit from a distant time and style, and making it fresh and current again. I briefly wondered what it would have been like if I could go back to 1963, knowing then what I know now. Oh, well. As the poet says, life goes not backwards, nor tarries with yesterday.

I remembered how I felt when I got one of my mother’s letters while out in the field during advanced training at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Even though she had written that letter perhaps a week early, when I began to read her words, it was as if she were right there with me, and me with her. For the length of the letter, I entered into a genuine kind of togetherness, of our fragile mutual life.

Even now, many years since her writing and her passing, I still got back in touch with her soul, her spirit, and with our still living relationship.