Letters from the past

If in this day and age you end a relationship or friendship, it's the easiest thing in the world (on the surface at least) to erase all traces of it - press delete and all emails from the person in question disappear. Go back in time to the era before the internet, however, and you're faced with a different scenario.

My mother's recent death is proving an excellent time for "healing through sorting". As I needed to return to my own life in London after her funeral in Sweden, I had no choice but to go through all her belongings first; what to keep, what to give away, what to bin - that is the "business" and aftermath of death.

Upon my return to London I suddenly felt compelled to do the same in my own home - a spring clean of sorts, during the height of autumn. My mother and I kept up a keen correspondence over the years, until she became too ill to write and we have over 20 years of letters and cards exchanged between us. Suddenly I had, not only her letters to me, but my letters to her, in my possession.

The idea was to try and put them into some kind of date order and read the whole correspondence, like a "book of our relationship". But I got sidetracked...  Since my early teens, I think it's safe to say I have gathered my fair share of letters and cards over the decades. This autumn I began to go through, not my mother's letters, but all the other letters sent to me over the years. I have regularly gone through and got rid of letters from time to time - a keen writer as a teenager in rural Sweden, at one point I had well over a hundred so-called pen-pals, from all corners of the world (and some of them I'm in touch with to this day, although email and skype have taken over from the hand-written letters). When my saved letters needed many large boxes and mostly languished in a cupboard under the stairs, or in suitcases atop wardrobes, I realised I needed to start seriously "culling them".

The culling has got easier over time, but this autumn I found that I still had two large drawers filled to the brim with "the most special letters" - love letters, Valentine's cards, deeply personal letters from past friends and lovers. In other words, the written words I found it the hardest to part with.

I found the letters, and I went through them, one by one. I may not have read every single one, but I read the vast majority. I let myself remember, I allowed feelings to flow - gratitude, love, compassion, anger, annoyance, disbelief, sorrow - and then I let them go. I was for quite some time stunned by the contents in some of these letters. How much one forgets, how raw some emotions seemed, how heartfelt, how tragic even. If I'd ever doubted that I've been loved, appreciated and important to people, there was ample written proof right there, hiding in my own bedroom drawers. The temptation was of course to keep these letters, to keep reminding myself of past feelings, past regrets, friendships and relationships long since dead and gone. Right up until this point in time I have given into that temptation again and again, unable to part with these souvenirs, holding on to the memories attached to them in some tiny way, even if I hardly ever think of the persons, male and female, who wrote them.

But why hold on? Many years have passed, most of the people who touched my life and whose lives I touched, are no longer relevant to the present moment.

I feel quite physically and emotionally worn out after going through these written accounts and the accompanying feelings, but I also feel far lighter having let them go, having drawn that line, having shed that weight. I can appreciate what has been, without missing it or wanting it back. It's time to build something new. I trust recycling might turn these letters and cards into something different, a new shape, a new form.

As for my mother's and my letters, they are waiting to be read at a different time and in a different frame of mind. When I'm ready for those chapters.