With E-mail, We Leave History Blank

True story: In late 2004 my wife—who for good reason has been estranged from her family for decades— received a letter from an eccentric aunt she hadn’t had contact with in 30 years.

Aunt “Alice” was 77, the letter said. She wanted someone to help her get her affairs in order and believed my wife was one of two people in her extended family she could trust to handle her estate.

After much discussion, my wife and I decided she would contact Aunt Alice, but be ready to pull out of the deal at any time.

Aunt Alice had no phone and certainly no Internet access so the only way to communicate with her was by letters.

After a series of exchanges and an emergency call from the hospital letting us know Aunt Alice had been diagnosed with liver cancer, we drove to Allentown, PA to pay her a visit. We arrived at her modest two-story home on a crisp, sunny, winter afternoon. A scrawled note taped under Aunt Alice’s doorbell said: “Do Not Disturb.”

We rang it anyway—she was expecting us—and a sharp-featured elderly woman in a housecoat answered the door.

She led us through an enclosed porch and into her living room. It was instantly apparent that Aunt Alice was a hoarder and a shut-in. The windows were covered so no light came in, and massive piles of stuff—just stuff; I can’t describe what was in the piles any other way—were everywhere.

My son—two at the time—took one look around and reacted quite understandably: “Door! Door! Door!” he said in a tone of abject fear.

However, it quickly became apparent Aunt Alice wasn’t dangerous, just quirky and distrustful.

Also, it turned out her cancer was advanced and she didn’t have long. Not too long after that first meeting, Aunt Alice died, leaving a home it would take two dumpsters to clean out.

Nothing, it seemed, that had ever entered that house left it.

For example, during the cleanup my wife found a plastic bag full of plastic tabs from gallon milk jugs—milk jugs, by the way, that covered the basement floor and were filled with water. We determined Aunt Alice’s house had no water and she was collecting the water from her dehumidifier in those jugs for everyday use.

Opening a closet revealed it was full of empty Quaker Oats cans.

However, among the things that didn’t leave that house until it was cleaned out was a trove of letters from friends and family. They dated from the late 1940s until 2003.

I finally got around to reading the letters two weeks ago. Most were mundane—“We canned vegetables this week,” from the most prolific writer, Aunt “Jane,” for example—but through them I was able to piece together much of what happened in my wife’s family since she had broken contact.

Some of the letters were amusing, such as the one to Aunt Alice from Aunt Jane saying: “Sorry our visit didn’t turn out the way we planned. Hope you found your silver.” Did I mention Aunt Alice was distrustful?

Some of the letters contained historical references, such as one that referenced the waiting lines for gasoline in the 70s and another that referred to President Nixon’s resignation.

Another letter from Aunt Jane extolled the virtues of the Ford Pinto she and her husband had just bought. “You’re going to regret that purchase,” I thought. Years later the Pinto appeared in another letter because it had become dangerously unreliable.

One letter in particular was bone chilling. It was from my wife’s mother to Aunt Alice. In it, my wife’s mother referred to “all the trouble my children have caused me.” The “trouble” she referred to was the estrangement of her daughter—my wife—and the death from a heroin overdose in the 80s of her twenty-something-year-old son, my wife’s brother.

That sentence alone illustrated for me that my wife had made the right decision when she cut contact.

Then there was the heartbreaking letter from Aunt Jane who lost a baby boy my wife never knew existed. The couple had been trying unsuccessfully for years to have children and finally had a boy. The infant apparently seemed fine, but then simply died. The autopsy turned up nothing. It was SIDS.

Aunt Jane and Uncle “Bill” eventually had two children who are both apparently successful adults now. I got to follow their lives as they grew up.

My wife was mentioned in passing in a few of the letters. Not surprisingly, the mentions weren’t kind.

In any case, as I wrapped up my voyeuristic excursion into my wife’s family history, it occurred to me that I am part of the last generation that will be able to discover its past this way.

Forty years from now, no one will be finding tied up with a ribbon in a trunk in the attic love e-mails and text messages from Grandpa in the Army to Grandma back home.

The tragedy of electronic communications is that as we forge ahead, we leave little or nothing behind. The progress we’re making is not all good.