You must find a way to connect with your husband while he is in prison
Writing letters is important. Emails and phone calls don’t accomplish the same thing. Prison changes everything, but it changes how you communicate the most.
There is nothing more intimate than a handwritten letter. Nothing replaces the strokes of a pen that your hand made or the feel of the paper in his hand that was touched so much by your hand as you wrote it. An email can never compare. Emails are so easy to type, so impersonal, and so easy to delete and retype. A letter takes effort and time. If you change it, evidence of your original thought remains. Letters carry your personality, your thoughts, and your love across the miles.
It takes time to write a letter. Your husband knows that. Getting that letter from you reminds him that you still have time to spend with only him. It also helps you settle your thoughts as you carefully put them on paper. The flow of the words may be slower as your hand works across the paper, but your thoughts and feelings will be clearer.
You are creating a moment of magic.
As you think through each word and depend on your own skill to spell the words, you are creating a moment of magic. The magic of self-awareness and the magic of a moment that will be shared. The magic happens when you write it, and again when he reads it. You get to re-experience this moment through his experience days later when he receives the letter and responds.
Writing allows you a freedom of expression that is lost in typing. We have grown so used to texting short messages. Emails are so routine that it takes us only a minute to send a note. But a letter? Ah, that is something to treasure. A letter is something to hold, to smell, to save. It holds dreams, ideas, and events. It shares pain, joy, and laughter. It binds our experiences together.
I still have Ron’s letters. Ron still has my letters.
Just holding them in my hands brings me such joy! I remember getting them out of mailbox and the sound of the paper seal being torn away. I remember the “stolen” moments we had together in those letters. I call them “stolen” because we were together and not apart while I was reading those letters. I think about the tear stains on the letters and wonder if someone will mistake those for spills someday. It doesn’t matter, because those tears were between us. Something we shared and felt deeply.
Only a letter can create this kind of connection.
You must do things that connect you in extraordinary ways to make it through the extraordinary pain. Letters are powerful. Letters are absolutely necessary if you want to make it.
Grab a pen and write until the indent on your finger hurts too much to keep writing. Then, send your husband a piece of you to carry him through another day of being apart.
I am rooting for you!
Cathy