A few months ago, I found an old box of papers from my grandfather’s sister. A career stenographer for most of the 20th century, my mom’s Aunt Doris regular dashed off messages to family, friends, and local opinion editors by spinning paper into a typewriter.
When we think of the intimacy of letters, we tend to picture a handwritten message. My great-aunt however, punched her pastel stationary with black ink using steel typearms. She only calligraphed a closing and her signature with a ballpoint pen.
Still, her missives prove just as intimate as anything traced in script—just as lovingly handcrafted, idiosyncratically intelligent, and deeply felt. The contents of the box instantly placed me in the presence of a woman thirty years gone, her rose perfume and kabuki-like makeup, her wrinkled hands and adoring eyes. Aunt Doris embodied the quintessential purple-haired old lady, but she was also one-of-a-kind.
I know this primarily because of those letters. They capture Doris’ big personality, her unique phrases, and her names for all of us—everything she was on the surface—but also an unflagging optimism and endless curiosity evoking an equally rich inner life. My mother read the double-sided sheets to my sister and me whenever we were away on vacation or it was too long between visits.
My favorite of her posts describes an ancestral home which I’d only known previously as a street address from a census record discovered through genealogical research. She introduces me to the great building, the hilltop setting, and the people at the center of her childhood—my ancestors—playing under paper lanterns along a Connecticut river on a summer’s night in the early 1900s. Doris was a family historian like me, but we never compared notes until her notes were all that remained.
Her dispatches also filter what she never wrote about. Doris lost her only son Erroll to tragedy. When he was barely a teenager, Erroll was accidently shot and killed with a hunting rifle in the hands of a playmate. In that same box of her papers, police reports transcribe the details she never could. She published occasional poems to her precious boy in local periodicals, but they were more mannered and discrete than her correspondence, nothing confronting the full measure of the loss. She never said one word about Erroll to my mother, who was only four when he died.
I could see Doris’ isolation when I was barely a teenager, but I didn’t have the consciousness or experience yet to do something about it. I know dynamics among my grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ generations kept her family branch distant from us, but I’m sure the absence of Erroll played a role too. Some people protected Doris, others avoided her, and in our flawed human approach, all the ways everyone didn’t say the wrong thing offered her the same poor result.
I can never know exactly how Erroll’s loss affected his mother because she didn’t type about it. Yes, hers was “the worst tragedy anyone can bear,” but that’s also a cliché sentence that sentences anyone who knows such a loss to one road. Too often we believe we have the only words for a situation, when each of us has unique experiences and reactions to put to words if we take the time. We also like to say some experiences are “beyond words,” but I’m sure Doris had hers. She just had nowhere to direct them. The power of writing and media lies in how they make us more conscious of our singular adventures and put us in control of the many ways we can respond to them. That’s a relatively new understanding of ourselves.
Doris survived her tragedy, the subsequent divorce, never remarrying, and kept on corresponding with a world that rejected each of those triumphs. She had pen pals in all corners. I found a few letters from Hollywood hopefuls thanking Doris for her letters of encouragement. I found replies to her op-eds and “Remember When” columns from across the country. I have no evidence of her ever mentioning Erroll to any of her correspondents, but all of her mail is a testament to her resilience despite the social landscape that failed her. After my grandfather was widowed, she moved in and took good care of him until her death at age 81.
My aunt persevered among a generation of men that went to war and only ever spoke about their shell shock if they had grandchildren caring enough—and tenacious enough—to get an interview in their final years. The women of her generation survived an equally elaborate system that never mentioned stillbirths, or abortions, or any of the other complications of childbirth. Walk through a late 18th or early 19th century cemetery and look at the numbers of graves for babies and children. Notice especially how many young people died prematurely in 1918 of the Spanish Flu. The stiff upper lip was catastrophic then and its catastrophic again. Words from “cancer” to “swindle” to “homosexual” have paralyzed us for most of our existence.
Astonishingly, we still find a nobility in the people of the past’s resolve to endure wordlessly. I research my family history because I feel indebted to my ancestors, but I never envy them. The past is a miserable country, and every day forward is a little better, regardless of the new disasters we face or the problems we invent ourselves. The reason the challenges seem to increase is the same reason we continue to surmount them—we talk about them now. We freely pass around knowledge. Nothing is taboo, sacred, or off limits anymore; the mic is properly on.
When we talk about our problems, we produce new and better solutions. Science shows us the simple benefits of putting our personal stories into words and imagery. Soldiers who write about post-traumatic stress and mothers who can name their post-partum depression have a better chance at returning to life. They are tougher than their tight-lipped predecessors because they find the courage to face their tragedies more than once and bring their nightmares into the daylight. People who write, reflect, and change find second and third chances. And I don’t just mean famous authors either; I mean people like Doris.
I can’t help but see, in Doris’ thin, seriffed type, not just her road back from despair, but also the digital characters on our smart devices today. Her letters are texts from a ghost; iMessage out of the past. The fleeting glimpses of that summer party—and of her—are very modern and still meaningful in their brevity. They are what I have left of her now, and they tell me far more than I know about most of the other descendants in my family tree. Because she took the time to use her typewriter and her undoubtedly swift words-per-minute average to access and articulate her mind, I know her better today than I might ever have.
“Interfaces,” the name we give to any tool for communing that is not another human face, are often less than their biological counterparts. Doris’ letters are more. Her keyboard revealed more of herself than polite conversation would allow in the 1900s to her audience and to herself. Her messages became instruments of thought and revelation that only went the distance if another face or letter responded with as much attention and art. When that happens—when both participants are engaged in talk, type, or any other form of media or communication—that is the height of our consciousness.
Documents, headphones, and screens can inspire just as much cognition, recognition, and interaction as any individual in the room. The differences only exist in the deliveries and imaginations of the authors interacting. We liken the usual chitchat with the average greeting card or Instagram selfie when we should compare the most important conversations of our lives with the favorite novels, movies, and software that change us just as much.
We are remote beings. We never needed technology to make it so; we are terrified to express our remarkable selves all on our own. Our speech, texts, and paintings give us the ways we overcome that silence. Our photographs, smartphones, and letters are nothing to fear. The more we use them, the more human we become, and the greater the chance our presences and ideas will invite conversation long after our physical selves have gone.
I have to thank Great Aunt Doris for that insight. It was so good to talk with her again.
