Some things become more meaningful with time. A photograph, a wedding ring, a familiar song, or a handwritten letter can hold memories we never expected it to carry.

For Carol and me, it was a box of old love letters.

We met in October 1959. I was 16, Carol was 17, and I was hardly what anyone would call smooth with girls. I was shy, awkward, and couldn't dance very well. Carol was smart, beautiful, funny, and already planning to become a nurse. Somehow, when I asked her to go on a Luther League hayride, she said yes.

It was the beginning of almost 56 years together. We dated for nearly five years before marrying in June 1964, then built a life filled with family, work, laughter, difficult moments, illness, and all those ordinary days that seem unimportant until you would give anything to have one of them back. 

When Letters Kept Us Close

There was no texting when Carol and I were young. No email. No video calls. When the person you loved was far away, you either paid for an expensive long-distance call or sat down and wrote.

When I transferred to the University of Illinois in Champaign to finish my engineering degree, Carol was beginning her final year of nursing school. For the first time, we were really apart.

So we wrote to each other almost every day.

Some letters were long. Others were filled with ordinary details about school, family, and whatever had happened that day. Sometimes, after hours of studying, I had only a few words left in me.

“I love you.”

And sometimes that was enough.

Writing made Carol feel closer. I wanted her to have a piece of me while I was away, and whenever one of her letters arrived, I knew she had been thinking about me too.

A Box That Followed Us Through Life

We kept those letters. Hundreds of them, many still inside their original envelopes.

The box moved with us wherever we lived. We always found a safe place for it, although I don't think either of us understood then what we were actually preserving.

We weren't trying to document some great romance. We were simply two young people who missed each other.

Then life moved forward. We married. We became parents. We worked, raised our family, made plans, solved problems, and grew older together. Through all of it, the box remained somewhere in our home. 

After Carol Was Gone

After Carol died, the house felt different. Her things were still there. Our furniture was still there. The rooms looked much the same.

But Carol wasn't there.

One lonely day, I finally gathered enough courage to go into the bedroom closet and bring down our box of letters. I began reading them again, along with the scrapbooks Carol had carefully kept over the years.

I cried. I smiled too.

Suddenly, the teenage Carol was there again. I could hear the young woman who missed me when I went away to college. I could remember our dates, our nervous beginnings, and the years before either of us knew what our lives would eventually become.

A letter that once meant “I miss you tonight” carried a completely different meaning decades later.

The handwriting mattered. The envelope mattered. Even the date in the corner mattered.

Her words were still there.

Love Had to Survive More Than Distance

Our love story did not end when we got married. In many ways, that was when the real work of loving each other began.

Marriage brought children, jobs, responsibilities, family decisions, and all the pressures of everyday life. Eventually, it also brought illness.

Carol lived with an aggressive form of breast cancer for thirteen years. For much of her final decade, she underwent chemotherapy, yet cancer never became the whole story of who she was. She remained caring, funny, courageous, and deeply devoted to the people around her.

When Carol died at home in June 2015, she was still the woman I had loved since I was a teenager. In the obituary I wrote myself, I called her “the love of my life and my very, very best friend.” 

What the Letters Mean Now

When Carol and I wrote those letters, neither of us imagined that one day an older version of me would sit alone and read them after she was gone.

We weren't writing for history. We weren't trying to teach anyone something about marriage.

We were simply in love.

Maybe that is why the letters matter so much now. They capture us before marriage, children, careers, cancer, and goodbye. They preserve two young people who had no idea how much life they would eventually share.

Almost 56 years changed nearly everything around us.

But the letters survived.

And when I open that box today, I understand something I could never have understood when I was sixteen.

The love survived too.

And now, I am sharing that love with you all. Click here to learn more.