"I took an old book from the shelf, a manual of mythology...Immediately inside, I opened to find a love letter written by our father, Ben, to our mother, Doris, on December 26, 1938, on one of the inside pages of the book.
"He begins with: 'To my pretty Dowee' and writes to her about having read about gods and goddesses of several world traditions. He finds the mythology 'incredibly extraordinary' but comments that mother's magnetism out-magnetizes any of the Greeks, Romans (etc.) with your 'come-hither looks.' Pretty hot stuff, huh? And he ends by saying: 'May you live forever, my beautiful Enchantress.' I think that spell he put on her worked! Wow, how great to be loved that passionately!"
My Mom was only twenty-three years old when she received that precious Christmas gift - not the book of mythology, but the love letter. My Dad would have been twenty-nine when he penned it. My own children are more than ten years older than this young couple, so overwhelmingly in love. I forwarded my sister's email to them and to my in-law children, wondering how they'd react.
They all found it as beautiful as I did, the best kind of Christmas gift, - for my mother and now for us. It brought Cathy to tears, as it had me. Merritt wrote "Simply beautiful." Stephanie wrote "'My beautiful enchantress'" got to me. I wish I could have known him." My youngest, John, who never met his grand-father, wrote "What an incredible find. It's so beautiful to see the physical evidence of our parents' (or grandparents') love. it somehow legitimizes our own existence, in some sense, and gives us something tangible to seek in our own lives. Love this so much." Our oldest, Mary Beth, wrote about what a "real romantic" her grandpa was.
My precious, sensitive, scholarly Dad is so much more real for my children now. And I am bemused at the thought of my reserved, rather stoic, German mother casting him "come-hither" looks when she was young.
Dad died at sixty-two, leaving my mother a widow at the young age of fifty-six after twenty-nine years of marriage. In her nineties, she lamented living so many years more without him than she had with him. Ben, the romantic, who swept her off her feet by proposing to a woman who wore an artificial leg and thought no man would ever want her. The suitor who called her an enchantress. We knew his enchantress, whom he had asked to live forever, had fallen deep into dementia when she no longer cried when she looked at his photo at the nursing home where she lives on without him.
Pope Francis writes "The family is experiencing a profound cultural crisis, as are all communities and social bonds. In the case of the family, the weakening of these bonds is particularly serious because the family is the fundamental cell of society, where we learn to live with others despite our differences and to belong to one another; it is also the place where parents pass on their faith to their children. Marriage now tends to be viewed as a form of mere emotional satisfaction that can be constructed in any way or modified at will. But the indispensable contribution of marriage in society transcends the feelings and momentary needs of the couple."
My parents had their arguments, and they weren't perfect parents. But then, what parents are? And their bond of love was so deep that it transcended death and now transcends the years to inspire a new generation through a Christmas love letter. A simple letter, discovered by luck - or was it God? - is teaching my sisters and I and now my children the profound values of love and fidelity, and the irreplaceable sense of belonging that a strong marriage provides for the children blessed enough to be raised in one.