Cathy Kinard

She pulled out a telegram that she had kept that was sent by my father.  The paper was fragile, and pieces of the paper were missing.  It was dated November 3, 1953.  She said, “I think you should have this,” as she handed it to me.

I placed the pieces on the kitchen table to read the message.  The memory of that day and the visceral reaction I had when reading the telegram is still fresh in my mind. 

“Mom!  Do you see what this says?”

She looked at me, with a confused look on her face.  “I don’t know what you mean.”

I read the entire telegram out loud to her and still she didn’t understand.

My father came back into my mother’s life after an absence of three years on November 4, 1953.

My father married my mother on November 24, 1953.

My father died….exactly twelve years later on November 4, 1965.

For all those years she held that telegram never understanding the meaning of the message.  My mother was a woman who did not hold on to keepsakes, and so there was a reason unknown why this treasure survived one of the routine purges she had done of the past.

She handed it to me.  I put the telegram in an envelope for preservation. Eventually I put it into an album where it remained since that day.  Perhaps she knew that one day I would want to tell their story. 

In those twelve years they lived a lifetime. 

It wasn’t an easy twelve years.  It was an everyday struggle. 

For all the struggles that they had, I know that the foundation that kept them together was love, and their four little children.

Mom lived 45 years longer than my father did, and created a new life.  And it certainly was not her happily ever after.