Encouraging the gift of a snail mail note
There’s no fool like an old fool.
Allow me to serve as a prototype of that adage. I’m old, three years past the Good Book’s allotted age of three score and ten, and now I have once more donned my jester’s motley and bells by making resolutions for the New Year.
Given my past record of failed resolutions, even a casual observer would be forced to conclude that I am a slow learner, and yet here I go again. For 2025, I have pledged to send a letter every week to two of my grandchildren, a platoon-sized crew ranging in age from one to 20. This project requires keeping a chart so that all of them get the same number of letters by year’s end.
Fortunately, just after making this pledge I was in my local library when I bumbled across the perfect book to accompany me on this adventure.
In “Heartspoken: How to Write Notes that Connect, Comfort, Encourage, and Inspire” (Koehler Books, 2022, 218 pages), Elizabeth H. Cottrell offers not only techniques and samples for writing letters for all occasions, but she is a passionate advocate for composing and sending such notes. In her “Preface,” she writes that the handwritten note “is still one of the most powerful tools we have for connecting meaningfully with others. A well-written note can give voice to the stirrings of your most heartfelt sentiments and can be read, saved, and treasured forever.”
Those words set the tone for the rest of her book, making Cottrell exactly the sort of cheerleader I need to persevere in the letter writing game.
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Any self-help book is worth its cost if it yields even one tip that can improve our lives, and “Heartspoken” is a treasure trove of such helps. In her chapter “Hang in There: Words of Encouragement,” Cottrell writes “how much a simple handwritten note will mean to someone of any age,” then specifically speaks about the importance of such notes for young people needing a boost. She mentions the delight of receiving letters when she was young, at summer camp or in college, and she also cites examples from readers of her blog, heartspoken.com, who have shared their own memories of heartening letters they’d received.
Here, for instance, is part of a comment Cottrell shares from a woman named Esther, who writes of her mother’s correspondence: “My mother wrote to me a little bit every day. On Monday she would mail the letter and start a new one. Every Tuesday I had a chronicle of the past week at home. Mother died before I finished college. Her letters, in her beautiful, award-winning handwriting, bring her back to me as nothing else can.”
In “My Heart Is Broken: Expressing Sympathy,” Cottrell speaks to those occasions when a disaster, usually death, has taken place. She asks, “What do you say when you feel so helpless in the face of someone else’s loss? What good can a simple note do?” She answers these questions by again including valuable reflections and examples from friends and readers.
Cottrell also reminds us that when a person we know has experienced some awful tragedy, our presence often counts as much, or more, than our words. The notes we mail allow us to be unobtrusively present for someone who is suffering such a loss. Cognizant of the difficulty in composing such condolences, Cottrell even provides us with some lines to help us with this task, like “Words fail me, but I had to send a hug by mail during this awful time” or “Every fiber of my being wants to swoop in and make things better for you, but for now, just know I hold you in my heart.”
In “Why Does It Seem So Hard?” her chapter on the stumbling blocks that prevent us from writing notes, Cottrell covers the usual reasons, like “We’re busy and rushed” and “We think writing notes takes a long time.” (It doesn’t.) But perhaps the biggest obstacle standing in the way is this one: “We lack confidence we’ll say the right thing.”
Certainly it’s true that we can say something open to misinterpretation in a note — people who text or email know well these possibilities for misunderstanding — but as Cottrell points out, what the people who receive our letters most remember is that we took the time and made the effort to write to them, not whether we said everything perfectly. As she several times reminds us, when we write our letters to encourage and inspire, the very act of sending such a note can fulfill those aims.
My supply of paper, envelopes, stamps, decorative stickers for the little ones, and pens are ready to go. I’ve mapped out a chart with each grandchild’s name and spaces to record the dates I mail them a note. One certainty will help spur me on in this effort: snail mail notes are for most of us a rarity these days, and kids in particular take the arrival of an envelope with their name on it as an event to be celebrated.
Forty-five minutes or so writing notes every Sunday evening, and with Elizabeth Cottrell’s “Heartspoken” cheering me on, maybe I can climb Mount Resolution.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
