Letter to My Father

Having wounded his father with a devastating letter when he was twenty-three and felt somewhat responsible for his subsequent mental collapse, the author reexamines his father’s life using documents found after his death to reflect on their relationship and reach a reconciliation with a man he had not really known.

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Having wounded his father with a hurtful letter when he was twenty-three, Tom Couser felt somewhat responsible for his later mental collapse. When his father died, Tom found personal documents that revealed facets of his father’s life of which Tom had known nothing. Too traumatized to grieve properly, much less to probe his father’s complicated history, Tom boxed the documents and stored them—for over thirty years. When he finally explored his father’s rich legacy, he achieved a belated reconciliation with a man he had not really known.