Before COVID, this Fresno woman’s parents were separated by an event called World War II

“What is it going to be like when we can be together again?” We have asked this question often as we have endured this past year of isolation. This is the same question that filled the letters my parents wrote to each other during World War II while my father served in the Marine Corps, his final 20 months in Pearl Harbor, separated from his wife and baby daughter.

Their letters, carefully tied and stashed away high in the den closet of the house I grew up in, were the first things I packed in my car when we began the emotional task of closing our family home of 67 years. In the past three years since the letters have been with me I have slowly worked my way through them, sorting them, wiping off the dust and sand that time nestled into their pages, and gently reading them.

Their letters described the love and longing separation created, the challenges of living with restrictions imposed by rationing and scarcity, the necessity for my mother and me living with her parents in a tiny house in Los Angeles, and, always, their dreams of life at war’s end. Reading the letters is an emotional journey for me. From time to time, the letters have returned to their boxes until curiosity drew me back to them.

More than a year ago, when we were ordered to “shelter in place,” I seized the opportunity to finish reading the letters (more than 2,000 of them). Through them I began vicariously living more than 75 years in the past. I was struck by the similarity of the feelings expressed in the letters with the feelings I was having during this pandemic. The anguish of being separated from family, fears surrounding the survival and health of loved ones, and anxiety about how different life would be when it was over. Uncertainty filled our lives then and now. Time reluctantly crept by.

“Life is awfully slow right now,” Dad wrote. “Tomorrow will be V-J Day at last. It will be a terrific relief to have all the killing ended.” The end of the war was in sight. The closer it got, the less tolerance there was for waiting. Dad wrote to Mother, “Take awful good care of yourself ... We’ll soon start living again, so we can’t take chances on anything going wrong now … I have been away too long, Sweets, I’m afraid of everything.” Mother responded, “Keep steady for just these last few months … they’re the longest.” These words have meaning for us now. We know all too well our patience is thinning. We have to remain steadfast.

The production of vaccines against the coronavirus may be the “V-J Day” of our time. Both events were signs that the end was possible. They gave the opportunity of rebooting our lives — focusing on what matters most to each of us as well as what matters most to all of us. We have the opportunity to think about what we want our lives to be like. Stripped of much of life as it was, we can ask ourselves what we will restore and what we will allow to lay fallow.

Then and now, we knew we would be different when it was over. Dad wrote, “Another month of our life has been spent apart. I won’t say that it has been wasted, because being alone, both of us have had a lot of time to think and to plan or prepare for the future. Time is wasted only when we don’t know where we are going or how to get there. Most people live a whole life without knowing where they are going. ...”

Let’s not let that happen to us. Seventy-five years from now, if a younger generation were to look at our letters, or emails, what would they learn from us?

This story was originally published June 2, 2021 at 1:17 PM.