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 About the treasure chest that inspired me.

 My dad died long before my mother did, leaving her a young widow at the age of 54. When my mother died 13 years later in 1997, I found a treasure chest while cleaning up her estate. Literally, a treasure chest— an old heavy trunk in the garage, covered in dust with rusted locks, and a scratched black leather surface. It was shoved into a corner and had piles of storage boxes on top. But yet it was indeed a treasure chest—not of gold or silver or diamonds, but of memories and personal mementos.

Among the treasures was a box of love letters between my parents as they courted long-distance for over two years across the pacific. I knew about how my parents met and how they ended up getting married, but I had no idea these letters existed! You see, my mother was Japanese and my father was an American soldier and when they fell in love at first sight they couldn’t speak each other’s language. As a teenager, I asked my dad how did they communicate? He told me “Love Is a Universal Language.”

The night I found the letters my husband, David, and I opened them and read a few. The first one had a sentence that I will forever remember. That one sentence hit me emotionally about the relationship they had. It was a simple sentence but so profoundly felt. It said, “I know someone is reading this letter to you, so I can’t really say what I want to say, but you know how I feel.” David and I cried—no, sobbed—for hours. The tears wouldn’t stop. As we unfolded more letters, we continued to sob until we couldn’t carry on.

Not only was I grieving my mother’s recent death, but now I found the documentation of their life before me. The sentiment of love and devotion expressed in these letters was so deep and emotional. And to make it even more remarkable, these letters had to be translated for each to read.

Exhausted, we stopped reading the letters for the night and carefully tucked them back into their well-preserved envelopes to take home.

It was not until twenty-three years later during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic that I rediscovered the old trunk, now safely tucked away in my basement, and I found the time to look at the letters again. Initially, my only intent was to scan the letters into my computer to store them digitally, presumably forever protecting them. When I unfolded the letters to scan, I read all of them—about a hundred letters. Even twenty-three years after Mom’s death and thirty-five years after Dad’s, I still mourned for them. The love that emanated from the letters was overwhelming. Every letter made me cry—again. That is when I decided I had to tell their story.

And that was the beginning of an exhausting, mentally challenging and emotionally draining effort that has yet to end. Stay tuned.