Hey rockstars,

I’ve been writing a lot this week. Maybe it’s because it’s almost fall and I’m feeling particularly inspired. Today, I spent almost an hour sitting in my friend Kaitlin’s office talking about books.

Kaitlin and I both work at the same firm, and I don’t think anyone has ever accused either of us of having an abundance of free time. But conversations with Kaitlin have a particular effect on me. We went to law school together, although we weren’t especially close then. We became friends later, through work and adulthood and the strange way some people arrive in your life twice: the second time at exactly the right moment.

We work well together, but I also just really like talking to her. Almost every time I leave her office, I feel warmer, lighter, and more interested in the world than when I walked in.

Among other things, we started talking about reading. Both of us go through phases with it (as I think most people do). Sometimes I’ll devour book after book, and then suddenly I won’t read anything for months. But we agreed that there is really only one reliable way out of a reading slump: you have to find the book that pulls you back in—the one you cannot put down, and the one that reminds you why you loved reading in the first place.

For me, it was most recently Whistler by Ann Patchett. For Kaitlin, it was Dear Edward by Ann Napolitano.

A spoiler warning here, because I am about to discuss a fairly major part of the book. In my defense, it was released in 2020, and there was an Apple TV adaptation of the book as well.

The premise of Dear Edward is devastating. A plane crashes, killing everyone on board except one passenger: a twelve-year-old boy named Edward. The book follows Edward afterward. In the plane crash, he loses his parents and his older brother, and he then goes to live with his aunt and uncle. He is grieving and depressed and trying, as much as a twelve-year-old possibly can, to figure out how to continue existing in a world that has suddenly become completely different from the one he knew. Though he went by “Eddie” in the beginning of the book, he becomes “Edward” afterward, which Kaitlin and I talked about as its own little marker of how an event like this forces you to grow up and face reality far too quickly. Eddie → Edward.

I believe it’s about halfway through the book that Edward discovers that his uncle has been keeping a box filled with hundreds of letters, all addressed to him.

Hence, Dear Edward.

The letters come from all sorts of people, but many are from the families and loved ones of the people who died on the plane. While some contain well wishes and some contain stories, others contain requests.

Luckily, Kaitlin had the book in her bag, so I demanded she show me where this happened. I started reading some of the letters, and the first one I saw was from someone whose daughter had loved photography, asking Edward to take pictures. I don’t even know if the letter requested that he send the pictures back; I think it was purely, in essence: “this is something that my daughter loved and can’t do anymore, and it would mean the world to me if you went out and saw the beauty in the world and photographed it, too.”

I believe Edward’s uncle hid the letters to protect him. Edward was already carrying an unimaginable amount of grief. Perhaps his uncle thought that giving him hundreds of letters would give him hundreds of additional losses to carry, too.

Except the letters don’t destroy Edward. Instead, in some ways, they save him.

Kaitlin and I sat there talking about that for a while. There is something extraordinary about the idea that all of these people, in the middle of their own grief, reached toward this one surviving child, and that their reaching toward him ultimately helped pull him back toward life.

The requests become invitations: Go see this. Go experience that. Pay attention. Keep living.

There is a version of love, I think, that simply says: I want you to flourish.

We talked quite a bit about how people flourish when they’re loved; all kinds of love. I often think about that Good Place quote: “People improve when they get external love and support. How can we hold it against them when they don’t?”

Maybe that is one of the quiet gifts other people give us: they give us reasons (and opportunities) to participate more fully in our own lives. Listen to this song. You have to see this place. Call me when you are leaving work. “Come down and chat!!” (Kaitlin’s words to me today). Read this book.

None of those things can erase grief or loneliness or exhaustion or whatever else a person is carrying. The letters in Dear Edward cannot give Edward his family back, but they can, and do, point him toward something beyond what he has lost.

A beautiful love story, if you ask me. And then I realized there was another, much smaller kind of love story happening in Kaitlin’s office.

We are both busy. There were emails and Teams chats demanding answers; documents demanding edits; undoubtedly several things we “should have” been doing instead. But for an hour, we talked about books, grief, love, and what makes a person want to participate in their own life again.

Eventually, I went back to my office. But before I did, I said, “Kaitlin, thank you for sharing something you love with me.”

Nothing about my day had materially changed. My work was still there, and my to-do list had certainly not gotten shorter. But I had changed, just a little. I felt warm, rejuvenated, and more grateful.

Maybe that is part of what it means to love people well, too. You do not always have to rescue them. Sometimes you just give them another reason to be interested in being here.

Until next time!

xo

Sandhya

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