I sat down on the hallway floor with the suitcase open in front of me, because it was full of letters. Not a few. Hundreds of them, maybe more than a thousand, bundled and tied and packed in tight, and the other two suitcases up on that shelf, when I got them down, were full of them too. Thousands of letters, and my wife of twenty-nine years had never once said a word to me about any of it.
I sat there and read until it got dark. They were from prisoners. From people in nursing homes with nobody left in the world. From a few soldiers, and a whole lot of just plain lonely folks, shut-ins, the forgotten kind. And every last one of them was answering a letter from Eleanor. My quiet Eleanor, who I thought spent her afternoons on her crosswords and her programs, had been writing letters, for near thirty years, to the loneliest people in this country. People with no one at all. She found them through the church and through prison ministries and through little notices in the backs of magazines, and she wrote to them, faithful, for years and years, and she never told me, and she kept every letter they ever wrote back in her mother old suitcases up on that top shelf.
There was a note in the middle case, in her hand, and I believe she meant for me to find it one day. Everybody deserves one person who writes back. That is all I ever did. It did not cost anything but time, and I had time, and they had no one. Do not make a fuss over it. I just did not want anybody to be all the way alone in this world.
I found the address book she kept, and I did a hard thing. I wrote to all of them, every name in it, to tell them Eleanor had passed. And the letters came back by the dozens, and then the people themselves started coming. To the funeral, some of them, folks I had never met who had traveled a long way to get there. A man just out of prison who said Eleanor letters were the only mail he got for nine years and the whole reason he made it through. Three different old women who said my wife was the only person left on this earth who still wrote to them. They stood up, one after another, at the service for a woman they had never once laid eyes on, and told a church full of strangers that she had saved them.
Twenty-nine years I slept beside that woman and thought I knew the whole of her. I knew she was kind. I did not know she was quietly holding up a hundred drowning people with nothing but a pen and a postage stamp, asking no credit, telling no one, not even me. I have kept the address book. I am not the writer she was, not by a long way. But I have started answering the ones who are still living. Somebody ought to write back. She taught me that, after she was gone, out of three old suitcases full of proof that no kindness is ever really a small one.