I unwrapped that old church bulletin right there on my porch, and I had to sit down, because inside was a letter in my mothers handwriting, folded small, and it was addressed to me.
My mother sat in that third-row pew every Sunday of her life, and so did I beside her, until she passed when I was still young. I always felt I had lost her before I got to truly know her. And here, hidden in the pew where she prayed, was a letter she had written and tucked away for the day the little chapel finally closed and her child came for the pew.
She knew she was ill, she wrote. She knew she likely would not see me grown and married. So she did the only thing a dying mother in a country chapel could think to do. She wrote her child a letter, and she hid it in the one place on earth she was certain I would return to, the family pew, third row, left side, where she had held me every Sunday since I was a baby.
Knowing she was leaving a young child behind, my mother sat in her pew and wrote me all the mothering she would not live to give me in person, and she slid it into the hollow of the seat, trusting that one day, when I was old and the chapel closed its doors, I would come back for that pew and find her waiting there with everything she never got to say.
The letter was long. It told me she was proud of me before I had earned it. It told me to marry a good man, which I did, my Daniel, in that very pew. It told me that when I knelt to be married, if I chose the pew from the third row, she would be kneeling there with me, though I would not be able to see her.
And I had chosen that pew for my wedding, without knowing why it called to me. My mother was there. She said she would be, and she was.
Her letter ended: I could not stay, my darling. But I could leave you this, in the pew where I held you, so that when you are grey you will hear your mother tell you, one more time, how loved you were.
I am an old woman now. I waited my whole life for my mother to say something more to me, and this week, from inside a ninety-year-old pew, she finally did.
I have the letter framed above the pew on my porch. I bought it back because the kneeler was broke. It held a letter my dying mother wrote to the old woman I would become, and after seventy years I finally got to hear my mother tell me she loved me.