The envelope inside Grandma’s box was addressed to me, but the handwriting belonged to my grandfather, who had died when I was nine.
I opened it with shaking hands.
Inside was a birthday card meant for my eighteenth birthday. Grandpa had written it years before he died because he knew he was sick. He told me he was sorry he wouldn’t be there to see the woman I became, and that Grandma had promised to give me the card when I turned eighteen.
But she never did.
When I asked her why, Grandma began crying.
She admitted that after Grandpa died, she couldn’t bring herself to open the box containing the cards he had prepared for future birthdays. Every year she told herself she would finally do it, but grief always stopped her.
There weren’t just cards for me.
Grandpa had written birthday cards for my mother, my brother, my cousins, and even Grandma herself. Some were meant for birthdays more than twenty years after his death.
That was why Grandma had saved every card the family ever gave her. She said she couldn’t bear to throw away written words from people she loved after learning how suddenly those words could become priceless.
We spent the entire afternoon opening Grandpa’s cards together.
Before I left, Grandma handed me the floral box.
“Take these home,” she said. “And promise me something.”
“What?”
“Never wait until someone is gone to tell them what they mean to you.”
Grandma died peacefully two years later.
I still have that box.
And now, every birthday card I receive goes inside it too.
