Write to someone you love, or someone you miss

For most of the last century, people who kept writing to someone they had lost were told, gently, that it was time to let go.

The idea goes back to Sigmund Freud. In his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia” he described grief as work: the slow process of pulling attachment away from the person who had died, so that it could be given to someone new. For decades that shaped how doctors, counsellors and families thought about loss. Grieving well meant detaching, and someone still talking to the dead years later was assumed to be stuck.

In 1996 the researchers Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman edited a book called Continuing Bonds, which brought together studies of bereaved parents, children, siblings, widows and widowers. They found that a great many people kept a relationship with the person they had lost. They talked to them, wrote to them, kept their things, and asked themselves what that person would have thought. The authors argued that this was part of healthy grief, and that the old model rested more on cultural habit than on evidence of what people actually do. The idea has been widely taken up since, though researchers still debate when these bonds help and when they do not.

One of the clearest examples is a phone box in a garden in Otsuchi, on the north-east coast of Japan. In late 2010 a garden designer named Itaru Sasaki set up a white booth there with a disconnected rotary phone, so he could talk to a cousin who had died of cancer. A few months later, in March 2011, the tsunami killed about one in ten of the town’s people. Word spread, and people began to come to the booth to call parents, children and partners who had been lost. More than 30,000 people have visited since. The line has never been connected.

Writing seems to help in a particular way. In 1986 the psychologists James Pennebaker and Sandra Beall asked students to write for fifteen minutes a day, four days running, about a traumatic experience. Those who wrote about both what had happened and how they felt visited the campus health centre less often over the next six months than students who had written about trivial topics. More than a hundred studies have tested the idea since, and on average they find a real but small benefit. Pennebaker’s later work found that the people who gained most were those whose writing became more of a story over the days, using more words like “because” and “realise” as they went.

None of this applies only to the dead. People miss a parent who emigrated, a friend they fell out with, a partner from a life that ended. Grief counsellors often suggest the unsent letter for these too, because it lets someone say the whole thing without having to manage the reply. For people who are still close by, the same letter can simply be sent.

People have always written to those they could not reach. For a long time they were told it was a habit to grow out of. The research now suggests they knew what they were doing.