Beautiful Takeaways From Love Letters To The Dead

"It's sad when everyone knows you, but no one knows you" (Ava Dellaira, Love Letters to the dead)

Love Letters to the Dead is truly a remarkable novel by Ava Dellaira. I love how this book was perfectly put altogether to capture the hearts of the reader, to capture my heart. It was sharply written with depths and sensitivity that every letter pen down conveyed transparent emotions from the characters. As I absorb one letter to another I felt I was a silent companion of Laurel who was with her in her journey. The book was hauntingly beautiful that I felt the vulnerability of the dead people (mentioned in the book) over the course of their lives. Ava Dellaira made me pondered on the many takeaways I brought with me as I closed the last page of her novel. Truly a work of a beautiful mind. 

As I go through each letters, It inadvertently dawned on me that these letters aren't just messages to the souls already in the stars, these are also personal letters for the readers to deeply contemplate.

Here are just four snippets from the many actual letters in the book which moved me.

(These are not in written in chronological orders)

1. Dear Amelia Earhart,

*I thought of you watching the world always changing from above. The tall grass swaying. The rivers like long fingers and the fog from the sea sucking up the shore. And how, when you disappeared down there you must have become a part of it.

*You think you know someone, but that person always changes, and you keep changing, too. I understood it suddenly, how that's what being alive means. Our own invisible plates shifting inside of our bodies, beginning to align into the people we are going to become. 

*How long could you have lived there, with your navigator? Which one of you died first and had to mourn the other?

*I wonder what it was like, Amelia, in the final moments of your life. Did you stare up at the clouds that you have soared over? Did you wonder if you were going back there, to live in your beloved skies forever?

2. Dear Kurt Cobain,

*You had a daughter, and now you'll never get  to know her. You won't see hear fall in love for the first time. Do you know what she'll have instead of her father? Your suicide note. 

*Did you think about the fact that when you wrote those words, when you took your life, you stole the innocence you loved her for? That you forever changed her heart full of joy? You were the first to do her harm. You were the first person to make the world dangerous for her.

3. Dear Judy Garland, 

You started so young that you could never stop, and then you were gone. I can't help but wonder if nobody ever really grows all the way up. I look at you in The Wizard of Oz, on that yellow brick road that just hope will lead to home, and I know you always wanted to get there. 

4. Dear Amy Winehouse,

"No one else can save you, not really. Not from yourself. You fall asleep in the foothills, and the wolf comes down from the mountains. And you hope someone will wake you up. Or chase it off. Or shoot it dead. But when you realize that the wolf is inside you, that's when you know. You can't run from it. And no one who loves you can kill the wolf, because it's part of you."