When Dr. Hall died this past fall, I wasn’t able to drive to Birmingham for his funeral because my husband had just had surgery, so I pulled that report card out of my mother’s things and read it again, trying to find the right words to write in a letter to his widow. I remembered the good man who had meant so much to me at such an important time in my life. Someone who saw me clearly as I was and who looked past my faults to the possibilities of goodness. Someone who believed in the person I could yet become, long after I had left his religion class behind.

It’s not easy to put into words what such a person means, and I have not always been the most faithful correspondent where condolence letters are concerned. But I am old enough now to have lost most of the beloved adults in my family, and I know what a gift a few words of shared sadness can be.

When my mother died, I saved every card, every letter, every enclosure that came with every flower arrangement or potted plant. I printed out every email. I even copied all the Facebook messages into a Word document and printed that out, too. I was desperate to hold onto any shred of evidence that her life mattered, and to far more people than just my brother and sister and me. I needed to keep learning about her from others, now that she was no longer here to keep revealing herself in real time. I needed to be reminded that my own memories were not the only ones keeping her in the world.

On the very worst days in the months that followed her sudden death, I pulled out those reminders and read them again and again and again. Oftentimes I could swear I’d never read them before, though I knew I’d already read them all, and more than once. The shock of grief made me lose track of all manner of kindnesses in those first impossible days. I completely forgot that five of my neighborhood friends had driven all the way to Birmingham for the funeral. I had hugged them, I had cried on their shoulders, and then I had forgotten they had come. Their notes of love and remembrance, when I pulled them out later, helped me remember again.

A condolence letter is a gift to the recipient, but it’s a gift to the writer, too. Remembering someone you loved is a way of remembering who you were, a way of linking your own past and present. Even when you love only the survivor — even if you hardly knew, or never met, the mourned beloved, you know something crucial: You know that person had a hand in creating someone you love. A condolence letter confirms the necessity of connection, one human heart to another. It’s a way of saying, “We belong to one another.”