In January of 1975, at the ranch outside Crawford, Nebraska, Marion sat down to tell her cousins that her husband was gone. Preston had suffered a stroke on Tuesday the seventh and died on Sunday the twelfth. What survives is seven handwritten pages — a letter to Cousin Frances dated January 29, a second letter to Cousins Mark and Sally dated February 3, and the drafts she worked through between them.

Most of what she wrote is an accounting of arrivals. Who came, from where, on which night, by which plane: Dan from Ainsworth late Tuesday, Helen and Jim and the boys from White River, Carol’s plane met at Rapid City on Friday, two sons-in-law driving all night from Durango. She keeps that ledger until she can set down the sentence she seems to have been working toward — that every child was with Preston and her by Friday. She writes that line in both letters, in nearly the same words. She also drew the cemetery, a mountaintop in the Black Hills, small labeled boxes marking where each of them would one day lie. Then she put the pages away.

You can access these letters by clicking on the link below.

_Marion_Letters_1975_Transcript