The Postscript, a Small Dignity

Somewhere in the attic of my aunt's house there is a shoebox of letters, and in nearly every one of them the most interesting sentence arrives after the signature. The writer has said goodbye, lifted the pen, and then, as if stopped at the door by a thought, added something small. By the way, the apples are in. Don't tell your mother I said so. I miss you more than I managed to write.

That last one is real, or near enough. I read it years ago and have never quite recovered.

The room after the goodbye

Consider what a postscript does. A letter, as most of us were taught to write it, has a shape: greeting, news, health, weather, wishes, farewell. It is a polite performance, and it holds the writer at a decent distance from the reader. Then, below the name, the performance is over. The writer is standing in the hall with their coat on, no longer composing, and the true thing slips out.

I think the postscript is the one place in a letter where we allow ourselves to be unfinished. Everything above it has been arranged. Down there, we say what we couldn't arrange.

Why it's disappearing

Our messages don't have a foot. They scroll. Somebody writes a line, sends it, and then, as often as not, sends another a moment later that begins "also". We still have afterthoughts, plenty of them. What we've lost is the ceremony of them: the physical pause, the dip of the pen, the decision that this small thing deserves to be set apart from the rest.

There was a dignity in that, I'd say, a way of marking a thought as late and therefore tender. A postscript tells the reader, quietly, this one slipped past my guard.

Writing one on purpose

I've started doing something slightly artificial, which is writing postscripts deliberately, in the letters I still send. A few birthday cards a year. A note to a friend who moved away. I draft the main text, sign it, and then ask myself what I haven't said.

Often the answer is nothing, and I leave it. But about one time in three, a sentence turns up that I'd never have found by aiming. It's usually shorter than I expect and a little embarrassing. Those, I've learned, are the keepers.

The postscript is where the letter stops being a letter and becomes a person.

My aunt, when I asked her about the shoebox, laughed and said that her own mother used to write P.S. on the envelope itself, a last line outside the last line. I don't know whether that's a tradition or just a quirk of one family. Either way, I have thought about it ever since: a thought so late it had to be written on the outside.

I'll end, as one ought, with an afterthought. If there's someone you've been meaning to write to, do it this week. Make the letter ordinary. Make it dull, even. Then add the line below your name that you'd say only in the hall.