This letter, my son, I intend to share with only one person, the only friend I will keep all my life, and beyond. She is called Christine, she is gentleness itself.

I had no preconceptions when I started deciphering and translating the letter. It was long, and I figured it would probably take me an hour just to type out the rough translation. But as I began to read I was almost immediately swept along by the emotional journey of the unknown mother who had lost her son. How does one come to terms with that? How can one continue living? How had he died? As I translated and typed I began to fear that the letter was a suicide note. In the middle, I broke off and turned to the end, dreading a final farewell as the mother jumped off the cliff to join her son. But the last few lines made no sense without the rest of the letter, so I had to go back to where I had stopped. I typed faster, making the translation as literal as possible, rushing to discover what had happened. As I translated, I wept, and my partner, working quietly behind me, looked round curiously. I could not stop to recover my composure until I knew how the letter would end. But as the mother promised her son that she would ‘live [life] to the full’ and ‘savour each instant in richness and in serenity’ my anxiety eased. By the end of the letter I felt emotionally wrung out by the horror of the writer’s experience and the rawness of her grief. Who was she? What had happened to Maurice? Where was she now?

I kept the letter but sent the translation to my friend, and turned back to my own work with relief.

3

I heard nothing for several days. Finally I asked my friend whether she had received the translation and what she thought.

‘It’s awful,’ she said almost in a whisper, and I could hear her voice breaking. She too had been devastated by the letter. A single mother, with a thirteen-year-old son herself, she found the message almost unbearable, and it took her several attempts to read to the end. When she had picked up the bottle on the beach that day, she had thought of romance, mystery, the glamour of a message from a distant shore. But it was far from the casual love letter she had imagined. She later told me that for days after discovering the contents she had been depressed and emotional, mourning Maurice’s death in sympathy with the unknown mother. She grew quietly more protective of her own son. She offered to take him to his football matches; she walked the first few streets with him when he set off for school in the mornings; she dropped him off when he went to meet his friends, so that he wouldn’t have to catch the bus alone.

The death of a child is unimaginable. The mind shies away from it, but when I held this letter in my hand I was forced to confront it. Although my friend had found the bottle, I felt the letter it contained was written to me. And it was addressed to me, the stranger, ‘l’inconnu’. Apart from the unknown friend, Christine, I was the first person to hold the paper the unknown mother had written on, and I had been the first to read and understand her message of desperation.