I started writing the letters because I could not bear the quiet in my own flat. It was a small place in Phibsborough, above a pharmacy, and during those long months when Dublin felt like it was holding its breath, I would sit at the kitchen table after work and listen to the buses sighing past on the North Circular Road. I was twenty-six, working reduced hours in a café near Dublin city centre, and every evening I came home with nothing to do except scroll through bad news and miss people I had taken for granted.
My granny had died the year before in a care home in Glasnevin. Not from anything dramatic, just age and a tired heart. I used to visit her on Sundays with a bag of pear drops and a newspaper she never read but liked to hold. She would complain about the tea, ask me if I had a boyfriend, then tell me the same story about dancing in the Metropole when she was seventeen. After she died, I found three birthday cards I had sent her tucked into the drawer beside her bed. She had kept them like they were official documents of love.
That memory came back to me one night while I was watching a news report about care homes being closed to visitors. I thought of all the people sitting in rooms with no one coming in except staff in masks, no familiar faces, no grandchildren leaning over the bed to say, “I’m here.” I could not fix any of it. But I could write a letter.
The first one was awkward. I wrote to “Dear Friend,” which felt both too formal and too intimate. I told them about the rain hitting the window, about a man on the bus who had brought a bunch of daffodils for someone and guarded them like a newborn child, about how I had burned my toast that morning and still eaten it because I was too stubborn to start again. I signed it, “From Aoife in Dublin.” Then I wrote nine more.
I rang a care home near Glasnevin Cemetery and asked if they would accept letters for residents who did not get much post. The woman on the phone went quiet for a second, then said, “God love you, yes.” She told me not to expect replies. I said I didn’t. I walked over the next morning and handed a bundle of envelopes to a nurse at the gate. She thanked me as if I had delivered medicine.
After that, it became a habit. Every Thursday evening, I wrote five letters. Sometimes I described little walks through the city, the canal at Drumcondra, the light on the trees in the Phoenix Park, the smell of chips outside a takeaway after rain. Sometimes I asked questions I thought they might enjoy answering in their heads. What was the best dance you ever went to? Did you ever swim in the sea at Christmas? What song would you put on if the whole room needed cheering up?
I thought of the letters disappearing into a soft silence. Then, one Tuesday in June, a pale blue envelope arrived at my flat. My name was written on the front in a careful, shaky hand. Inside was a note from a man called Seamus.
He wrote, “Aoife, I have not been to the Phoenix Park since 1988, but when you wrote about the deer, I saw them. I used to bring my daughter there when she was small. She lives in Australia now. Your letter made me feel less like a chair in a room.”
I sat down on the hallway floor and cried. Not loudly. Just the kind of crying that comes when something small opens a door you had been leaning against for too long. I wrote back to Seamus that same night. I told him
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