This is NPR's life kit.

The silence after your departure and the arrival of the radiogram did not last 48 hours for me.

It lasted the time of an entire existence, as is usually the case when anxiety tightens at our throats.

When was the last time you wrote a little letter?

How about any letter at all?

Even if you are one of the few still taking time to put pen to paper, I'm guessing you don't sound quite like this.

She too was sat in by your departure.

I certainly could not have endured traveling home on that same day.

Absolutely not.

My distress would have only worsened.

That day, an abyss opened under my feet, and I had to pay careful attention not to plunge inside.

I'm Andy Tagle, one of the producers of this show, and that was Sonya Cancun, a historian specializing in migration and an expert of immigrant letters and love letters.

She's reading letter exchange between a transatlantic Italian couple from 1948.

Yes, my spirit and my heart were not normal.

My body had never before felt a similar fatigue.

My legs failed to hold me steady.

Cancun says our long history of letter writing still has a lot to offer us today.

What you say in a letter, you will not say in a WhatsApp.

Nor will you say it in a text message.

Nor will you necessarily say it in the email.

Because the letter itself will push you, will compel you to write in another way.

Because there's a cultural memory of letter writing.

...