At left, author Dara Kurtz (Photo by Jodie Brim Photography), and with her mother in the 1970s (Photo courtesy Dara Kurtz)
For Dara Kurtz, rediscovering handwritten letters her mother had written to her while she was growing up was a life-changing experience. The stash of letters, including several from her father and grandmothers, contained stories of their lives, their thoughts, feelings and advice. “I’m so grateful … that I have them,” Kurtz says, “that [my mom] cared enough to write letters to me and that I saved them.”
For many years, Kurtz had forgotten about the letters she had stored in a closet in her childhood home. She left her native Richmond in 1989 to attend The University of Alabama, where she met her husband, Jon. He’s a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, so after the couple married, they settled there.
In 1999, Kurtz received the happy news that she was pregnant with their first child, but just a few weeks later she learned her mother had stage 4 skin cancer. Wanting to be with her mother, she spent much of her pregnancy in Richmond, going into labor a month early and giving birth at Henrico Doctors’ Hospital. A few weeks after daughter Zoe was born, Kurtz’s mother died. “That was really, really devastating to have a new baby and be so excited about that and then lose my mom all at the same time,” Kurtz says. “It was really one of the greatest challenges of my life, learning how to live in the world without my mom and not have her, especially after having become a new mom.”
She powered through, returning to work as a financial advisor at a large bank and later giving birth to a second daughter, Avi. But in 2014, when Kurtz learned she had breast cancer, her world again came to a crashing halt. “That was devastating, because I knew what it felt like to lose my mom at an early age,” she says. She was 28 when her mother died, and at the time of her own diagnosis, Zoe was 14 and Avi 11. “That brought up a lot of feelings that I hadn’t really completely dealt with from the loss of my mom,” Kurtz says.
Even with the worries she carried from watching her mother battle cancer, Kurtz says she was lucky because her cancer was diagnosed early and she chose to fight it as aggressively as possible, undergoing surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments. “But after I went through that, that’s when I thought, ‘You know what? I really don’t want to be a financial advisor anymore.’ ” she says. “So that’s when I quit my job and decided to start writing. I’d always wanted to be a writer and write books, and that’s when I started my blog, ‘Crazy Perfect Life.’ ”
On her blog, she writes about her past experiences and how others can navigate the twists and turns of life. It led her to pen her first book, “Crush Cancer: Personal Enlightenment From a Cancer Survivor,” in 2017, offering guidance on how to thrive after cancer.
In 2019, when her daughter Zoe was preparing to return to college, Kurtz didn’t want her to leave, knowing she’d miss her. Zoe pulled out an old mother/daughter journal the two kept as Zoe was growing up, passing it back and forth as they wrote notes to each other. Flipping through it, they were reminded of happy memories and the bond they share.
The rediscovery of family letters inspired Dara Kurtz to write “I Am My Mother’s Daughter: Wisdom on Life, Loss, and Love.” (Photo courtesy Dara Kurtz)
It left Kurtz wishing she had something similar from her own mother — and then she remembered that she actually did. When her father remarried and moved to a new home, he brought over some of Kurtz’s childhood possessions, including a bag of letters she had saved. They were written to her from the days at sleepaway camp at age 9 through her college graduation. She had stuck them in the back of a drawer and forgotten about them, and it wasn’t until her experience with Zoe that she considered reading them. But she had reservations, afraid that reading the letters would rehash the grief of losing her mother.
“Finally, one night, I just was kind of like, ‘OK, I really want to know what’s in these letters,’ and I opened them up, and I was just blown away by just how I felt like I was having a conversation with my mom,” Kurtz recalls. “I could feel her personality, I could hear her voice, and I started sobbing. It was all so unbelievable, because of the wisdom that the letters contain, and they were timeless, and they were so relevant.”
The letters were full of insight and offered a glimpse, written in her own words, into what her mother’s life had been like. Kurtz has more than 100 letters, mostly written by her mother, but also by her two grandmothers and father. They inspired her to write “I Am My Mother’s Daughter: Wisdom on Life, Loss, and Love,” published in September 2020. Kurtz says, “I just wrote from my heart. A lot of times I was crying while I was writing, and then I ended up with this book.”
Writing the book was cathartic for Kurtz. “I was giving myself permission to release a lot of the sadness and grief that, honestly, literally followed me around like my shadow for the last 20 years before this experience,” she says. It also brought her closer to her late mother. “I just got to know her better, and it was an unbelievable gift.”
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