Renovating decades-old homes can sometimes yield surprising artifacts and for one New Jersey woman, it was a love letter lost for over seven decades that moved her to take action.
Melissa Fahy and her father found the letter in a gap under the stairs while renovating her Westfield home.
The letter, postmarked May 1945, was written by a woman named Virginia to her husband, Rolf Christoffersen. Her husband was a sailor at the time in the Norwegian Navy.
“Dearest Husband,
I still have a few minutes on my lunch hour and I was dreaming about you so I thought I’d write to my favorite pin-up boy. Are you as lonesome for me as I am for you?” Virgina wrote.
“I love you Rolf, as I love the warm sun,” she continued. “That is what you are to my life, the sun about which everything else revolves for me.”
Fahy told NBC affiliate WNBC that she could not believe the loving admiration Virginia had for her husband.
“It was really sweet to see that long-distance love,” she said.
She decided to find the Christoffersens and deliver the letter, turning to a Facebook page for help. Her social network located the couple’s son in California just a couple of hours after Fahy’s post.
“He couldn’t believe that I reached out to try to find him and return the letter that belonged to him and his family,” said Fahy.
The son read the letter to his 96-year-old father. Virginia died six years ago this weekend.
“In a way, I guess it’s his wife coming back and making her memory alive again,” Fahy said.
— With files from Jenny Rodrigues