A widow in County Cork named Una Heafey kept every condolence she received after her husband's death in November 2024. She put them in a single shoebox, in the order they arrived.
When she counted them, in March 2025, she found that she had received four hundred and twelve messages of condolence. Of these, thirty-one were handwritten letters. Forty-seven were printed sympathy cards with a personal note added. The remaining three hundred and thirty-four were digital — text messages, emails, Facebook comments, WhatsApp messages, and, in a few cases, public posts on the funeral home's online guestbook.
Heafey, who is seventy-three and a retired schoolteacher, was not surprised by the ratio. She was, she told me, surprised by how differently the letters and the digital messages aged.
Six months after the death, she had reread the thirty-one handwritten letters three or four times each. She had not reread any of the digital messages at all. Most of them she could not have located if she tried.
This is the difficulty of the condolence letter in the present moment. It is among the oldest of the personal-letter forms. It is also among the most threatened.
The condolence letter has a recognizable architecture. It usually opens with an acknowledgement of the death, in plain language. It moves to a specific memory of the deceased. It says, briefly, what the writer felt for the dead person. It offers, without insisting on it, the writer's continued presence.
It does not, in good practice, ask questions. It does not require a reply. It does not offer advice.
These rules are not modern. The Roman letters of consolation, of which Cicero's are the most famous, follow roughly the same shape. The Victorian condolence letter, codified in countless etiquette manuals, follows it more elaborately. The mid-twentieth-century American condolence letter, distilled by writers like Phyllis Theroux into a small, repeatable form, was almost identical in structure.
What changes is the medium.
Heafey's observation about her shoebox is borne out by interviews I conducted with eleven other recently bereaved people across Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States over the spring of 2026. All eleven reported the same pattern. They had received many more digital messages than handwritten ones. They had kept and reread the handwritten ones. They had, for the most part, forgotten the digital ones.
Some of them felt guilty about this. Several said the digital messages had been kind and well-intentioned and had probably taken just as long to write, in some cases, as the letters. They had still not reread them.
The reasons are partly architectural. A letter is a discrete object. It arrives. It is opened. It is put somewhere, often in a visible place. It is reread, often within the first weeks of grief, when rereading is what one does.
A digital message is not a discrete object. It exists inside a feed, alongside everything else that came in that hour. It can be reread, but it requires effort to find. The grieving person has to scroll past everything else that has happened since to recover it.
Several of the people I spoke to said they had tried, in the early months, to organize the digital messages. One had started a folder in her email. Another had taken screenshots of the most meaningful texts and saved them to a single album. A third had printed her brother's Facebook posts and put them in a binder.
All three had stopped within weeks. The project, they said, felt artificial.
There is a related problem, which is that the digital condolence is often shorter. A handwritten letter takes some time to write. The time, almost necessarily, slows the writer down. Even a short letter requires the writer to find a card or paper, address an envelope, and post it.
A text message requires none of this. It can be written in twenty seconds. The constraint that produces the rhythm of a good condolence — the slowness of writing, the time to think — is largely absent.
This is not an argument against digital condolence. To say nothing is worse than to send a brief message. People with three hundred friends would not be capable of writing three hundred handwritten letters. The digital condolence has, in many cases, replaced silence rather than the paper letter.
But it has also replaced some paper letters that would otherwise have been written.
Heafey said she does not blame anyone for the digital messages. She does, however, keep the letters in the shoebox in her kitchen, and she does, when she needs to, take them out.
She said the last one she reread was from a former pupil now in her fifties, whom she had taught in 1979. The letter was three pages long. It described a specific afternoon in the spring of that year and a thing Heafey's husband had said at the school gates. The letter is, she said, the only place that afternoon is now recorded.
The condolence letter is hard to write. It is hard to receive. It does not always say the right thing.
It does, however, persist in a way that a comment thread does not. That alone is reason enough to go on writing them.