(Name)

(Instructors’ name)

(Course)

(Date)

Dear Son,

It is with deep disquiet that I write to you this letter. I understand why you do not wish to see me out of your sight, but I urge you to please grant me this opportunity to travel to my hometown Bountiful. I appreciate that you took me into to your home and have taken care of me since my husband passed away but my experience here has been nothing but acrid. I miss my home, I miss my friends, I miss the memories of my childhood and I worry that this loneliness that I feel is what is making me feel depressed. My journey to Bountiful is a spiritual journey, one that is destined to heal my cheerless soul. A silent hum that will console me in this noise that is my daily aging life. This journey will grant me the serenity that will surpass all what I have lived for and seeing the people I grew up with in my childhood will reconcile me to the reality and inescapability of my demise. So I urge you my son not to allow your childlike self-interest to exacerbate my depression. I urge you to permit me to spend these very last days of my life re-living the memories that have made me who I am today. This trip to Bountiful is not intended to inconvenience you in any way. I do not wish that you accompany me to Bountiful, and will not ask for pecuniary support. I know you think am too old to travel, or that if I go I may not come back but I assure you I will.

Although I do not want to pre-empt your response to my request but I shall ask you to consider what this trip would benefit the three of us. Please do not repudiate my request out of the fear for my life, or out of the belief that my actions are obstinate. All the time that I have lived here, you have not allowed me to go back to my hometown, let alone travel to another town. I feel like a prisoner in my own home and I feel like if my life is to end soon, I shall not have lived it to the fullest. I stare at the television set everyday with the hopes of seeing someone from my old hometown. I listen to the radio, hoping to hear from one of my childhood friends. And instead of getting all that, I am tormented by rumors of what my town has become, a empty town reduced to and decrepit shacks. You have confirmed these rumors over and over again as you refuse to grant me permission to travel to Bountiful. How I wish you would take the time to understand what this trip would mean to me. This trip will grant me the redemption I will need to rest easy before my days in this world are cut short by the almighty. This trip will make me happy and give me the peace that I have been longing for since you brought me to your house. So my dear son, I hope that you will find it in your heart to let me, your old aging mother, visit my hometown Bountiful for one last time. To let me say goodbye for one last time to my friends and my relatives.

Sincerely,

Mother