A saint…
One Extraordinary Couple…
A Story Preserved Through Hundreds of Love Letters:
William Carrigan and his beloved wife Ramona were married for over fifty years. During his overseas work with the Red Cross, the couple wrote each other nearly daily as they worked to keep their marriage and personal life together intact through two years and thousands of miles apart.
During the war, mail service was slow. Letters were often delayed and sometimes lost or received out of order. It could take two weeks to a month for letters to come through. Bill’s post office box often changed and mail could be slow to catch up. This had sometimes humorous results (at one point, Bill was mystified at receiving a package full of cans cake flour with no accompanying explanation). But, at other times, such as when Ramona had to break the news of the accidental death of a family friend, only having bits and pieces of information was a source of emotional strain.
In spite of this, the Carrigan’s marriage not only survived the separation, but thrived, as they shared their ups and downs and both the miraculous and mundane events of their separate lives through the only means available to them. The letters written after the beginning of 1944, took an interesting turn, when Bill first made contact with Padre Pio. Pieced together, the letters tell the story of not only an astonishing friendship between Bill and one of the most well-known Catholic saints, but also of the remarkable marriage of an otherwise seemingly ordinary couple.
The Carrigans kept the collection of their correspondence after the war. When going through some of his remaining personal effects some twenty years after his death, Ava and I found a handwritten note of Bill’s, expressing a wish to have Ramona’s letters bound and published one day. Busy man that he was, he never saw that wish come true during his lifetime. But, he did keep hundreds of their letters to each other. After his death in 2000, they came into the possession of his nephew, Chuck Furr, and ended up in Hawaii, where they sat untouched for many years.
When I initially started this project, I was intending to record and edit a single short interview of Chuck alone, to preserve Bill’s story, just for the Furr family. Discovering the box of Bill and Ramona’s letters, tucked away in Chuck’s garage, was an incredible surprise. As Ava and I read, digitized and archived the letters, we found they ended up revealing a far more complex story than I ever could have imagined and took the project to unexpected places.
The letters I selected for use in the film had to be abridged for the sake of time. As an editor, it’s my job to pull the threads of a story together and create a coherent narrative from a sea of options. As director, I hope that through my thematic selections for the film I have painted a vibrant portrait of Bill and Ramona. However, for those curious and wanting more, below you will find 10 of the Carrigan letters in full. Transcriptions have been provided in addition to scans. As you click through, I hope you will enjoy this glimpse into the hidden lives and hearts of two incredible people.
