Should I act after finding letter from my teenage lost love?

here I feel I should remind you that you hadn’t given her a thought for years until not long before you found the letter.

It’s also important to realise that the strain of witnessing your mother’s decline and death within the walls of your boyhood home will have made you emotionally vulnerable; the death of a parent can trigger memories of lost youth and the sense of the inexorable passage of time.

Your discovery of the lost letter will have just added to that potent mixture of thoughts and feelings.

That is why I counsel you not to try to trace this lady.

Ask yourself whether — even if she is still alive — it will do her any good to be found. She might be very contented in her life, as you have been up until now.

So what good will it do to remind her of all she endured as a teenager? Of course, she could well have been contacted by the child she had to give up for adoption, but that is a whole other story, her very own story, and I’m not sure you have the right to disturb her.

So I would leave well alone.