Everybody prepares for the goodbye. Almost nobody is told about the four weeks after it, which are stranger and quieter than expected and which nearly every family is surprised by in the same ways.
The first few days
The drop-off is loud and then the house is not. Most families describe the same thing: the day itself is survivable because there is something to do, and the following Tuesday is not, because there isn’t.
Expect the ordinary objects to do most of the damage. A bedroom door that is now always shut, a place at the table, a particular mug, the shoes by the back door. It arrives sideways rather than in the moments you brace for.
The first letter takes longer than you think
There is usually a gap before the first proper letter, and the gap is administrative rather than meaningful. They are being processed, trained, moved and exhausted, and the first week’s writing often amounts to a few lines confirming they exist.
Do not read anything into a short first letter. The long ones start once there is a routine to describe, which is usually several weeks in.
What to do with the gap
Write anyway. A letter waiting for them is worth a great deal in the first two weeks, and it also sets the expectation early that this correspondence runs in both directions. There is more on what makes a letter worth reading in what to write to a missionary.
The week reorganizes itself around one day
Within a month the whole house knows which day is preparation day. Everything bends around it: the letter arrives, the call happens, and the rest of the week is before or after that.
Two things are worth settling early, while it is still being set up rather than being changed.
- Who is on the list.Grandparents, siblings who have moved out, the friend who will absolutely want this. Adding somebody in month one is a sentence; adding them in month fourteen means they have missed a third of it, and those letters will exist only in other people’s inboxes.
- Who is on the call. Nine people on a screen is a worse conversation than two. Some families rotate deliberately rather than letting it be decided by who happens to be in. There is more in calling and video chatting your missionary.
Training comes first, and it is not the mission yet
The opening stretch is training, and it runs differently from everything after it. Contact is more limited, the days are scheduled end to end, and a missionary learning a language is in it considerably longer than one who is not.
Families read this period as the mission and then get a shock when it ends, because the letters change character completely. Training letters are about classes, companions and tiredness. Once they are assigned, the letters are suddenly full of places, strangers, weather and food. If the first few weeks sound institutional, that is the institution, not them.
The house reorganizes, including the people in it
Siblings are the part nobody prepares for. A younger brother has lost the person he talked to in the evenings and is now watching the entire household arrange its week around somebody who is not there. That is a complicated thing to be twelve and have no words for.
- Give siblings their own channel. Letters from a brother or sister are the ones missionaries most often say meant the most, and they almost never happen unless somebody suggests it.
- Do not make the weekly call entirely a parents’ event. Five minutes of a sibling talking about nothing is worth more than it looks.
- Watch for the one who seems fine. In most families it is not the person everybody expected who finds it hardest.
“How’s he doing?”
You will answer this question several hundred times, usually from people being kind, often when you do not want to. Two things make it easier.
Have a short answer ready that is true and finished — “good week, they’ve moved areas” — so you are not deciding how much to say each time while standing in a corridor. And keep the real answer for people you actually want to tell. A hard letter is theirs, not yours, and most missionaries find out eventually what was repeated about them.
Marking the time, and the ways it backfires
Nearly every family builds some kind of counter. A jar of candy, a chain, a chalkboard, an app. They are genuinely helpful for younger children and they have one failure mode worth knowing.
A countdown frames eighteen months or two years as something to be endured until it is over, which is a difficult frame to hold for that long, and a strange one for the missionary to come home to. The families who do best tend to count up rather than down, or count nothing and keep something instead — a folder of letters, a shelf of the things they have sent, photographs printed as they arrive.
The difference sounds like semantics and does not feel like it in month nine. One of them produces a pile of days got through. The other produces something you can sit down and read.
The first package
Most families want to send something immediately. A few practical notes, because the first one is usually the most expensive lesson:
- Ask the mission about rules and addresses first.Some have restrictions, and in some countries customs charges land on the missionary rather than you.
- Small and frequent beats large and rare. They have to carry everything they own to the next area, sometimes at short notice.
- Photographs survive the journey better than anything else. Printed ones, which can go on a wall.
What is worth sending, and what is not, is in what to send a missionary in a care package.
The comparison trap
Somebody in your ward has a missionary whose letters are three pages long, full of names and numbers and remarkable things. Yours writes four paragraphs about the weather and a flat tire.
This means nothing. It is a difference in how two nineteen-year-olds write, not a difference in how two missions are going, and families reliably draw the wrong conclusion from it. The short-letter writer is very often having the better month.
The same applies to everything else that gets compared: where they were assigned, how the first transfer went, what is happening in the area. None of it is a scoreboard, though almost every family admits to keeping one for a while.
Set the archive up this month, not at the end
This is the one genuinely practical thing in this guide, and the only one with a deadline attached that nobody tells you about.
The letters are about to arrive every week for eighteen months or two years. Right now there are four of them and everything is easy. By the end there are a hundred, spread across several people’s inboxes, with photographs attached to some and linked from others, and the account they were sent from will be closing.
Five minutes now covers most of it:
- Make a label or folder and a filter so the letters file themselves as they arrive rather than being searched for later.
- Check your storage.A full account stops delivering mail, and the usual fix — sorting by size and deleting — finds exactly the letters with the photographs in them.
- Save shared photo albums as actual files when they arrive. A link to an album is not a photograph, and those links break at the end of a mission.
- Ask the others on the list to keep theirs too. A grandparent written to directly holds the only copy of those letters.
All four are written out properly in keeping the letters safe while they’re still out, and what happens if you leave it to the end is in what happens to missionary emails after the mission ends.
The admin nobody mentions
A person has left the country for two years and their ordinary life does not pause. Most of this surfaces in month one as a series of small irritations, and it is easier dealt with in a single sitting.
- Mail and packages. Everything still arrives at your house. Decide who opens it and what gets mentioned.
- The phone. Plans, numbers and two-factor codes tied to a handset in a drawer. A number that lapses takes a lot of accounts with it.
- Banking and subscriptions. Cards expire mid-mission. Standing payments go out for two years for things nobody is using.
- Anything with a renewal date. A driving license, a passport, insurance on a car sitting on the drive.
The first transfer
Usually a few months in, and it is a bigger event than it reads as from home. A new area, a new companion, a new apartment and the loss of everybody they had just come to know — all on one day, at short notice.
Two practical consequences. The letter that week is often short or odd, and it is about upheaval rather than unhappiness. And the preparation day can change with the area, so the day your whole week is built around may quietly move.
It is also worth writing down the date and the area name each time one happens. Nobody thinks they will forget, everybody does, and that short list turns out to be the spine of the whole mission later on — it is what puts the photographs in the right place.
And then it is just long
After the first month the acute part mostly passes and is replaced by something duller: it is simply a long time, and it does not go quickly in the middle. Month nine is nobody’s favorite month.
The families who find the middle easiest tend to be the ones who have something accumulating. Letters filed somewhere they can be reread, a note after each call, photographs that are actually saved rather than sitting in a thread. It turns a long wait into something with a visible shape, which is a surprisingly large difference.