… addressed to Sedgwick’s brother, David, and running from the ‘seventies through the early ‘nineties. UD has sent them off to UD‘s friend Hal Sedgwick, who maintains a memorial blog about his wife.

Long-term readers know that Eve’s brother, David, was UD‘s first boyfriend. (Details here.)

Here’s David as I knew him when

we were young, a fine observing
presence in the swirl of the world.

Several years ago he left some boxes in my basement; he and his wife and son were on their way to a new life in Louisiana, but they hadn’t settled on a place to live. He wanted me to hold on to what I thought were books and clothes.

At David’s memorial service, his wife told me to keep the boxes. I told myself I’d donate the clothes somewhere. The books would stay boxed until our shelves cleared enough to hold them.

Two nights ago I was in the basement, checking for water damage after the storms, and, expecting to see a pile of sweaters, I idly opened one of the boxes. Two black trash bags, tightly tied at the top, enclosed what felt like neither books nor clothes.

Upstairs, on the kitchen table, I cut through the bags and found – in this and three other identically packed boxes – stacks of photographs and letters. Also cassettes he’d made of his thoughts from places like Calcutta and Malacca.

David traveled and lived all over Asia for decades; he had a multinational love life; and he was, like his sister, a gifted writer who corresponded with other gifted writers. The boxes burst with passionate love letters to him (UD‘s high school love notes to David were mere foothills on the way to a vast groaning recriminating range); and they included files filled with correspondence from David’s sister, to whom he was very close.

Those three boxes, and a fourth box of objects (a luopan; a tallis bag), engrossed me for hours yesterday. I couldn’t bear to read my own stuff, which, like his exchanges with Eve, ran through the pre-email years and then vanished into online; and it felt wrong to read the other stuff. So I emailed Hal and packed off all the Eve letters and postcards I could find. I made a separate file of the many letters (manual typewriter, single-spaced, onionskin paper) from David’s parents, who – I saw as I scanned a few of them – elegantly combined descriptions of their cultural outings in ‘thesda with anxious inquiries as to his health and whereabouts. These I will give to David’s mother.

UD is gratified by Hal’s enthusiasm at the prospect of these new letters; she is gratified to think that some of the letters might be of interest to scholars. It is strange for her to think of having harbored unknowingly for so long David’s almost over-rich record (certainly much too rich for her to handle) of his short life. A life lived to the hilt.