I Inherited a Box of Unsent Letters
My aunt wrote to everyone she loved and mailed nothing.
The box was under her bed, where the lawyer said the jewelry would be.
There was no jewelry.
There was a biscuit tin from a brand that stopped existing in the nineties, and inside it, standing on their edges like index cards, one hundred and thirty one letters. Addressed. Stamped. Sealed... Never sent.
My aunt Prem died in April at seventy eight, in her sleep, in the house she had lived in alone since before I was born. I was her executor because I was her favorite, and I was her favorite, I always assumed, because I lived close and drove her to appointments and did not ask questions. The family called her private the way you call a locked door decorative.
I sat on her bedroom floor with the tin and read the addresses. My mother's name was in there, four times, at three different addresses, which means the earliest one chased her through two moves and never caught her. My late uncle. Her doctor. A cousin in Nairobi. A name I did not know, R. D'Souza, eleven times, more than anyone. And near the back, in newer ink, my name... Twice.
Some of the stamps were forty years old.
She had paid postage on all of them.
That is the detail that undid me, sitting on that floor. Whatever this was, at some point, each time, she had carried the letter to the point of costing her something, and then walked it back home and stood it in the tin.
I did not open mine that day. I want that on the record. I opened my mother's oldest one first, because I am the executor and I have decided that is a defensible order and no one can prove otherwise.
It was dated two months after my grandfather's funeral, which put my aunt at thirty three. It was an apology. Not a vague one. She apologized for a specific afternoon, for words she quoted back to herself with terrible accuracy, the way you only can when you have been reciting them for decades. The letter explained, without asking to be forgiven, why she had not come to the hospital at the end: not because she did not care, but because she had promised our grandfather something years earlier that made watching him die unbearable, and the letter said what the promise was, and it is not mine to put in print. Then it said, you are the person I have loved longest in this life. Then it stopped, signed, sealed, stamped, and stood in a tin for forty five years while my mother, one town over, decided her sister was cold.
I read for three nights. Letters congratulating people on weddings she had skipped. A letter to her doctor thanking him for a kindness during a diagnosis she never told us about, and that is how I learned she had been sick in 1988. Letters to the dead, written after their funerals, addressed to houses they no longer occupied, stamped anyway. And eleven letters to R. D'Souza, spanning 1971 to 2009, which together told the story everyone privately assumed my aunt did not have. He appears first as Dear Mr. D'Souza. He is Dearest Rui by the third. In 1974 there is a letter accepting a proposal, sealed, stamped, unsent, and every letter after it is written to the man she would have sent it to, in the life where she mailed things. She kept him updated on that life for thirty eight years. In the last one she tells him her hands shake now, and that she has finally figured out what the letters were for, and I turned the page over so fast I tore it... and the back was blank.
She figured it out and did not say.
So I had to figure it out myself. I am still working on it... but here is where I have landed.
She wrote to everyone she loved and mailed nothing, because the writing was the love, and the mailing was only the risk.
You can call that cowardice. For a while I did, angrily, on her behalf and against her, both at once. A stamp costs less than a silence that outlives you. But I have also now stood at a mailbox holding a letter of my own, and I can report that the distance between a sealed envelope and an open mailbox slot is the longest distance in the world, and my aunt walked to the edge of it one hundred and thirty one times. Most people never write the letter at all. They just carry the unsaid thing around loose, letting it spill on whoever stands too close. She contained hers. Addressed it. Paid its fare. She did everything except let it out of her custody, and I no longer believe the word for that is cold.
The question was what an executor owes the truth. The lawyer said the letters were mine to burn or deliver as I saw fit, which is a terrifying sentence to hear on a Tuesday.
I delivered them.
Not all at once, and not blind. I read each one first, gatekeeping like she should have let someone do for her fifty years ago, and only two stayed in the tin, for reasons the people named in them would understand. I drove my mother's four letters to her house myself and sat in the garden while she read them in order. She was quiet for a long time... Then she said, I spent forty years being right about her, and I would rather have been wrong, and she took the letters inside and I was not invited, and that was correct.
Rui D'Souza died in 2014. I found his daughter. I called her first and asked whether she wanted eleven letters that would rewrite her father's thirties, because consent matters more to me now than it did in April. She said her father had kept a photograph in his desk his whole life of a woman nobody in the family could name. She said, send them. I sent them registered post, and I stood at the counter while the clerk weighed thirty eight years of an alternate life, and it came to a little over four hundred grams.
My own two letters I saved for last. The first, dated the year I turned nine, thanked me for holding her hand at my grandmother's funeral, hers, she wrote, being the hand that most needed holding, though everyone assumed it was the child comforting the child. The second was recent. It said she knew I was the one who would find the tin. It said, do better than I did, and then, because she was Prem, it told me exactly how: write them all, mail one a year, the one that frightens you most. Start with your mother.
I have taken up the practice, with amendments. I keep a tin now. When someone I love does something unsayable to their face, tender or terrible, I write it down, seal it, stamp it. Some of what fills the tin is barely letters anymore, half of them turn into poems about family and forgiveness, because it turns out that is what an unsent letter has always been, a poem with an address on it. One from last winter got loose from me entirely. I read it at her grave, rewrote it until it stopped flinching, and entered it in a monthly contest, which is a form of mailing, if you think about it, to everyone at once. She would have been horrified. She would have kept a copy.
And every year, on her birthday in April, I take the tin down and mail one. The one that frightens me most. Last year it went to my mother. This year's is already stamped, standing on its edge in the dark, and I know the walk to the mailbox is the longest distance in the world, and I know something now that my aunt paid one hundred and thirty one stamps to teach me.
The letter does not weigh less if you keep it. It weighs less if you let it go.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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