Dear Jeane,
.PP
.fi
.na
Thank you for your letter of June 6.
I am sorry that you feel so bad about my mother's death
and about the settlement of her estate.
I try to understand how you feel,
and I am neither offended nor angry.
On the contrary, I am grateful to you
for saying exactly what was on your mind.
As I told to you on the telephone,
I have not forgotten, and I cannot imagine
that I will ever forget what you did for my parents, and so far
as my parents' assets are concerned, I want to make sure that
you have gotten or will get your fair share, and if there is 
any doubt about what is fair,
then I would want you to have the benefit of the doubt.
Furthermore, the money that my parents left has not been spent,
and will not be spent in the foreseeable future,
so that we have time to think 
about what is the right thing to do.
.PP
The best way to start is to look at the facts about
which we can probably agree.
First of all, my mother's will is genuine and valid.
There is no way it can be contested.
We have to accept that my mother did not leave
anything to you in her will. I think this is unfortunate,
but there is nothing I can do about it.  The terms of my
mother's will were no surprise to me, and I tried on occasion
to tell you even before my mother died,
gently, without hurting your feelings,
that there was nothing for you in her will.
I had the impression that you understood me.
In any event, I was determined to make up for my mother's neglect
of you, and to do so while she lived.
That was one of my motives in giving to you and to Herman
such substantial gifts in the last four years.
.PP
I approved of your decision to stay in my parents' house
during such periods as no other family members were present.
I thought that you were very kind and generous to my parents
and I was grateful to you for looking after them in my absence.
You explained to me on several occasions that you wanted to stay
in my mother's house and to take care of her not on account
of any money payments but because you loved her, and that you
would look after her even if in return you received nothing at all.
I believed you then and I believe you now.
Nonetheless we agreed that it would be
appropriate to continue the monthly salary which my mother
had been paying you before she got sick. I explained that
since my mother could not fulfill the obligations of an employer,
I believed it would be proper for you to accept the monthly
payments as an "independent contractor."
Under this agreement, I paid you $14,800.00.
In this framework
I agreed to reimburse you for any expenses you might have
in caring for my mother, except that I did not wish to become
responsible for remuneration which you might choose to
pay to third parties, again because I did not wish to accept the 
legal obligations of an employer.
In paying you the salary and in making what I thought
were generous gifts, I deliberately tried to avoid a situation
where, in return for your help, you would feel, at their deaths,
that you had a moral claim to their estate
for which there was no legal basis.
Obviously, I did not succeed.
.PP
My mother's payments to you from January 1, 1987 through
January 31, 1990 amounted to 14,800.
What I gave you and Herman
from 1986 through January 1990 came to $66,800,
making a total of $81,600.00.
My mother's estate will be settled in January 1991.
At that time, the present value of the payments you have already received
at 7.5% compounded semi-annually, will be $100672.11.
.PP
With respect to the thirty-seven payments of $400.00,
as you accepted each payment from month to month,
you acknowledged the correctness of the previous ones.
With respect to gifts from me, we agreed that
I had no legal obligation to give them to you,
and that in accepting them you did not incur any 
legal obligation to me.
I futher explained to you that although these payments
were intended by me as gifts and were accepted by you as such,
nonetheless it was possible that they created income tax
liabilities for you, and I asked you to inquire of the
Internal Revenue Service whether and how you should report them.
.PP
Your letter suggests that it was I who divided my mother's estate
between Margrit and Klemens, and that it was within my
power to name the person who would receive my share of the inheritance.
This is not the case.
All I did was to disclaim my interest in my mother's estate.
At that point the law took over and determined
to whom my portion was to be given.
The interest in my mother's estate which I disclaimed
did not go to Klemens at my direction. It went to Klemens
because the law states that given my disclaimer,
my mother's property should be distributed as if I had died
before she did, and this in fact was what I, as the
administrator of her estate, was required by law to do.
As administrator I have no choice but to distribute my mother's
property according to the terms of her will.
Of course there is nothing to prevent Klemens or Margrit to make
gifts to you of any portion of their share of the inheritance,
or for myself to make gifts to you of my own funds,
except that any gift in excess of $10,000 per year
is subject to gift tax liability.
.PP
Although I do not believe I have any legal obligation,
it is certainly possible that I have a moral obligation
to make further gifts to you on behalf of my mother.
If there is such a moral obligation, it might rest
on the fact that possibly the market value of what you
did for my parents exceeded the value of what you received.
Although I do not believe it entirely valid,
I shall accept your assumption that the alternative to what
you did for them would have been nursing home care.
I shall also accept your figure of $2600
as the monthly cost of such care.
As soon as you subtract the value of room and board
and especially of the weeks that Margaret, Margrit,
or I relieved you of the care of my mother,
and I shall assume that you provided 77 percent of the value
of her care, then the value provided by you was $74,000 of a total
assumed cost of 96,200, which compares favorably with the
$81,600.00 which you received.
.PP
Another measure of the economic value of what you did
is to compare $ 88.57, which is approximately
the amount which you received from day to day
with the payments one would make to other individuals in the community
for taking care of my mother for a day.
Again I think we can probably agree that
so far as the market value of what you did
for my parents is concerned,
you were not underpaid.
.PP
Finally one might argue that there is a moral obligation 
that my mother's assets should be distributed
among the various members of her family in proportion to their love for her.
Love, as you know, is something that one cannot measure,
and the closest one can come to rewarding it
would be to distribute my mother's estate
among those individuals who cared for my parents
during their lives in proportion to the time and effort spent
in doing so.
.PP
I hope you will not be embarrassed if I make the simplifying
assumption that you, Margrit my sister, and Margaret my wife
and I were the three of us
children of my parents, but that whereas Margrit and I
had been part of my parents' family all our lives,
and Margaret joined it in 1952 when we were married,
you became part of that family when you started
to help take care of my parents in the late autumn of 1986,
and any moral claim to share in my parents' assets
which you might have, arises out of that involvement.
.PP
Margrit and I, on the other hand,
had been caring for my parents, each in his
own way, since we became adults,
and I think that our disagreement arises partly from the 
circumstance that what Margrit did for my parents
and what I did for my parents seems more important
to us than it does to you.
So far as Margrit is concerned,
try to put yourself in her place and imagine
how you would feel if you had made, over the past forty years
more than a hundred and sixty long trips,
six hundred miles coming and six hundred miles going
to see your mother.
Each time you had stayed a week or more,
and your mother had asked you, "When are you coming?"
"How long are you staying?" "Why do you leave so soon?"
"When will you come back?" but then had not let you cook
or wash the dishes, or do the laundry, or do practically
anything else that would make you feel useful.
Isn't that really more of a sacrifice than if Margrit
had worn herself out actually doing the work that
she wanted to do ?
.PP
So far as my own contributions to my parents'
lives are concerned,
remember that I came to Konnarock to take care of
my father's practice while he was sick,
that I made in his behalf a contract with the Lutheran Church
which not only secured for my parents the house in which
they both wanted to spend the rest of their lives, 
but which made it possible for them to spend the last
thirty-two years of their lives in Konnarock at all.
I then set up practice in Damascus to be able to work together
with my father. The argument that if I had gone right
into specialty training like my classmate Elliot Blaydes
in Bluefield and taken out everybodys cataract for miles around
and made fifty million dollars, instead of fooling around
in Damascus for six years, is no worse and no better than
your argument that you passed up good jobs in Abingdon
or Marion while you were sitting up on this hill taking
care of my mother.
After I left Damascus in 1962,
because my father had changed his mind, and didn't want
to work together with me after all,
Margaret and I made, during the 27 years that followed,
as many as 116 trips to Konnarock, each requiring about
nine days and involving 1650 miles of travel.
.PP
It is not necessary for me to mention other things
which I did for my parents.
If you will agree that the time and effort and energy
which Margrit and Margaret and I spent on our visits
also have a value,
which is comparable on an hourly basis to the loving
care which you took of them,
and if we assume that morally you and Margrit and I
have a claim on my mother's assets proportionate
to what each of us has contributed to my parents,
then one can quickly calculate what proportion of my
mother's estate each of us is morally entitled to.
I have made such a computer model,
a printout of which is attached.
According to this model Jeane and Herman actually
received $21757.46 in excess of their share.
.PP
I hope that this analysis will make you
feel a little bit better, and willing to consider
the possibility that maybe I had been more than fair
with you after all.
Please think about these figures
and ask me any questions about what you don't understand.
You are free to challenge my assumptions.
I will be glad to run off the computer model 
with assumptions that you have selected.
I am open-minded about everything,
and I hope you will consider it worthwhile to argue with me
where you think I am wrong.
.PP
Finally, let me make the suggestion that you
think about not only the portion of my mother's assets that you should
rightly receive,
but calculate als what you believe Margrit and Margaret
and I are each entitled to.
It is just possible that you
might recommend a distribution
which would be acceptable to all of us.