Dear Marion,

You're back from the Farm. You've survived the weekend
with your usual elan, and you write me a letter telling
me how it was and how it is, and I thank you. Your accounts
make the world of Micha and Boo and Marion very vivid both
with the explicit accounts of the satisfaction that it offers
its participants and the implicit perplexities it leaves
not only unresolved but also unarticulated. In replying,
I have no choice but to ask myself, what should I say,
how should I respond, what position, what stance should
I assume that would be most helpful and constructive?
Have I any obligation other than to distract and entertain
you with letters chronicling nothing more than the trivia
of my own egocentric existence?

I'm not at all sure it is helpful to lapse into theories
and to try to improvise off-the-cuff paradigms of interpersonal
relationships, but it's obvious to me that the interactions
on the Farm, that my sister's satisfaction or discontent with
her presumably transitory nursing home experience in Belmont,
and ultimately also the exchange of e-mails between you and me,
are all of them facets of the same issue: how to we "relate"
to one another, what do we "know" of one another, what do we
"do" for (or to) one another. You have raised this issue
tangentially in your critical comments about your father's
disparagement of friendship in favor of "family" relations.
It's an enigma that looms large in my own experience, and I
am trying to understand it more fully by writing about it.
The title, after all, of my current novel is "Die Freunde".
It is a topic about which we can exchange as many letters as
you care to read and write.

But the immediate issue is much narrower: For the forseeable
future Margrit cannot even begin to accomplish her purposes
without my active help. Never mind my driving her to the airport.
That part is easy. Her dilapidated sports car is garaged in
Konnarock. To resume her itinerant lifestyle she must go to
Konnarock, and pack her car, which she is physically unable to
do. At best, even with help, packing would take her several days.
While in Konnarock, the water and the heat need to be turned
on to make the house livable; this she doesn't know how, and
is physically unable to do. What she would like is for Margaret
and me to make the 1700 mile round trip to Konnarock in winter,
open the house for her, stay for a week or longer, helping pack
her belongings into her car which is much too small for such
transport and which has a leaking roof, and after she has driven
off to visit "friends" in North Carolina, winterize the house
once more by draining the water and pouring antifreeze into
all the fixture traps. She tells me that she is indifferent 
to the consequences; she tells me she doesn't care if what she
proposes to do kills her. She admits that her projects are 
flirtations with suicide. There's no question I want to help
her out of the trouble she will get into. My question to you
as the expert:
Is it my duty to help my sister commit suicide? Is it my duty
to try to prevent my sister from committing suicide? Is it
my duty to pretend that I don't know what she is doing, or
is it my duty to mind my own business and start ignoring my
sister, telling myself that she has friends  - and that includes
you, - who will take care of her?
Jochen