Dear Margaret Walden,

Thank you for your letter.

My wife and I returned to Massachusetts only six days ago. 
We expect to be back in Detroit on two or more separate occasions
after February 20, retrieving those of Margrit's belongings
which are presently in storage there. We would try to arrange
our trip so as to be able to attend the memorial meeting, but
can make no promises and ask explicitly that you arrange the
meeting for your convenience rather than ours. As for my son,
I am copying this letter to him to give him the opportunity
to respond.

I attach an initial draft of a short biography of my sister.
I expect to e-mail you a final version in a day or two. What I
have written is far too long and wordy for a Quaker meeting,
where, as I learned at Germantown Friends School, silence
should reign. However, please feel free to use what I have written,
in whole or in part, in any manner you deem appropriate.
My own respectful suggestion is that what I have written
be condensed to fit on the two sides of a single sheet of paper
and offered to Meeting members who might wish to read it.

Thank you again for your affection and care for my sister.

Ernst Meyer

===================================================

About Margrit Meyer:


In sorting and packing and giving away the various objects
that Margrit left behind, I was struck more forcefully
than ever by the frailty and by the futility of words when
they purport to do justice even to the simple objects which
we see and which we touch, let alone the incongruity of words
when they presume to define the spirit that is the ultimate
essence of our existence.

For those of you at this meeting who did not know Margrit very
well or who knew her not at all, the bare biographical facts
that I can offer you will serve as little more than an unconfigured canvas,
a screen onto which you will project your own intuitions and intimations
of life, a mirror in which you see almost exclusively yourselves.
For those of you who worked with Margrit in the various
institutions and for the various causes to which she was devoted 
those biographical facts will prove to be a riddle, a screen which
more conceals than reveals who Margrit really was.
Your knowledge of her, will come not from what I can tell you,
but from your own inward relationship to her.

Margrit Meyer was born on August 26, 1928,
in Braunschweig, Germany in an affordable housing development
called "Siegfriedviertel" (Siegfried Quarter)
expressive of the architectural and social style of the
Weimar Republic. The street address was Siegfriedstrasse 18.
Her father was a physician who had opened his general practice
of medicine only the year before. Her mother had been assistant manager
of a local bank who now managed her husband's medical practice.
A year after Margrit was born the family moved into larger quarters
at Hildebrandtstrasse 44, renting two apartments that were adjacent,
one of which served as her father's medical office, the other as the
family's living quarters. The advent of National Socialism in 1933
was interpreted by Margrit's parents, erroneously, as it turned out,
as but a passing tempest, as they, ignoring Hitler, moved into a more
prestigious apartment at Schleinitzstrasse 1. It was from there that
Margrit was enrolled at age 7 in a nearby public school, the Pestalozzi
Schule, where she was a diligent student and was much loved by her teachers.

It was only in 1938, when her father's license to practice medicine
was revoked on account of his Jewish ancestry, that Margrit's parents
decided to emigrate, but by then it was almost too late. On November
10, 1938, her father was detained in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp
being released on the condition that he immediately leave the country.
On December 7, 1938, Margrit and the rest of her family bid her father
good-bye as he boarded the ship bound for America. Margrit herself,
her mother and her brother followed three months later. On March 31, 
1939, they arrived in New York.

Because the family was destitute, all their liquid assets having been
confiscated by the Nazis, Margrit's parents could not afford to establish
a home for their children. Margrit was farmed out to the American
family of the Rev. Everett W. MacNair who was an assistant pastor at
a Congregational Church in White Plains, N.Y. Margrit and her foster
parents quickly became very fond of each other. Their friendship endured
for the lifetime of the MacNairs.

In the autumn of 1939, Margrit rejoined her parents. Through the offices
of the Board of American Missions of the United Lutheran Church in America,
her father had obtained a position as a physician in a rural mountainous
backwoods community in Southwest Virginia called Konnarock,
and it was in that remote and unfamiliar landscape that Margrit
absolved her childhood and entered upon adolescence.
It is an understatement to say that the local schools
which Margrit attended were less than college preparatory.
Her first sally into the academic universe was a freshman year at
Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, North Carolina. That experience was
not entirely satisfactory, and the following year Margrit
enrolled at Wilson College in Chambersburg Pennsylvania,
an institution of the Presbyterian Church from which Margrit
graduated in 1950 with a B.A. degree in Sociology.

Margrit's first employment was as a waitress in a Chambersburg restaurant.
She then returned home to Virginia and for a year
taught third and fourth grade in the local public school.
Thereafter she found a series of very junior positions in
church related social work, first in Philadelphia, then in Middle River,
Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore, and finally in Hartford Connecticut.
In 1953 Margrit enrolled in the Bryn Mawr School of Social Work,
from which she received as Master's degree in Social Work in 1955.
From 1956 to 1957, she was a social worker in Germany with the
Berlin Neighborhood Homes. From 1957 to 1961 she worked as a school
social worker employed by the Champaign Illinois Board of Education.
From 1961 to 1969 she was a casework supervisor at the Cunningham
Children's Home in Urbana, Illinois, a position from which she took
time off from 1964 to 1965 for graduate studies in social work
at the University of Chicago. In 1969 she was appointed
Associate Professor of Social Work at Michigan State University in
East Lansing, Michigan, a position which she held until 1973 when
she became Associate Professor of Social Work at the University of
Windsor, where she stayed until 1993 when she was sixty-five
years old and retired from full-time employment.

I am aware of two episodes when Margrit was deeply in love, both of
which ended in disappointment. But I never heard from her a complaint
that life had treated her badly. She was unquenchably content and 
optimistic. With advancing age, her optimism only increased.
When in recent months I telephoned to make sure that she was well,
she would sometimes reply: "You should know. Of course I'm alright.
I'm always alright."

What seemed to sustain Margrit above all, was her circle of friends,
so numerous that I found it impossible to keep track or count of them
all. When Margrit was visiting us in Belmont or when we were together
in our parents' house in Virginia, Margrit often spent hours on the
telephone talking to friends far and near and making arrangements to
meet those in the vicinity. Going through her belongings I found so
many address books that I lost count. Everyone she met, Margrit
regarded as her friend and listed his or her name, address and
telephone in one of her catalogues.  The doormen at her Detroit
apartment house considered Margrit as their friend, and so did the
officials at her bank. In one of her compilations I even found the
name and address of the Moroccan bus driver who had chauffeured her
travel entourage through the Atlas Mountains in Africa.  She almost
certainly regarded him also as her friend, and it would surprise
me if she had not written him a letter of appreciation.

Her love of people made her very trusting. She thought nothing of dozing
off in an unlocked car in a parking area on the West Virginia Turnpike.
She usually travelled alone in her small convertible sports car,
and when she was stalled by some mechanical problem, she would trustingly
flag the next approaching driver to ask for help. She was courageous
beyond belief.

For many years she had made her peace with the anticipation of death.
That was the ultimate expression of her courage. She wanted to live
and to be independent, but she would unhesitatingly have chosen death
over dependency, and when, in an attempt to persuade her to live with
us in our house, I described to her the indignities of dying in a
nursing home, Margrit replied simply and directly: Then I'll just die.

When I contemplate Margrit's life and her death,
I begin to understand that
in her willingness to wager her life,
in habitually taking chances, she won,
and what she won was her own life as the prize.
I also understand that her death,
not in a nursing home or in an intensive care unit
nor in a hospice, but in her own apartment
was a dying peculiarly her own,
a death that proceded from the life that was her love,
that gave her meaning,
and whose pain she accepted in heroic denial.