Dear Georgette,

Thank you for your letter. Considering the pressure
of your professional obligations, I ought not expect
you at this juncture to devote more thought to the
complexities of Margrit's existence;  and I don't.
If I write about them nonetheless, I do so, as I may
have mentioned before, because my own thoughts are
evanescent. When they appear, they demand to be recorded
before they vanish. The written record, as you well know,
acquires meaning as it is read. Hence correspondence.

Your distinction between family and friends is perceptive.
One ignores it at ones own peril.  Tolstoy famously observed
that happy families are alike, but that unhappy families
differ. My explanation: the happiness of families is
illusory. What is uniform is not the happiness, but the
illusion, the idealization. The ideals are the same;
degrees of happiness depending on the point of view are
also degrees of unhappiness, and these are all different. 
It seems to me that imperfection is so integral to the
family relationship that "unhappiness" should be considered
the norm rather than the exception.  The difference: one
can separate oneself from ones friend.  One cannot separate
oneself from ones family.  When one cannot separate oneself
from ones friend, that friend has, by definition, become
part of ones family.

In meditating on your own relationship to Margrit, you should
be mindful that disharmony was prominent in Margrit's
relationships with all members of her family, from her
infancy when she seated herself determinedly in the middle
of the streetcar tracks coursing through die Siegfriedstrasse
in Braunschweig, until December 7, 2009, when, announcing her
imminent departure, instead of talking with us, she wrote to
my wife Margaret - not even to me - a letter saying among
other things that in the course of the seven weeks when I
nursed her through her recovery from a strangulated hernia,
my most valuable contribution to her well-being had been the
provision of an extension cord for her portable radio, making
it possible to listen to her favorite talk-show hostess
Amy Goodman. There is no need, and it would indeed be
impossible, to recapitulate the intervening saga of discord
in Margrit's relationships not only to our parents and to me,
but I suspect to all individuals with whom she succeeded
in forming family relationships.  During the days that my
father was dying Margrit was "at home" in Konnarock. Here
is an account that she photocopied and distributed to her
friends.  Perhaps you have already seen it:

      "My mother and I had a most difficult time during the
      course of my father's illness. The hostility between
      us seemed heightened: there was absolutely nothing I
      would do for my father that wasn't questioned, if not
      berated by her. Of course this made it an even more
      difficult time for me than it would have been otherwise.
   
      "My mother's response to me changed immediately upon
      my father's death, and what I then realized was that 
      she had been insanely jealous of my relationship with
      my father, at least during the last months of his life...."

My intention in quoting Margrit's letter is not at all to shift
from myself onto Margrit responsibility, blame, or guilt for
what has transpired.  I write only for myself, when I assert my
beliefs that nothing that I do is "voluntary" and that guilt
flows not from action but from existence. My existence and my
guilt are inseparable. To corroborate this conviction I like to
quote Anaximander (550 BC)

    "The origin of all things is chaos.  From chaos things that
     exist have arisen, and into chaos things that exist dissolve,
     according to what they owe.  Thus they requite to each other
     just penalties for their injustice, pursuant to the ordinance
     of time."

My daughter-in-law and my four grandchildren are all of them
accomplished musicians.  We are considering a memorial concert
for Margrit in Konnarock on Wednesday, July 14, 2010. As yet
we are not at all certain whether we can bring it off. I am 
uncertain who of Margrit's "friends" and who of Margrit's 
"family" would want to come. I'm embarrassed to extend
invitations because I myself don't like ceremonies. I'm
embarrassed not to extent invitations because obviously
a memorial concert might be, if nothing more, a significant
symbol of Wiedergutmachung. I very much hope that Margaret
and I will live long enough that you may some day visit us
in Konnarock. I don't know whether a memorial concert, when
the attentions of all of us are unavoidably diluted, would
be a felicitous occasion for such a visit.

Jochen