Dear Jane,
.PP
Thank you for your postcard telling me about your trip to Peru.
What you wrote to me has since been much on my mind, but I 
haven't quite known how to answer. I often think of the months
I spent with your family, with you and Peter and Ellen, and your
parents, especially when, as regularly occurs, on our way to
Virginia, we drive across Massachusetts, south of Amherst and
into New York State past Canaan. Of course, it's just as well
that sentimental musings can't recapture the past. We contemplate
it to assure and reassure ourselves that we have survived.
.PP
Cyndy, who as you may or may not know, has stayed in touch with
me by e-mail, has hinted at the changes occurring in your life.
I hope and I wish for you not only that your confidence and
equanimity will not fail you, but that surviving and surmounting
the difficulties of aging can become a celebration of your life,
an ornament integral to your existence.
.PP
I myself experience in these declining months and years a gradual
but undeniable disintegration of my world and of myself, a 
metamorphosis which far from deploring I want very much to
embrace and to welcome. To what extent I succeed, remains to
be seen.
.PP
For years now, I have contemplated my relationships to my family,
to my friends and acquaintances, and not least to my patients
as opportunities to cooperate to mutual advantage in the projects
that adorn life and make it meaningful. But I have learned that
no matter how great the love and how deep the yearning, the
isolation and the loneliness of our lives will not be dispelled.
.PP
Thank you again for your postcard.
.nf

Jochen