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Dear Joe

Thank you for sending the letter up with Beverly. She gave it to me New Year’s Eve. I totally agree with most of what you say. I must admit, though, I still can’t believe how pigheaded you were --anyway, I’m not writing to go into that again. Rather I was pondering one remark you made, not in the letter, but when we were arguing. You said something like ..."The big sister comes in, sets things up, then leaves me left to deal with the ramifications..."

The ramifications? --What the hell were you talking about? Ok, true, you live in the same city as our folks etc whereas I am a long ways off, and I can imagine you anticipating and fearing walking into the house some day to find Mom or Dad lying dead. You even mentioned how the parents of some your friends have been dying, so I can imagine you anticipating something like that .. --But as a physician you are dealing with this type of thing every day -- that really couldn’t be underlying what you said, --could it?

So then there came to mind a discussion last spring with some students who were explaining how they had felt when older siblings had left home. It was an unusual discussion, not a regular class, just a get-together I had at my house. Somehow or other they got on this topic how abandoned they had felt and it became an emotionally charged discussion. --Jake, for the first time ever, I had to admit it to them, it dawned on me how you might have felt when I left. Or rather-- eventhat you might have felt something in relation to my leaving. --And I did feel it, thanks to their comments and tears, and obviously it had been a big deal for some of them. -- So maybe this was behind your comment about the ramifications etc...??

--As a child, we were so active and alive together. It was magic playing with you, I recall for example one baseball game in which you received 216 strikes before you were out on strikes. We had a big fake argulment about why it should be only 216; -- if 216, why not 217? And I was proclaiming that only 216 strikes permitted was a law of nature. And in reply you invented legal positivism right on the spot...Then there was the time playing hotbox in the backyard you dove into the chimney and we spent Christmas afternoon in the ER getting you stitched up; --or did I trip you? --I felt terrible in any case----

--and then I was so gone!--A visit once or twice a year; now once every two years.

Am I getting warm here? Does this make sense?

-- And boy I certainly did leave! I recall once before christmas Dad calls me to say they’d gathered some money so I could fly home. Which at the time was not a trivial thing, gathering money like that. And I made up some excuse --already planned dinner with a chinese friend, or something --which wasn’t false, but not quite the whole story --and I just stayed away. That was a period when I had a little phrase, "what I have left is more than I have left" and Jake, I had no idea which way to think it: (a) what I still have here now is more than I have left behind --the religion, the social world, family ? Or, (b) what was back there is more than I still possess? --Yet, Jake: it was necessary, it was so absolutely necessary for me. I would love to try to tell you the story in a way that makes sense to you. But my point now is that I am trying to say that I have no idea, I guess, what it might have meant for you for me to be just so gone.

And now --precisely because of how much fun I have with your kids when I am with you, and how much they seem to enjoy me too --now I realized you could see or feel the same thing happening with them! --I might just leave them in the lurch too! ... And I realize in many ways I’m just the same as twenty years ago, how I dress, how I act --except sillier perhaps--the same feel of magic we had together... --Is this making any sense?

All that plus the extra component that maybe you are not entirely sure whether you lmight want me around them at all! I realize that. I know you are afraid I will influence them to be interested in religion, to refuse gender, whereas you and Jill are not necessarily trying to encourage those sorts of interests. Well, it is true! -- and I will too, goddamit!-- As for religion, kids need something grand and inspiring like the bodhisattva vow of universal compassion, the story of Jesus and his love. Otherwise no matter how vast they know the world to be in theory, it will be simply matter, stuff, next years’ cars like the ones we found on the internet, stocks and bonds, machines like the horrid video games they play in which you survive only if you win. And you don’t want them stuck in stuff like that, but you dont’ see religion offering a viable way either; and then you sense perhaps how easily they could be beguiled by their aunt’s world, my jargon abnout freedom etc; and this is a threat to you becuase first you don’t really know where I am coming from --but you fear correctly it comes from a world view quite different from yours.

Jake, I will never forget the night when as a med student you took me down into your gross anatomy lab and showed me the human body which you carefully had been dissecting for four months. See! Here’s the optic nerve. Wow! The valves of the heart. Muscles, brown dried meat. It was profound and moving. Later we sat drinking coffee and I asked you if you worked with any people who see the world totally in those terms. Yes. I do, you said. You know people or you do yourself? I asked. I do myself, you said. I argued with you. No you don’t! The religious background permeates deep. I will still argue with you if you want to. When a patient is before you, ill, facing death --I have seen you joking and playing, creating magic. --Yes, like when we played.-- This is totally another level from blood, pus, skin, the central nervous system. Yet it isn’t religion or mysticism, you said.-- No, of course not! It is interpersonal, though, rather than impersonal. A different level from the physical mechanisms, even though there is no soul. You have to respect those levels, Jake. For instance, the jhanic states are real physical/psychological states but you won’t see them from the 3d person perspective. You seem them directly, firsthand, in your own experience --or not at all! And since people have been cultivating the jhanas in religious practices for centures --in prayer and in meditation-- this sort of thing is likely to associated with religion for some time to come. It wouldn’t have to be, but that’s how it is. --Ok.

And look! Your rejection of a No-saying religion, a religion of negation, that says we deserve to die, because of the situation we are born into (original sin) ??!!! --but a God has died for us instead! --This odd weird mix of ideas, which I absolutekly reject just as much as you and equally am befuddled why has it taken such hold? -- But what I want to say is that simply rejecting the idea of religion in any form is just as No-saying as that very No-saying form of religion!!

Ok. --I know.-- I know what you are thinking now at this point in this epistle = that I myself, then, am the very biggest No-sayer of all! --True. That was the point before I digressed. I did leave. I left. I left it all. And I left you too. My mistake --yes, mistake, perhaps-- was the very all or nothing assumption I was just preaching against for you; freedom I equated with radical separation, including from you. I didn’t think about this consciously, but it was certainly how I lived. There have been some big rewards; and there have been costs.

Ok. First, let me say I am not trying to apologize here because you’d think that is silly and it would be silly and it wasn’t like I did something wrong. It is different from that. The point is I have missed you. I loved the magic of playing with you. Of just being with you. Yet there were things I needed to do. Alone. -- And I felt separate. I didn’t take myself seriously enough. I thought I could just leave without changing anything for you. Of course I didn’t take you seriously enough either. Not seeing or feeling the causal inter-connectedness. Jake, it is really terrible to see how little I appreciated these points even when I would have thought that of course I really cared about you. Well, I did care! I do care! What is terrible and amazing is this mind

--Even now, writing this, it is shocking to realize I might never have seen this at all had you not had the strength to fight with me... I thank you so much, baby. By the way, I am not saying I’m agreeing with you about the argument--you still seem so pigheaded and weird about it; why shouldn’t it be up to our parents what they do with the money they have managed to save? So what if the spend it foolishly?-- but you became so real and vivid to me when we fought; and also you got me so angry that for once I wasn’t just the calm cool older sister, detached and soon gone.

I had a dream about you last week> I was roofing your house --btw I can still do it! --Can you? --I roofed a friend’s garage last summer! Came down pretty sore!--In the dream I had put cedar shakes on your house, but done it hurriedly and looking up at it I could see sunlight through under some ridge shingles. So I make myself climb †Âck up and examine it, and I see a lot of problems. Might not leak for ahwile but given a strong or unusual wind, water surely would get in. Then I realized somebody else already had been up there examining it too. They’d pulled up shingles by a wall to see how poorly it was sealed. So now I begin to make up a story to explain it all so I will be able to come out looking ok. Then there is a huge guy, sunburnt and sweating, he is coming down a long ladder--he has been working hard on some industrial type roofing job on top of a huge factory--and the job is done, and now he is getting fired, and his brother who is really cute is shouting up to him about a message from their mother which seems to have to do with his getting some beer or some pot to bring home... I guess the point here was they really have some problems, difficult mind-numbing work, now no job, fruitless drugs leading inevitably to loss--they really have problems, compared to me, yet they also have a certain lightness too --the cute brother shouting up the ladder is laughing and lighthearted. And then I think. =Look, the thing I should do is whatever it takes to repair your roof so it won’t leak instead of just tyring to make up a story so I feel better or create the right image for somebody.

Anyway I’m not apologizing for anything, but I do take responsibility for what didn’t happen. Jake, the dots are still there --maybe we can connect them! I would love to tell you where I am coming from. And with uyour kids, if I am not totally mistaken here, and if you do have an underlying lack of trust in me (because I just left!) which has hurt you and which leads you to fear I’ll hurt your kids in the same way --well, it is true.-- I am not a very reliable sister. A lack of trust would be correct. -- ..But. --Still.--

Mark Epstein wrote about me in his new book, at least I think it was me-- I was going to tell you about this but we got too wrapped up in the other stuff -- he thinks anger keeps me separated, alone. For awhile I agreed. Then I thought it was mistrutst. Now I’d say it is simply fear. Of myself, of doing something wrong, doing something peculiar, fear of not being good enough; fear of anger, desire; of fear itself; fear of offending God or the gods or the Goddess or you or our folks or my colleagues or yuou name it.

The fact I was able to argue with you means something positive.-- Jake, one of the many great gifts from your children is their making it vivid my path to connectedness includes you, and them. Some t3en years ago I came to see that about mom and dad, now I see it wiht you.

Please write back; just say wahtever.-- Thank you so much for the Funkadelic/Parliament tickets, I can hardly wait!

With love,

Erin

p.s. --Wait a minute! --I’m not all that important to you guys, -- am I!!

:)

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