Letter to S

CAVEAT: Warning! These letters have not been edited by Carla. Expect errors.

Dear S,

You are my treat for the day. I have gotten well enough to do the work that I love to do, but it is backed up so much that I could get crazy from it. I feel that the only sensible solution is to write one friend a day, regardless of what else I do or do not do. I am going to reread your letter because I think it is a substantial one even though it is an old one, I would like to respond.

Wearing an item of my true soul, I did not expect to have it on at 2 p.m. in the afternoon on a nice summer’s day and that is a nightgown that is designed like one of those little pinafore type things with a nice pretty neckline, but basically a nightgown. I am making it do for a day gown because there is just so much I’ve got in my wardrobe that looks even vaguely like a day piece of apparel. It has no waist. I have a couple of sundresses with just straps which will work fine in real hot weather which is coming. But, I have a tube in my side which I will continue to have for an unknown period of time.

I did really well in the operation as Jim’s letter said, but what he didn’t say because he didn’t know it yet was that when they took the parting x-ray when I was leaving the hospital to come home, they found that somehow a gall stone had slipped out, fallen out, gotten lost, while they were taking out the gall bladder and hidden behind something else while they were doing the operation and only showed up in the x-ray floating around in the common duct and partially blocking it, of course. Instead of pulling the tube as they normally do several weeks after surgery, they have left it in. It is called a t-tube. It is buried deep inside the organs of the body and they plan to go in through the tube or through the channel left by the tube. They haven’t decided that yet and I hope they don’t take the tube out until they finish the surgical procedure, but I have yet to talk to the specialist who is going to do this operation. To go back in through the tube and not dissolve the stone, because apparently my guts are such that it would also destroy my GI tract that is around there. I’m just not a candidate for that. They have a little grabber thing that they put in through the tube or the tube channel and grab the stone. The problem with that is that there is the risk of grabbing meat and causing internal bleeding, etc. so there are risks to the operation and if something seems to go wrong, if I seem to be bleeding inside or something, it may turn out to be an actual incision and a whole big hairy stay in the hospital. It is only what I have learned up until this point that makes me willing and able to look at it fairly calmly.

I have a bad feeling about it. I had a good feeling about the operation. I have a bad feeling about this next procedure. I don’t take myself too seriously there, but being a pessimist, I mean I don’t really play a mind game with myself, but I feel that I am better prepared if something does go wrong that I won’t be too disappointed because I have had this intuition. On the other hand, I don’t take it seriously enough to add energy to it. So it is not a thought form. It is just kind of an intuition. It will probably go great, but I don’t know, nor does the surgeon know how long the specialist really wants me to keep the tube in. She had talked to the specialist once, but she, the surgeon, had not hunkered down with the specialist for an in-depth chat and you know my records, and my history, which are very complex. My guess is he probably will want to keep the tube in because people with a history of lupus, especially lupus patients or arthritic patients that take cortisone, are facing the peculiar tendency of the skin to be very flexible and to heal up very good and go back together and not to make scar tissue. So hopefully he will leave the tube in and hopefully he’ll get the stone and hopefully, it will be fine.

If that doesn’t come to pass, if he says, “No no, I want to wait,” well Dr. M first said the conventional wisdom of medical school, which continues to this day she thought, is that it would be a 6 to 8 week wait before the channel was mature and they would pull the tube and go in after the stone. But after talking to the specialist, he’s been trained in London in this specialty or in a specialty, which embraces this particular type of operation, he favors a much longer time for everybody, not special cases, but he wouldn’t say just how many weeks. He said he wanted to look at my records. A much longer time would be what, four weeks longer anyway. I had the gall bladder out on Friday, May 13th. It serves me damn right to have something go wrong. I should have waited another day or something, so it has been one month. It has been four weeks, probably a little more because May has 31 days, so 4 weeks and ½, so another 3 ½ weeks would be 8 weeks. Dr. M said to call her at that point, if she hadn’t called me. By then she would have gotten with the specialist and be able to tell me what is what on the operation.

Unfortunately, Jim and I had already put some money down, about $300. Because our refrigerator healed itself for a little while, we took $300 out of the refrigerator fund and decided to try for a week at Polly’s Island in August. We really need a vacation just from all of the fuss of the illness. Really I think Jim has been under a terrible strain. It is so much harder to watch somebody suffer than to suffer and I don’t think people really understand that until they are the ones who are suffering. The people who love you, you watch them go through it and you see. “Okay, I’m having a hard time but I’m not having that hard a time emotionally.

You are pretty involved with continuing from moment-to-moment and exhibiting some knowledge of the Creator and it is almost like a game that challenges you. Where is the love in this moment? Whereas, you maintain a much more God-oriented attitude if you are in the sick bed and if you are working your program because there is not a lot of emotional content to it, especially if you have been sick for a long time; you have come to grips with the fact that God didn’t do this to you. You and God sat down before you came into the incarnation and decided this was just what was right for you. And I worked that one out long ago.

Not much emotional weight except when I get so exhausted that I just cry because I’m tired and I hurt. That is just me feeling sorry for myself because I hurt. It doesn’t have anything to do with real deep emotion, anger and emotions like that, which are devastating. Whereas, Jim is overcome, overwhelmed by what I am going through and he really hurts inside emotionally to a terrible extent so it will be real good for both of us for me to get better. He hasn’t shown any sign whatsoever of wanting anything other than what we are doing. He hasn’t said, “You are too sick for me. I’m going,” or anything like that. He hasn’t said, “You are obnoxious. I’m not going to make love to you anymore.”

Our life goes on whether I sit in one place and look at the television and can’t do another damn thing or whether I am working. He just goes about his business the ways he always does. It is just that he is suffering.

I’m really glad I took the time to reread this letter. I hadn’t remembered this letter. I must have gotten it April l7th. See I stopped being able to eat anything on April 14. That was the last day I got anything down and that night, I tried to eat a cookie for supper and it came back up. I mean a health-food cookie. And I never could get down anything after that, not even milk or chicken broth. You name it. If there was any oil to it whatsoever, it would just go down and just run right back up. The reason for that was that the gall bladder was completely jammed with something that didn’t show up on the x-ray. They weren’t precisely stones apparently.

I would have to be unique, right? Sometimes I get bored with all of my specialness. But it wasn’t showing up on anybody’s x-ray and I had been told for years that it was all-in my head, but I went from specialist to specialist and everybody told me that it was in my head.

Finally I said, “Okay, I am going to start over. I had been going to Dr. G and his medical group you are familiar with for 30 years, and so when he died earlier this year, I went to his funeral, by the way. It was very nice for a Presbyterian funeral. I don’t much like the way they treat funerals in the Presbyterian church, but anyway sadly, he died. He called me after he retired and before he died, he said, “I want you to know the doctor that I think you should go to because you are a real unusual case.” (I am. You know I have a very complex medical history.) People have to deal with everything from allergies to kidneys, to arthritis, to lupus to cross-medicating problems. So he said go to B. B.

Well Mother had been to B B and she hated him. She loathed him. She exclaimed about him and I guess I just didn’t consider the difference between Mother’s personality and my own. B doesn’t talk much. He has a marvelous dry sense of humor and just about everything he says, there is a little flash, but it is very dry and you have to be the kind of person which, of course, you know me well, I am that among other types of sense of humor, which are very broad and earthy. I do have the sense of humor to say something that could or could not be funny with a totally straight face and not really worry about whether anybody else gets the joke. He does this all the time. And it cracks me up inside.

For instance the first time I ever went to see him, I was chewing gum and he needed me to take the gum out so he could check my mouth and he said, “Remove gum.” And I took it out and said, “Gum removed,” and stuck out my tongue. When he had finished looking in my mouth, he said, “Resume gum.” And I put the gum back in and I said, “Gum resumed.” Neither of us laughed. Both of us enjoyed it. It is just a matter of personality.

He made the diagnosis simply by the old fashioned method of touching me. He got me to breathe out and he kept feeling from the pit of my stomach down, back up, back down, this way, that way, and after an age, I was doing good just to obey his requests. He said, “I know what this is. There is a test that you are going to have to take to confirm it, but I believe I know what it is.” He diagnosed it because he knew his medicine. He didn’t rely totally on tests. Nobody else had palpitated my abdomen. Nobody else had done it that way and this man has my loyalty for as long as he lives and works. Logic, yes. Good man.

So he got me to the hospital and there was supposed to be a two-hour test. It ended up being a four-hour test because they kept waiting for some dye to get through the gall bladder, but you see it was all jammed up, even the ducts. Nothing was going through. So at that point, they ran into emergency gear and on the 13th I was operated on. That was the first opening they had and they kept me on pain medication and with an IV in the intervening time. So I was in better shape for the operation than I was when I entered the hospital on the 10th.

Now you know my situation. I also have a cross problem. At the same time I was going through arthritic flare-up and my back was just wiped out. I couldn’t talk on the phone. I still can’t for very long if it is more than 30 seconds or a minute, I just can’t do it. It messes me up to the point where I start getting nerve pain in my back and running down my arm, so it is not worth it. I have just not been answering the phone to anybody except my mom or Jim’s mom. And that is just to say, “I am sorry, I can’t talk, but hi,” and let them get whatever message to me they need. It is the most closed-off from the folks around here who call me that I have ever been. I have about 25 letters that point out that I am somewhat closed off from my communications, my work.

Gall bladder symptoms include being gassy and bilious. It is just unfortunate and so various noises occur from time-to-time. I know you will forgive me.

Now to your letter. You say, “I have spent 20 years studying, suffering, meditating, questing in order to be of service at this time and now that the time has come, I am in such a depressing state of inadequacy.”

I don’t deny the human feelings of inadequacy that go with the observation of others in pain. I just spent a long time talking about how depressing it is to be around somebody who is suffering and how you really suffer for them so terribly. But I want to share with you first of all, that according to the understanding that I have gotten so far, you have spent those 20 years being of service while you were studying, suffering, meditating and questing. I honestly don’t believe that our service-to-others can be gauged in any way we understand. Language is really inadequate to convey this concept, but I believe that the greatest gift that we have to give is a life lived in the most conscious state we can, realizing that the Creator and we occupy our particular universe and that the rest is a helpful illusion. I think that the basic service-to-others thing that we do is stay in touch with the Creator. As you have put it, sometimes being on the watch tower, keeping that consciousness going because it is our silent witness to a world lost in limitation, confusion, struggle and suffering. That there are eternal values, states of mind, peace, joy, laughter, compassion that live not only in poems, and philosophy, and religion, and other things that are highly theoretical, but for all the world to see in the human heart shining through the human eyes, blossoming in a human smile.

We don’t know the good we do. We don’t know until after this experience. Attempt at understanding it, especially at understanding what our service is, always seems to go wrong one way or another for people because the answer to the question is, you are being of service right now. That whatever isn’t directly in front of your face holds every opportunity that you need to be of service right now. Now you have spent those 20 years so that your consciousness at this point is far more refined than it was at the beginning. Refined by suffering, and struggles, and trials, changes of heart, progress. That is one concept that I really want to share with you because you have always had this feeling of waiting to be of real service.

When does your service start? And I am convinced that we are all of equal service and that each of us has a unique contribution to make and the contribution lies in how we respond or create our life. How we respond to our life moment-by-moment or how we create our life moment-to-moment.

Don believed that one should create the life. That one should completely create the life. I think that is shooting too high—that kind of spiritual pride. I think that we need to rejoice in the fact that we are vulnerable to life. That we are open to life. That we can be heard because that means we also can rejoice. That we can feel compassion. That we have personal heart feelings that become deeper and deeper and deeper, and I believe that at the end of our lives, there is a shape to that life, a complex of feeling states that dwell within us. A consciousness that has its biases and this is a unique portion of God, the Creator, the Infinite Intelligence, which has been given that spark of free will that makes God human.

At this point in my life, I really do believe that we are a mixture of God and free will, the Creator and free will. Free will is going to be various. That is all you can say about it, not good and bad, although happiness and suffering certainly do seem to be good and bad, but just experience, just catalyst and we more and more shape our lives into a poem, an essay, a stream of consciousness novel, whatever form you want to use to conceive of your life as a whole thing. I see it more as maybe a gem. It is a gift. We give it back. This is all of me, Creator, take me as a larger life now. I am ready to die now. Let me drop this body and let me give my heart, my gift of consciousness to you.

I think the big surprise on the other side is to discover that the God we are praying to has been within us all of the time. Your state of inadequacy is totally understandable, but I honestly believe that by your compassion and consideration, by your allowing your friends, D, and you didn’t give me the name of the other one, just the consideration, just being. I mean you are such a joy to be with that you have helped most adequately.

The second point is, you can’t do anybody else’s healing. I was so guilty about Don that I felt dead after he died and I really wanted to die. I thought I should die because I was so hopelessly inadequate to the situation. I never could read it right. I couldn’t read it right and I may still not be reading it right. The way I read it at this point is that Elkins was completely an incarnation pattern of his own free will. He had said again and again that he wasn’t going to live to be an old man. He hated being old. He wasn’t going to be old. And he was having his first real physical problems, even though they were in his head according to the coroner’s office, the autopsy report. He thought that his health was breaking and I really blame his death at this point on E A because he thought that his job was on the line, and he didn’t think he could do it any more because they kept asking for more and more hours, and he was just too tired.

Of course, I urged him not to continue at E. I had been urging him to quit for years and I did okay at first, but as the months wore on, I started going crazy and by, I’d say, two or three months before he died, I was in a state of total nervous exhaustion and was having a break-down myself. I was from that point on completely inadequate to Don’s situation. He would sit down next to me and I would start crying. I knew he was killing himself. I didn’t understand it. And I wanted him to get better, but I couldn’t force my life onto him, and that is the way free will works. The only house we can clean up is our own. We can’t do the work for somebody else. We can share with them as sisters or brothers and maybe make the load a little easier that they are having, but we cannot suffer for others any more than we can learn for others. The suffering is a teaching tool. It works pretty well if people make sure not to get bitter. And the fruit is often incredible.

One seldom sees a happy artist. If he is a happy artist, he is writing non-fiction. He is in the world of facts like Isaac Asimov and he is just playing with his computer that is his brain.

Now to D. From my experience, the best thing that you can do for somebody whose personality is—that she is very strong and I relate to that one-on-one that I am usually very strong. The best thing is just sympathy, compassion, assurance that you are praying, but in addition to that, just holding the person’s hand and saying, “You don’t have to be strong right now. Just relax and if it feels good to cry and get some of this out, go ahead and do it.” That is about all you can do and I think that is the most healing thing you can do is to help somebody if she is strong and she is trying to be stoic and trying to take it all in and trying to maintain and trying, and trying. To get down to the heart of the thing where she is exhausted, and tired, and weary, and say, “Okay, 99% of the time I realize you need to be on the up and up and realize that you have to be positive and emphasize the good wherever you can find it and just tough it out. But right now, I want you to go ahead and let it all out. It is okay. I’m here. And just release some of the terrible pressure of trying to be brave. Nobody is really brave.”

Bravery is controlled fear. If a person has no fear, than the person isn’t brave. The person is crazy. Tell D that it will get better in time. Time is a terrible thing to wait for because it comes so slowly, day-by-day, but like drops of water on stone, eventually a channel is formed so that all of the sad and salt brine of tears, and pain and suffering eventually meet the sea of being. At this point in my life, I feel pretty healed about Don’s disastrous suicide. I have feelings left over, grief, anger, and a basic anger of “How could you do that to me?” That kind of anger and he took himself away from me and I just missed the hell out of him. But somehow once enough time has passed that you are in the sea of many memories and not just compulsively going back, back to every conversation you ever had, every way you could have helped, how you could have helped more than you did, and all of that stuff, this eventually fades and it really needs to. You need to let it.

Tell D this: Let it fade. Don’t hang onto it.“ If she still is thinking (you wrote this April 17th and I’m talking to you in June and you are about to leave so you may not get a chance to do more than say by-bye to her) compulsively about I should have done this and I should have done that, tell her that a technique that I have heard is useful. (I did not use it; I didn’t want to get that close to the experience.) I didn’t want to remember it. I really didn’t want to remember Don that way. I didn’t think it was fair. It was just like people who have something wrong with their brains through cancer or something like that. He had mental illness, but he wasn’t himself the last year of his life and there is just no need to ruin a 16-year relationship by thinking about one bad year. There is no need for that. It is not a good thing to do.

My friend, HD, who has been through a lot of therapy told me that that is the suggested therapy for somebody who is going through something very hard. You get a notebook and you write it all down. Everything you can possibly think of and remember about the whole situation. You write it and you’ve got it and at that point, something in your mind says, “Okay, I’ve got all of these memories down on paper so I don’t need to keep remembering them to make sure that I won’t forget my friend. I have it down in this notebook so I can get on with the present now because I have this notebook full of all the facts.” Apparently that is supposed to help.

Her name is G, the second woman. I guess you know a lot more now than you did than about the progress of G’s cancer. I have seen a lot of cancer healings. I talked to a woman who had ovarian cancer, who had very good results with a diet high in fruit, melon, avocado, just really fresh things that were grown organically and I have a friend in Alaska who has had two radical mastectomies and a couple of operations for cancer in the spine who went on a very strict macro-biotic diet, which is another word for fish and rice as far as I can tell, or maybe not even fish, maybe it is beans and rice. Anyway basically everything that tastes good is off of this diet. Actually I sort of went on a vaguely macro-biotic diet as close as I could come to it and still live. I just can’t stand eating large amounts of brown rice for about a year and half to see if it would help the arthritis. It got a lot of weight off of me. I went down from probably 125 to about 100 on that diet. I quit the diet and I continued losing very slowly until the Ra contact, which really hit me like a ton of bricks, and I was losing, losing after that. But that was ten years ago when I went on the diet and it is certainly something to try, a change in diet.

Also, the Law of One material suggests that illness in general is negative emotions, which have not been able to be expressed in the mind, through the use of the mind, and you know I am a person who believes that if you have problem, you should call a meeting and air your grievance right away. You and Jim not talking to each other for ten years just blew me away. Was it last year, a couple of years ago when you had that awful year when you were in school and you and Jim were just totally leagues apart and things seemed so hopeless and yet you were both being so carefully courteous to each other and really so brave in your suffering, but it would be better if you had the lack of manners, if it seems to be that way, both of you and get it out. Get out whatever and communicate and continue to communicate because I think that it is about the best you can do in avoiding body illness. Express your feelings, your dis-ease about something with your mouth and not let it get down into your body.

Now you realize I am a lousy case for this because of all the different illnesses that I have, which are chronic, and I do claim those and I claim responsibility for that. I realize that I got the arthritis when my kidneys failed and I even take responsibility for that because I can remember at that age, kneeling down in the bathroom and pressing my head against the cool porcelain of the tub and praying for God to take me and really being surprised when he didn’t. The reason for my prayer was that I had concluded that I could be of absolutely no help on this planet whatever, nobody understood me. I couldn’t communicate with anybody so how could I help anybody?

Six months, maybe less after that, I remember my kidneys failed and at that time, that was when I went beyond death’s door and was told I had a choice. I could come back and finish what I started to do or not, but I really hadn’t at all finished what I came to do. So, I chose to get with the program and my symptoms gradually subsided and I had no real problem, maybe just a sore joint or two in the winter from the cold until DeWitt divorced me, and the suffering from that was intense. I started having symptoms and I guess I suffered about three years over that loss, not that I could marry him again. He asked me to marry him about two weeks after he had moved out. He decided that he really wanted to be married again and basically I failed him in that I could not trust him at the time.

Finally I said, “Okay, I am going to start over.” I had been going to Dr. G and his medical group, you are familiar with for 30 years and so when he died earlier this year, I went to his funeral, by the way. It was very nice for a Presbyterian funeral. I don’t much like the way they treat funerals in the Presbyterian church, but anyway sadly, he died. He called me after he retired and before he died, he said, “I want you to know the doctor that I think you should go to because you are a real unusual case.” (I am. You know I have a very complex medical history.) People have to deal with everything from allergies to kidney to arthritis to lupus to cross-medicating problems. So he said go to B. B.

Well Mother had been to B. B. and she hated him. She loathed him. She exclaimed about him and I guess I just didn’t consider the difference between Mother’s personality and my own. B doesn’t talk much. He has a marvelous dry sense of humor and just about everything he says, there is a little flash, but it is very dry and you have to be the kind of person which, of course, you know me well, I am that among other types of sense of humor which are very broad and earthy. I do have the sense of humor to say something that could or could not be funny with a totally straight face and not really worry about whether anybody else gets the joke, and he does this all the time. And it cracks me up inside.

I did go to B. He put me down on the table after checking me out. I think I finally saw him on the 10th of May. He sent me over to the hospital to get a test run. I hadn’t eaten since April 14th. I hadn’t eaten for about a month. I hadn’t lost any weight either. You see all of the water was being kept in the body. I was real close to death. It was really an amazing experience. I wasn’t afraid, but I realized anybody that is down to a swallow of water at a time, I was getting down about 4 glasses of water a day and I knew it wasn’t enough. Things moved fast after he got the right test. He made the diagnosis simply by the old fashioned method of touching me. He got me to breathe out and he kept feeling from the pit of my stomach down, back up, back down, this way, that way, and after an age, I was doing good just to obey his requests. He said, “I know what this is. There is a test that you are going to have to take to confirm it, but I believe I know what it is.” He diagnosed it because he knew his medicine. He didn’t rely totally on tests. Nobody else had palpitated my abdomen. Nobody else had done it that way and this man has my loyalty for as long as he lives and works. Logic, yes. Good man.

Now you know my situation. I also have a cross problem. At the same time I was going through arthritic flare-up and my back was just wiped out. I couldn’t talk on the phone. I still can’t it for very long if it is more than 30 seconds or a minute, I just can’t do it. It messes me up to the point where I start getting nerve pain in my back and running down my arm, so it is not worth it. I have just not been answering the phone to anybody except my mom or Jim’s mom. And that is just to say, “I am sorry, I can’t talk, but hi,” and let them get whatever message to me they need. It is the most closed-off from the folks around here who call me that I have ever been. I have about 25 letters that point out that I am somewhat closed off from my communications, my work.

Gall bladder symptoms include being gassy and bilious. It is just unfortunate and so various noises occur from time-to-time. I know you will forgive me.

I don’t deny the human feelings of inadequacy that go with the observation of others in pain. I just spent a long time talking about how depressing it is to be around somebody who is suffering and how you really suffer for them so terribly. But I want to share with you first of all, that according to the understanding that I have gotten so far, you have spent those 20 years being of service while you were studying, suffering, meditating and questing. I honestly don’t believe that our service-to-others can be gauged in any way we understand. Language is really inadequate to convey this concept, but I believe that the greatest gift that we have to give is a life lived in the most conscious state we can, realizing that the Creator and we occupy our particular universe and that the rest is a helpful illusion. I think that the basic service-to-others thing that we do is stay in touch with the Creator. As you have put it, sometimes being on the watch tower, keeping that consciousness going because it is our silent witness to a world lost in limitation, confusion, struggle and suffering. That there are eternal values, states of mind, peace, joy, laughter, compassion that live not only in poems, and philosophy, and religion and other things that are highly theoretical, but for all the world to see in the human heart shining through the human eyes, blossoming in a human smile.

We don’t know the good we do. We don’t know until after this experience. Attempt at understanding it, especially at understanding what is our service, always seems to go wrong one way or another for people because the answer to the question is, you are being of service right now. Whatever isn’t directly in front of your face holds every opportunity that you need to be of service right now.

Now you have spent those 20 years so that your consciousness at this point is far more refined than it was at the beginning. Refined by suffering, and struggles, and trials, changes of heart, progress. That is one concept that I really want to share with you because you have always had this feeling of waiting to be of real service. When does your service start? And I am convinced that we are all of equal service and that each of us has a unique contribution to make and the contribution lies in how we respond or create our life. How we respond to our life moment-by-moment or how we create our life moment-to-moment.

Don believed that one should create the life. That one should completely create the life. I think that it is shooting too high—that kind of spiritual pride. I think that we need to rejoice in the fact that we are vulnerable to life; that we are open to life; that we can be heard because that means we also can rejoice. We can feel compassion. We have personal heart feelings that become deeper and deeper and deeper, and I believe that at the end of our lives, there is a shape to that life, a complex of feeling states that dwell within us. A consciousness that has its biases and this is a unique portion of God, the Creator, the Infinite Intelligence, which has been given that spark of free will, which makes God human. At this point in my life, I really do believe that we are a mixture of God and free will, the Creator and free will.

Free will is going to be various. That is all you can say about it, not good and bad, although happiness and suffering certainly do seem to be good and bad, but just experience, just catalyst and we more and more shape our lives into a poem, an essay, a stream of consciousness novel, whatever form you want to use to conceive of your life as a whole thing. I see it more as maybe a gem. It is a gift. We give it back. This is all of me, Creator, take me as a larger life now. I am ready to die now. Let me drop this body and let me give my heart, my gift of consciousness to you.

I think the big surprise on the other side is to discover that the God we are praying to has been within us all of the time. Your state of inadequacy is totally understandable, but I honestly believe that by your compassion and consideration, by your allowing your friends, D, and you didn’t give me the name of the other one, just the condition, just being. I mean you are such a joy to be with that you have helped most adequately.

The second point is, you can’t do anybody else’s healing. I was so guilty about Don that I felt dead after he died and I really wanted to die. I thought I should die because I was so hopelessly inadequate to the situation. I never could read it right. I couldn’t read it right and I may still not be reading it right. The way I read it at this point is that Elkins was completely an incarnation pattern of his own free will. He had said again and again that he wasn’t going to live to be an old man. He hated being old. He wasn’t going to be old. And he was having his first real physical problems, even though they were in his head, according to the coroner’s office, the autopsy report. He thought that his health was breaking and I really blame his death at this point on the Airlines because he thought that his job was on the line, and he didn’t think he could do it any more because they kept asking for more and more hours, and he was just too tired.

Of course, I urged him not to continue at the Airlines. I had been urging him to quit for years. I did okay at first, but as the months wore on, I started going crazy and by I’d say, two or three months before he died, I was in a state of total nervous exhaustion and was having a break-down myself so I was, from that point on, completely inadequate to Don’s situation. He would sit down next to me and I would start crying. I knew he was killing himself. I didn’t understand it. And I wanted him to get better, but I couldn’t force my life onto him, and that is the way free will works.

The only house we can clean up is our own. We can’t do the work for somebody else. We can share with them as sisters or brothers and maybe make the load a little easier that they are having, but we cannot suffer for others any more than we can learn for others. The suffering is a teaching tool. It works pretty well if people make sure not to get bitter. And the fruit is often incredible. One seldom sees a happy artist. If he is a happy artist, he is writing non-fiction. He is in the world of facts like Isaac Asminoff and he is just playing with his computer that is his brain.

[Tape ends.]

Carla