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(Handwritten on the copy: "8/10/74 - this was just one of several efforts, non adequate. A sample.")

To anyone who ever asks, if I’m long unheard from:

This is the thin-hard sublayer under all the parting messages I’m likely to have sent: Let me go, let me be if I can, let me not be if I can’t.
For a number of years now, I’ve been the object of affectionate concern to my relatives and many friends in Ann Arbor; Have received not just financial but spiritual support from them; Have made a number of efforts in this benign situation, to get a new toe-hold on the lively world. Have failed.

As an over-educated peasant I’ve read a good bit on Middle-Age Depression and known several cases other than my own. I know there are temporary chemical therapies and sometimes “temporary” is long enough. Experts agree it’s not a single isolable mental disease. Probably it’s a
few simple humanities mixed up in a pot of random concomitant circumstances.In the months after I got back from my desperate flight to England I began to realize that my new personal incapabilities were still stubbornly hanging in. I did fight, but they hung in.

Maybe my time in England, financed largely by my friends, was too benign a treatment; At any rate, it’s the only sustained period in my life that I now look back on in the silliest details as “fun,”unproductive fun. Not getting anything done. I did sit in my bedsitter very often in bemused despair,
but also I had fun.

Since then I’ve watched the elegant, energetic people of Ann Arbor, those I know and those I don’t know, going about their daily business on the streets and in the buildings, and I’ve felt a detached admiration for their energy and elegance. If I ever was a member of this species, perhaps it was a social accident that has now been canceled.

To survive it all, I expect I must drift back down through the other half to the twentieth twentieth, which I already know pretty well, to the hundredth hundredth, which I only read and heard about. I might survive there quite a few years - - who knows? But you understand I have to do it by myself,
with no benign umbrella. Human society fascinates me and awes me and fills me with grief and joy; I just can’t find my place to plug into it.

So let me go, please; and please accept my thanks to those happy times that each of you has given me over the years; and please know that I would’ve preferred to give you more than I ever did or
could - - I am in everyone’s debt.

Elizabeth (Connie) Converse

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