It took me quite a while to make up my mind what to write about today. There is plenty on my mind, but it's all so ... internal. I don't know - I guess part of the reason I write the journal is that it forces me to think through certain issues and figure them out. The problem with doing this, however, is that it doesn't always make for very compelling reading. I'm always tottering on the edge of an abyss of introspection, and it would be so easy to take a plunge down that abyss. But who'd be reading this at the end?

I thought I might write about the whole episode with Don, my email pen-pal who died yesterday. I barely knew him ... he was one correspondent out of a hundred or more people who write me regularly. Yet he wrote how me about how strongly he felt about me. It made me uncomfortable, like it always does when someone who writes me puts me on some sort of pedestal. I was going to touch on the issue of "celebrity" - how people like Don don't understand - there's only one of me, and there's no way I can feel the same way about someone like Don as he apparently feels about me. And yet, facing death, Don expected something from me - did I have any responsibility towards him? Or, should I remain distant - make it quite clear that there's a wall of involvement past which I can't go?

When Don wrote me a couple of weeks ago that he was going into surgery that he might not emerge from, I felt a little concern, but a few minutes later I was thinking about something else. It was so remote - someone I didn't know - just bytes in a series of email files on my hard-disk. Then earlier this week, I got a new email from the same email address. But it wasn't Don - it was his hospice worker. As the week progressed she kept me in touch with Don's progress, and told me how much I'd come to mean to Don. Again, I started to feel uncomfortable. I kept asking myself what my role should be. Here was a man who was on his deathbed, and he'd latched on to an image in his mind of who I was ... as something positive to help him through his final days. What was my responsibility, if any?

Before I could make up my mind on that question, I got an email from his care-giver to tell me that Don had died. For a second, after I got the email, I felt like I'd been let off the hook. You can't help thoughts like that, and it's silly to feel badly about them. My darn two-timing mind, though, wouldn't let me off the hook. For the last two days, I've been analyzing, and drilling into every feeling, every reaction, every thought. Then I tell myself - jeez, Keith, here's a guy who's died - you should be feeling sorry for him instead of indulging in the luxury of thinking only about your own reactions. Then I think ... well, you get the idea. I was still, in the end, thinking about what my responsibility would have been towards Don if he'd lived. And you know what - there is no right answer, nobody who can tell me what the right thing to do would have been. It's one of those uniquely ambiguous situations where you have to figure it out for yourself.