K: She lived a really independent life. She never wed and so all her life she said the most important thing to her was being devoted to my brothers and me as an aunt.

D: Is there any one thing that you miss most about not having her around?

K: Oh, you know, she was just so good at giving solid advice. She was a friend, she was just my very best friend and I really miss that. Probably the most wonderful thing she gave me, in addition to just some strength of character, was four-hundred and fifty to five hundred letters of mine, that I wrote her, that she saved for me. And we found these five hundred letters when we were cleaning out her house, they were stuffed in the back of a little cupboard. And some of the things that were captured in those letters, a really good sense of how much she meant to me, for example, I never kept a diary in high school, instead, I just wrote letters to MEF, and I knew she would never divulge them and I knew she would respect what I was saying. So, you know, starting in seventh grade, she got a litany of letters about boy troubles. In a letter I wrote to her back in 1962 I was complaining about boys again, and I started with this, "Dear MEF, all this is, is one big sob story, so be prepared." And then I go on for like three pages of notepaper. It was like having my own personal Ann Landers. So at the end of the letter I say, "But then, what are aunts for." So I mail that on a Wednesday and the next Monday she writes me a response. And this letter is kind of worn and torn, and it's a testimony to how many times I looked at that letter in the course of my life. And she says, "Dear Karen, enclosed is a prompt answer to your question, 'What are aunts for?' Well, I found this quote years ago In a book called Mrs. Miniver, and here's what I think aunts are for: 'Aunts are to be a pattern and example to all aunts, and to show that at least one daughter in any generation, in every generation ought to remain unmarried and raise the profession of aunt-ship to a fine art.'" She ends by saying, "Thank you, Karen, for reminding me of this. I shall have to keep trying again and again to live up to it." And I would have to say that she not only raised aunt-ship to that high art, I would say, that MEF was probably the gold standard.