No need for addresses and phone numbers. When Diana Ross's former PA took her down publicly all she needed to do was relate the woman's almost unbelievable pettiness and cruelty through the description of work-a-day examples. I'm still waiting for your's.

And fuck YOU for your codescending reference to my supposed use of "cliches." What I wrote was not a cliche but a truism, and no they're not the same damned thing. Stop hiding behind rueful rhetoric. Put up, or shut up. Literally.

Your make a great case for yourself, Quiet Tenant as one of those "little people" that you say Sontag stepped on.

You've got victim written all over you. Was Susan Sontag, the left-leaning champion of equality and the "new" nasty to her doorman? Did she fire her cleaning woman when she coughed on her sheets?

I know, when people approached who didn't have worship in their eyes--did she write fuck you before she autographed their books?

Don't you realize--you can't win playing for such low stakes. Are you the anonymous who said they were "sorry." I don't think so after reading your second entry. Did you notice I wasn't the only one who took offense at your remarks in the same way?

Be careful what you say, Quiet Tenant. It may shock you some day to learn that some people listen. I look forward to your entries on other issues to see how you think--instead of provoke.

In my reading of the afterlife I have come to understand that anything we did not learn and need to learn is continued on the other side.

If we did not learn how to be compassionate, then whether we are pope, king or president, we will have to tarry a while in the schoolroom beyond to learn compassion. These lessons are not skipped in the continuing life journey.

It means my destructive mother - and persons like Ms. Sontag - and anyone else whose particular lesson assignment is compassion will not get a 'pass and go' until that lesson is learned.

The mark of a person is one who can be present and compassionate to those he does not need to see again .

My mother impressed everyone - her newspaper audience, radio audience when she was interviewed as a student of yoga, and our extended relatives who now tell me she intimidated them.

The public persona of a person vs who this person is at home -especially toward a child - can be at great variance.

The rest of the world would find the child's version hard to believe...unless other people speak up. When other people do not speak up, they unintentionally become part of the oppression.

My beloved husband died of myelodysplastic syndrome just over three years ago, when he was 57. I was 46 and would have given anything at that time to know that someone else "out there" also had things to say about this relatively rare and quite stealthily horrific disease. Maybe I'm naive, and I KNOW I can be solipsistic, but what I got from Mr. Rieff was that he wanted to talk more of the shared experience of disease and death than about his mother. The fact that she is and was so famous and revered is incidental to his experience. And one can only understand that if standing in our shoes. That's the thing about death -- it can only be experienced and no amount of intellectual discussion can make it otherwise. My husband died Nov. 3, 2004 and Ms. Sontag died on what would have been his 58th birthday, six weeks later, Dec. 28, 2004. At the time, her death was reported as "cancer". It was only a year or two later when Mr. Rieff wrote about her death in the NYTimes mag, that I realized they had both suffered from the same rare and terrible disease. And I'm not afraid to say that I ate his piece up. How grand it was to feel witnessed.

And I'm also not ashamed to admit that I went to the book store and looked at La Lebowitz's photo-tome for that same reason. No, like you all, I didn't approve, but fuck me, I got it. There's a need to share and bear witness to the unfathomable. And when your own experience has no pink ribbons or yellow bracelets, well. It's very lonely and severe and haunted. My Phil's death was a "good" one. But I somehow feel that's scarcely the issue here. I feel quite personally blessed by David Rieff's journey and his beyond eloquent sharing of it.

PS when my guy was still alive, a piece of mine was included in Salon`s series on marriage: The State of our Unions. Funny, I forgot all about that, until now, ready to push the send button. Mine came under the heading:`Ìn Sickness or in Health``

What evidence of Susan Sontag's awfulness might satisfy you while simultaneously addressing the contingencies of discussing such a matter in an online forum?

I can speak only from my experience. I'm not about to offer names, addresses, and phone numbers of people who should vouch for me.

You're quite welcome to satisfy yourself with cliches such as, "I'm sure she was difficult, brilliant people often are." Monsters like Sontag successfully rely on the fact that most people satisfy themselves with such cliches.

I remain convinced that Sontag was kind, generous, loving, thoughtful, charming, and gentle with the likes of Robert Silvers, Sonny and Gita Mehta, Leon Wieseltier, etc.

I have no doubt that her friendships were warm, rich, and deep.

As I said in my previous letter, Sontag took care to lavish her abuse upon people who had no recourse to it. I'm sure she was never brutal to people who mattered to her.

As for Sarajevo, I personally regard it as one of her many beaux gestes.

Sontag may have evinced great empathy for humanity in the abstract, but for the very real men and women whom she considered beneath her, she showed nothing but violent contempt.

He has a syndrome named after him? Who'd a thunk it.