#66 Deborah

0:06Pushkin

0:12Hey, you picked up the phone. Very spontaneous. Do you think I'm spontaneous? No, there's nothing spontaneous about you. I'm pretty spontaneous. I live in Minnesota. Nothing spontaneous about you living in Minnesota. I got married. Wow. Oh, while I was at the shopping mall, I bought a parrot. Yeah. Oh, wait, one second. Chicken liver. Oh, did you hear that in the background? Yeah. Jackie Cohen. Oh, did you hear that? Jackie Cohen.

0:48She hung up on you. I know she did, imaginary parrot.

0:58From Pushkin Industries, I'm Jonathan Goldstein, and this is Heavyweight. Today's episode, Deborah.

1:12Right after the break.

1:21This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. There are moments in each of our lives that seem to change everything. An unexpected diagnosis, the sudden end of a relationship, the loss of a job. As our lives veer off course, it can feel like time is dividing into a before and an after. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist, and my new book, The Other Side of Change, Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans, is all about how we navigate these inflection points. The Other Side of Change pairs singular, real-life stories with scientific insights to help us find meaning in the tumult of change.

2:00What if we saw the hardest moments in our lives, not simply as something to endure, but as an opportunity to reimagine who we can be? I'm thrilled to share that Booklist gave The Other Side of Change one of its coveted starred reviews, saying, quote, It's impossible not to be moved. The Other Side of Change is out now. Get your copy today, wherever you like to buy books.

2:33Hello? Hello, is this Barbara? No, this is Deborah. Uh, how are you related to Barbara? I don't know who Barbara is. Although this might sound like a classic Cheech and Chong routine, it's actually me phoning Debra. Debra, you should know, is 102 years old. Yet, it is I who is having the senior moment. Oh, my. I'm so sorry. For some reason, I think I thought your name was Barbara. It's okay. I've lived long enough I could take any name.

3:11I'm phoning Debra. Her name is Debra. Because she made a discovery recently that has turned her life on its head. It all began with a phone call from her daughter, Lee. She called me several months ago. And she said, Mom, given your age, I'd like to help you clear out your storage room. So I said, fine, when are you coming? She said, now. The storage room is a room in Deborah's Bronx apartment. She affectionately calls it the Snake Pit. It's where expired vitamins and broken kitchen appliances collect. While cleaning it out, her daughter Lee saw something that caught her eye. And she walked out of the storage room with a cardboard box.

4:03Written across the top of the box were Debra's initials. And beside those initials, underlined in black ink, were the words, Go Through. When Debra lifted the lid, she uncovered something she'd stashed away long ago and had never gone through.

4:24256 letters written to me when I was 21. The letters, tied up in ribboned bundles, were from Deborah's first love, a man named Jerry Robbins. We were engaged to be married.

4:45He... Okay, I'm sorry. Jerry was killed in World War II on Christmas Eve, 1944. My future was shredded as well as the man that I loved. And had you forgotten about these letters? I didn't forget. I just found his death so disturbing, I couldn't take it. So I sequestered that aspect of my prior life away and never looked at it again.

5:32She has a really powerful ability to flip the switch, as she calls it. This is Debra's daughter, Lee. Put it away, not think about it. And that's just what Debra did. To escape the grief of Jerry's death, she threw herself into graduate school, got a master's degree in social work, and from there, life just kept on spooling. She married a man named Irving, who was an attorney and a good provider, and together they raised three kids. But all the while, through 64 years of marriage, through every move, every new chapter, Debra kept the box with its lid closed shut. Until recently.

6:22Nearly 80 years after Jerry's death, and over a decade after the death of her husband Irving, Deborah was finally ready to open the box and start reading. Every letter, every postcard, and every V-mail. E-mail? V-mail. The letter V as in victory. Right. Right. Will you listen to me? V-mail, as I only later learned, was a method the government used to get soldiers' letters to their families. And as Deborah read these letters, something began to happen. I fell in love with Jerry again.

7:10Not only did the box contain Jerry's handwritten letters, but also a number of his poems and short stories. Jerry, Deborah tells me, was an aspiring writer with big dreams. His absolute motivation was to write, write, and compose. If he had a pencil or a pen in hand, he'd seek out paper to write on. The sheer volume of letters, their depth and detail, attest to this. And each day, sometimes all through the day, Deborah would read and reread Jerry's words. And as she did, she felt him return to her. It was like time had collapsed.

7:55How can a 101-year-old woman whose hormones have long since shriveled fall in love again?

8:11Debra's daughter Lee noticed the change that came over her mother, how re-energized she'd become. And Lee thought that was wonderful, to a point. There's a thin line because she started slipping into what we would call Jerry land. Oh, what is that? That is, not to label it too much, but a kind of overarching obsession with all things Jerry. All she did was live in Jerry land. This is Debra's other daughter, Lauren. And every time I called her up or would see her, it would be, Jerry said this and Jerry said that. She would spend all my conversations with her just talking about Jerry. It sounds a little bit, the way you describe it is like, you know, like when a teenager's in love, you know?

9:07Yeah. They're just drawing like the person's name and heart, you know, in their notebook or something. Yeah, you just can't help but talk about it all the time. Lauren says their mother stopped watching movies, reading books, attending the classes she took online. I was concerned about it. Lee was concerned about it. We all kept saying, here, Mom, here's a great book. Read this. Watch this. Why don't you invite people over? And it was truly like she was in a bubble.

9:50Also concerning to Lauren is how, since the discovery of the letters, Jerry has threatened to eclipse her late father, Irving. For proof, you need look no further than Deborah's living room. On an entry table by the door is a photograph of Irving. But beside her favorite chair is one of Jerry. Sitting right next to her, and my father is off to the side. What the hell? How does that make you feel? Weird. Strange. Deborah, for her part, insists her feelings for Jerry have no bearing on the love she feels for her late husband. But this passionate side of Deborah is new to Lauren.

10:39They always say we become more of ourselves the older we get. Do you think so? I think so. Don't you? I'd like to think so, yeah. I mean, it certainly seems like with your mother, I mean, she continues to grow, you know. She does. There's a great line I love to quote, and it's from Metallica. Metallica? The heavy metal bands. And one of the lines is, my lifestyle determines my death style. And I think it's a great line. Like, she's not dying, but, you know, I think we just keep becoming more. Yeah. And, oh, I'm sorry for all these texts. My husband just got nominated for two Emmys. Oh, my goodness.

11:40That's fantastic. Yeah. As it happens, Lauren's husband is the award-winning documentary filmmaker Joe Berlinger. Among his work, Some Kind of Monster, an exploration of Metallica's experience in group therapy. He just got nominated, and my whole family is like, yay, that's great, congrats. Good for him. But you know what's also good? As good, if not better, than being nominated for TV's most prestigious award? Helping people. And right now, I'm going to help Debra. with something she's taken to calling her mandate. When I was a daughter, I had an obligation to my parents, as a student to my teacher in my school, as a wife and a mother to my family.

12:38But now that I've lived this long, my mandate is to do something with these amazing letters. Deborah hopes to honor Jerry by giving his writing an audience. It occurs to me that I have an audience, and perhaps if Deborah and I read through the letters together, it would fulfill her mandate and allow her to move on. I put the idea to Lee. Do you think, like, getting something out there into the world would allow her to leave Jerryland? Yeah, I do. Because he'll always be 21. He'll always be a writer who never got to live his potential. So there's this quality of stuckness or stasis getting his work out there.

13:37It's almost like she gets to the end. Can you come to my apartment? Well, I'm in Minnesota. I wouldn't fly out where you are, but if you can come to my home, I would be eternally grateful for as long as I last. Well, I mean, I would love to see the letters, and it would be really nice to meet you in person. Okay, Mr. Goldstein, so come look. Yeah. Said the old lady to the young man. And so, it looks like this 56-year-old young man is heading off to New York. Because like the writing on the box says, maybe the only way out is to go through. And speaking of going through, it's time for you to grease up the wheels on your shopping cart and go through some ads.

15:02There are moments in each of our lives that seem to change everything. An unexpected diagnosis, the sudden end of a relationship, the loss of a job. As our lives veer off course, it can feel like time is dividing into a before and an after. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist, and my new book, The Other Side of Change, Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans, is all about how we navigate these inflection points. The Other Side of Change pairs singular, real-life stories with scientific insights to help us find meaning in the tumult of change. What if we saw the hardest moments in our lives, not simply as something to endure, but as an opportunity to reimagine who we can be?

15:45I'm thrilled to share that Booklist gave The Other Side of Change one of its coveted starred reviews, saying, quote, It's impossible not to be moved. The Other Side of Change is out now. Get your copy today, wherever you like to buy books.

16:05256 letters. It took several weeks for my producer Phoebe and me to read them all. Many of the letters were missing dates and locations, but we puzzled our way through, doing our best to bring chronological order. And as we did, a life emerged, and a portrait of the young man who lived it. We went through all 256 of the letters. Oh, boy. So, you know Jerry. Oh, yeah. So let's, why don't we just start off by reading the first letter. Here goes. Dear Deb, finding myself with a few spare moments. Jerry's first letters are from the spring of 1940, nearly four years before he enlisted. My mother advised me that she doesn't mind my staying in your house till all hours of the night.

17:04She likes you quite a bit, which practically makes it unanimous.

17:13Deborah and Jerry had been friends since their elementary school days in Brooklyn. But their friendship was beginning to blossom into something more. What were you guys doing until all hours of the night? Talking. As passionate as it was, it was never consummated, which is my regret. It is a regret. Oh, intensely so. Deborah says she was waiting for marriage. But we would have had a hot time together.

17:52I forgot that I'm being recorded.

18:03Jerry lived over an hour away by subway, and before texting, emails, and the prevalence of phone calls, weekend rendezvous were planned out over letters. Jerry's writing is clever. In one missive, he invites Deborah out to a show for New Year's Eve. When she doesn't give him a straight answer, he sends a follow-up. To help you make a decision, and for your convenience, you will find on page four of this letter a ballot. Just check one and mail within the next week. The ballot shows two options, yes and yes.

18:44Be it in his letters or his short stories, Jerry had a way with a closing line. His fiction often showcased an ironic reveal in the final sentence. In one story, the peacenik babbling in the mental institution turns out to be a former war commissioner. In another, the motorist who stops to help a stranded woman turns out to be an executioner on his way to put the woman's son to death. They were like Twilight Zone episodes, almost 20 years before the show went on the air. Jerry shared drafts of these stories along with poems. Deborah appreciated his lyrical turns of phrase. I call them Jerry-isms.

19:26Instead of war, he says, man-made madness. Instead of bullet, hot sperm of death. How is that? hot sperm of death. I'm no poet, but it strikes me that the mighty Metallica itself would be proud to name an album something so in one's face.

20:08As a student at Columbia studying to be a writer, Jerry was exempt from the draft. but in the winter of 1943, he decided to leave school and enlist. Aside from his parents, Deborah was the first person he told. Since one of my guiding rules, he wrote, has always been, to thine own self be true, I feel I can't stay out any longer, just paying lip service to my beliefs. From boot camp, Jerry's letters arrived in Deborah's mailbox every day. His clever short stories with the tidy Twilight Zone ending gave way to reportage. Jerry detailed the eccentric characters he met, the sergeant with a jaw like a rock, the chaplain who was a secret lush.

20:54But he also shared his feelings. In one letter, he described the first time he stood before a mirror and saw himself in uniform, how it gave him chills. As training became more grueling and the thought of war more present and real, Jerry sought refuge in Deborah, summoning her presence during lonely evenings at camp or long marches in the heat. I didn't mind walking because I wasn't alone. You were with me, walking by my side and keeping me company all the time. We spoke about a thousand things, my furlough, the invasion, what we're going to do together when I come back. I recited poetry to you, and when no one was watching, I put my arms around you, held you close to me.

21:41and whispered, I love you, into your ears.

21:53Jerry and Deborah created a ritual which they enacted at 10 o 'clock each evening. Jerry called it their nightly meeting. When the hour struck, they dropped whatever they were doing, and in the absence of a telephone, each would simply think of the other. I closed my eyes. Jerry wrote. The world fades away, and then it's now. Now was one of our secret words. The only thing that was real was here and now. Through the ebony of night, I reach out for you, and from across the wide expanse of sea, you come. Your eyes flashing, your body warm and curved. This is the only place. This is the only time.

22:59Here and now.

23:08Do you want to read another letter? This one will be a special one. Sure. So here I go again, doing things crudely and probably very badly. Honey, I want to get engaged on my furlough. I needn't add that I'm anxiously and eagerly awaiting your reply. I just say yes. And here, Deborah recites from memory her reply from over 80 years ago. My answer to you is yes, yes, yes. Back at boot camp, time marched on. And in the fall of 1944, Jerry received notice. He was going to be deployed. But before his deployment, he was granted a final furlough. So he went home to see Deborah. where he gave her a ring.

24:08Together they made plans for the future, talked about everything that lay ahead once he was home for good. Then, standing on the subway platform in Washington Heights, they said their last goodbye. I can almost feel it. I remember kissing him and saying, this isn't good, I don't know what's happening. And I went into the train, and I cried hysterically all the way till the last stop on that train.

24:50Jerry's company was shipped off to England, where American soldiers were preparing to join the fight in mainland Europe. Unbeknownst to them, they were destined for one of the deadliest campaigns of World War II, the Battle of the Bulge. But they never made it there. Jerry was among more than 2 ,200 men loaded onto a troop ship on Christmas Eve. The ship was bound for Cherbourg, France, just a short trip across the English Channel. But hours later, just five miles from the entrance to the harbor, a torpedo struck. A survivor described the slender silver missile cutting through the water and colliding with the ship as having shaken the vessel from stern to stern.