They had never met. But they had shared secrets, fears and dreams in a fading art form. They exchanged letters.
Though they all live in the Bay Area, they have been writing to one another for the past nine months. On a recent afternoon, when the pen pals came together for the first time, they appeared as unlikely duos: teenagers and mostly middle-aged adults.
As they gathered for a healing service at the Marin Jewish Community Center auditorium, Cindy Perlis,, director of Art for Recovery at UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center at Mount Zion, described the similarities between two disparate groups: 32 seventh- and eighth-graders from Brandeis Hillel Day School’s San Rafael campus and 16 adults with life-threatening illnesses.
“Today we are bearing witness,” she said, “to an incredible group of people who have so much in common — adults coping with illness and adolescents coping with life.”
The students and adults will read their letters as part of a dramatic performance Tuesday evening at Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael.
Perlis has been matching Brandeis students with patients for nine years. More than 150 patients and 200 students have become pen pals. Forty of the patients have died.
“The young and ill have so much in common –feelings of isolation, dependency, loss of control, wanting to be listened to, to feel that they belong and to feel loved,” Perlis said.
After the pen pals shook hands, hugged, traded bouquets of flowers and looked each other over, they sat in a circle and, in front of the entire group, revealed their feelings to their pen pals. Nine Brandeis girls kicked off the service by singing “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” Several students and one patient wrote poems for their writing partners. One patient wrote a song for each of his three student pen pals.
With no musical accompaniment save for a single blow on his harmonica before each song, Harry Bernstein, a balding 52-year-old with a Hawaiian shirt and a gray beard, serenaded his teen-age pen pals with songs he wrote to the tunes of “Stranger in Paradise,” “Hine Ma Tov” and “To Life.”
To the tune of “To Life” from the musical “Fiddler on the Roof,” Bernstein sang to eighth-grader Ariel Greenwald:
A girl who likes a challenge
Has so much to gain in life.
Go fill your life with laughter.
This helps you with tough times in life.
So even if you have 40 cats,
Don’t let them drive you bats.
The pen pals swapped not only letters. They exchanged and created art together. Louise Fortmann, a 53-year-old U.C. Berkeley sociology professor diagnosed with breast cancer a few years ago, and seventh-grader Lauren Haimowitz mailed back and forth a collage with beads, rope and ribbon. Mary Isham, a 51-year-old woman with pancreatic cancer, and eighth-grader Jordan Davidovitz wrote and illustrated a comic strip.
At the healing service, Davidovitz gave Isham one of their strips in an oak picture frame. Isham showed off the framed strip as if it were a Charles Schulz original and bragged that one day her collaboration with her pen pal would become a syndicated cartoon.
Eighth-grader Elie Sherman told pen pal Margo Perin that she had left her mark on him. The feeling was mutual.
“I went through two years of a really bad depression after being diagnosed with breast cancer,” said Perin, a San Francisco writer. “These letters gave me so much hope and so much heart.”
Devora Zauderer, a seventh-grader who lost her mother to cancer, told one of her pen pals, Mimi Marsh: “You have helped me so much on my view of growing up. I feel so close to you, even though I just met you.”
Because she underwent brain surgery just a month before, Marsh wore her hair in what looked like a buzz cut. She recited the words of country singer Lee Ann Womack’s song “I Hope You Dance” to Zauderer: “I hope you never lose your sense of wonder. I hope you dance. When you get the chance to sit it out or dance, dance.”
By the end of the ceremony, seemingly mismatched pairs looked clearly like friends. Danielle Feldman, a redheaded robust-looking 22-year-old with lupus, walked arm-in-arm with her new pal Leah Wolfcale, a seventh-grader who vowed never to let Feldman go.
“Whoever says that teenagers are not capable of feeling empathy, compassion, they should meet you,” Perlis told the group at the service’s end.
She regularly runs into students who participated in the Brandeis Art for Recovery pen pal project.
“They may not remember their math or their history,” Perlis said. “But they always remember their patients.”