By Tamara Jones
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Five in the morning, and the desperate are clamoring at daylight's door. Trish Mayyasi lets them in, tapping her computer awake in her cozy Rockville study. She reads the incoming messages and takes a casualty count, the world's pain rushing up to meet her.
Cheating wives, nasty co-workers, anguished teenagers, dangerous lovers -- the troubles go on and on and it's not even time for breakfast. An atheist is seething over her father's Christmas card. A gay man is being shunned by his family. A woman in her 40s is feeling smothered by her clingy 71-year-old lover. A mother fears that her 15-year-old son is becoming a sexual predator.
Mayyasi purses her lips and goes to work, mauve fingernails clicking across the keyboard. At 73, she is restlessly retired. This is her volunteer work. People need her, and she is their cyber-grandmother, a virtual plate of fresh sugar cookies, warm and reassuring in lives full of cold rain.
I don't blame you for feeling confused
Don't allow this to go on any further
No, it isn't fair at all for them to disown you
Soul-soothing is a pastime Mayyasi discovered 3 1/2 years ago through a San Francisco-based group called Elder Wisdom Circle, an online community of some 600 seniors -- including a few centenarians -- who answer thousands of letters a month through http://www.elderwisdomcircle.org.
They publish a weekly advice column in 22 newspapers, and will have a book of collected wisdom out in October.
Besides the two or three letters she answers personally each morning, Mayyasi combs the Web site's inbox for queries to take each Wednesday morning to the assisted living tower at Asbury Methodist Village, the Gaithersburg retirement community where her own mother spent her final years. There, in the community room, a dozen or so seniors park their wheelchairs in a wide circle or ease frail bodies into folding chairs to listen while Mayyasi reads the letters aloud into a microphone.
"Ready to go work?" she asks cheerily.
A woman about to remarry is wondering about mingling finances -- should the newlyweds maintain separate accounts?
"Consult a financial counselor, that might be a good place to start," suggests Bernard Fogle, a retired minister and the only man in this morning's group. "The greatest reason for divorce is arguing over money, so get the counseling before going into the marriage and resolve it."
A woman wearing a jacket designed to look like an American flag wrapped around her shoulders asks for the mike and begins reminiscing about her own marriage and how her husband was in occupied Tokyo and had to decide about being a ballplayer, "so he played ball and went all the way to the top and lost by one."
Everyone listens politely. Mayyasi is confident she can unearth an answer, and tries again: How did you and your husband handle the money?
"Well, we had a joint account because sometimes he'd get a call in the middle of the night and pack up to go because he was intelligence, you know."
Mayyasi nods knowingly and moves right along, the world too needy to wait for awkward pauses or harsh reality-checks. Go with the flow is one of the recurring themes in the Elder Wisdom Circle.
Next is a letter titled "Mom and the Con Man," from grown children worried about their widowed mother falling for a bankrupt 66-year-old suitor who has been married three times, takes morphine for a bad back, lives in a trailer on his sister's property and proposed after two days. The kids hired a private eye and have also received warning calls from Romeo's own relatives.
"Basically, they've covered all the ground," observes Helen Clayton, 92. She and Fogle, sitting next to her, seem to be the only ones with much to say this morning, but sometimes it's like that, Mayyasi knows. Sometimes just listening to the world's problems without worrying how to solve them can be an interesting way to fill an hour.
"Nothing was said whether this woman really loves this man," points out Fogle, who is 87.
"I think she needs outside help, professional help, I do indeed," Clayton concludes.
Mayyasi takes notes, which she will turn into a group reply once she's back in front of her computer at home.
She reads the final letter of the day. A woman is feeling guilty about lies she has told her fiance, and hiding "certain things I can never tell my future husband because of their nature."
"I wish she'd tell us some," says Mayyasi, whose own second marriage is in its 24th year. She adds, more thoughtfully, "Everyone's got a little skeleton. If she does come out with it and he accepts her anyway, maybe she'll feel better about herself." Heads nod, and she has a consensus. Fogle offers a closing thought.
"Confession," he reminds them all, "is good for the soul."
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