‘You are not alone’: Love For Our Elders offers embrace via letters

Beth Swierczek remembers long afternoons as a little girl when she and her grandmother, LaVonne Birge, would sit on the couch opening the letters Mrs. Birge would receive from far-flung relatives, friends, and pen pals. Passing the letters back and forth, they would smile and laugh.

Those days seemed far away last Thanksgiving. Mrs. Birge, who is in her 90s, sat alone in her nursing home in Omaha, Nebraska. It was a typical pandemic day: The nursing home was locked down, and Mrs. Birge was isolated.

Then came a knock at the door. It was Mrs. Swierczek and her daughter, Emily, allowed in briefly because they are family. They were carrying a wicker basket stuffed with letters, about 500 of them, addressed to Mrs. Birge.

The coronavirus created what AARP dubbed “an epidemic of loneliness” among older people, who have often found themselves quarantined and isolated. 

However, thousands of volunteers around the world – connected through the organization Love For Our Elders – have responded with a simple but powerful gesture: writing a letter.

Puzzled at first, Mrs. Birge opened envelope after envelope, postmarked from the United States and abroad. The small room filled with greetings, stories, and voices. 

Many people wrote that they were praying for her. One woman described an ongoing battle to defend her geraniums from the neighborhood opossum. Someone from Scotland sent a seed that is a symbol of good fortune. 

The underlying message in all the letters was the same. Mrs. Birge was not alone.

A grandfather’s legacy

It’s a little surprising that the headquarters of the operation sending thousands of letters to hundreds of older people around the world is in the Yale dorm room of Love For Our Elders founder Jacob Cramer. What’s more surprising is that he started the operation as a junior high school student.  

“It makes me really happy to help others, and I just wanted to do something that would hopefully help people smile,” he says.

Love For Our Elders, which Mr. Cramer runs with 13 other volunteers, many of them young people, connects some 60,000 volunteer letter writers from more than 70 countries with older people around the globe in need of a pick-me-up.

Love For Our Elders’ volunteers have sent about 250,000 letters since 2013, and it promotes Feb. 26 as National Letter to an Elder Day.

The idea that grew into Love For Our Elders started with Mr. Cramer’s grandfather, Marvin “Marv” Cramer. As a child, Jacob Cramer was at his grandparents’ house on all the Jewish holidays and nearly every weekend in between. 

He credits his grandfather for teaching him values like gemilut hasadim, Hebrew for “acts of love and kindness”; tikkun olam, “repairing the world”; and a firm handshake.

After his grandfather died in 2010, Mr. Cramer wanted to live those values, so he started volunteering in assisted living facilities in the suburbs east of Cleveland where he lives.

As he spent more time at the nursing homes, he began to realize that he was some residents’ only frequent visitor.

“That really made me uncomfortable, and I think when you’re uncomfortable, you want to do something about it to change it,” Mr. Cramer says.

So, he did.

A P.O. box and a pandemic

A digital native raised in an era of texts and email, Mr. Cramer had always been fascinated with actual handwritten letters. Back in 2013, he combined the old art of pen on paper with new technology, advertising on the internet the chance to handwrite letters to people in nursing homes.

It took off. Within a year, he needed to buy a P.O. box to handle all the letters he was processing and delivering.

When the pandemic hit, many older people needed a connection to the outside world more than ever, but at the same time, there was a “huge increase” in the number of people who wanted to write, Mr. Cramer says.

“Being able to make a difference from home feels great because not only are you helping people feel loved, but you also don’t have to get off of the sofa ... or risk spreading the virus,” he says.

Phoebe Clark, a college student studying psychology at Loyola University Maryland, is one of those new pandemic volunteers.

Living with her parents after the pandemic closed her college, she witnessed her own grandfather’s struggles with dementia. 

“My grandfather had mentioned that he feels forgotten, and that bothered me when I went back [to school],” says Ms. Clark, who joined a Love For Our Elders chapter on campus.

While older people may have become more isolated during the pandemic, their life experiences and perspective make them more resilient than most young people, says Michiko Iwasaki, a psychologist specializing in older adults at Loyola University Maryland who advises the college’s Love For Our Elders club. Still, she adds, there is no substitute for human connection.

“Human beings are very social animals,” Dr. Iwasaki says.

Love For Our Elders has been adapting to increase its human connections. It used to collect generic letters and send them in bundles to be passed out at nursing homes. Last year the organization shifted to personalized letters. It features individual elders for a month on its website. But with each recipient now averaging more than 300 letters, the organization is trying to feature more nominees each month to “spread the love.”

Faith in humanity

Lisa Campbell and Lance Lugar know better than most the value of the written word. The two met and formed a friendship while poring over historical documents at the University of Pittsburgh library archives where they worked. When Ms. Campbell moved away about a decade ago, the two kept in touch, often by mail.

“Before you had a computer and you could just backspace everything, there was a lot of emphasis on thinking about your message,” says Ms. Campbell, who is a Love For Our Elders letter writer.

Dr. Lugar, who has a Ph.D. in paleobiology, says he is not lonely. He has friends from around the world he keeps in touch with, but the pandemic made it harder to see them, and he has recently needed to use a wheelchair he calls “the battleship.”

Ms. Campbell decided he was a perfect candidate for Love For Our Elders. He was featured on the website in December, and soon Ms. Campbell showed up at his door with hundreds of letters. 

People write about all sorts of things, though Love For Our Elders asks writers to avoid anything political or controversial, and many focus on common experiences or an interest from the online biography. Dr. Lugar chuckles when he describes one letter covered in dinosaur stickers, a nod to his background in paleontology.

Back in Omaha, Mrs. Birge still has plenty of letters to read, but the experience has already altered her perspective: “She says this absolutely, 100% has restored her faith in humanity,” Mrs. Swierczek says of her grandmother.