Host: Sarah Austin Jenness

Sarah: [00:00:02] Welcome to The Moth Podcast. I'm your host this week, Sarah Austin Jenness, filling in for our usual podcast hosts. I'm recording this while we're all social distancing and I'm in a closet in my father's house on Long Island. It's pouring rain and the dog is barking in the other room. So, if you hear any background noise, forgive us. Stay strong out there. We are all doing our best. 

Okay, we have three stories for you in this episode, all about a moment of truth. We're talking epiphanies, breaking points and big-time decisions. First up, Tim Sommers. Tim told this story at a Pittsburgh StorySLAM, where the theme of the night was Fresh. Here's Tim, live at The Moth.

[applause] 

Tim: [00:00:48] I was a horrible, raging alcoholic for 25 years. Here's the thing about being a drunk or really any kind of addict for that long. The longer you go on, the less you have to lose and the more you just say to yourself, why quit now? I've already lost everything. I lost girlfriends, a wife, a house, jobs, money, self-respect. They say that the only way that you can quit is for yourself. I don't know about that. I quit for a girl. Or, at least I quit when it became clear that I had one thing in my life that was worth quitting for, and that was Stacy. 

We had dated all through college, and we broke up the last day of college and we got back together 25 years later. It wasn't just being with her, but it was also that she was with me before everything went wrong, and it felt like it was another chance to be the person I was back then, before everything went wrong. I got sober on October 21st, 2013.

[cheers and applause] 

Thanks. For the first year, I was sober, but I wasn't drunk, but I wasn't really sober yet. And for the second year, I was finally starting to be clear. During the third year, I started to ask myself what I was going to do with the rest of my life that I had left. You see, I hadn't had a job since 2011 when I was in a horrific car accident. This is how horrific the car accident was. At the scene of the car accident, during the two hours that it took to cut me out of the car, I passed my cell phone to a fireman and asked him to call my mom. I could hear him on the phone saying, "I'm really sorry, ma’am, but I don't think he's going to make it." So, I asked for my phone back. [audience laughter]

This is how much of a drunk I was at the time. When I woke up in the smoking wreckage of my car, my very first thought is, is there any way I can make it back to St. Louis before the liquor stores close? So, anyway, I was trying to think about what to do, how to get a fresh start. I thought the one thing that I used to like to do was to teach. A long time ago, I had been a philosophy professor and I got a tenure-track job at Louisiana State, which I lost because of my drinking. But even after that, I did a bunch of adjunct teaching. But it had been a long time and I still only had a master's degree, so I was going to need help.

So, I called my old dissertation advisor at Brown, let's call him David, because that's his name. [audience laughter] And I said, "Would you write me a letter of recommendation to do some teaching or whatever?" We started talking. After a while, he said, "What do you really want to do?" And I said, "I really want to come back to Brown and finish my PhD." And the weird thing is I hadn't had that thought in my mind. It just popped out of nowhere. And he said, "Look, let's do that then." 

So, he took it to the department and the department voted to let me come back. And he went to the dean, and the dean had his doubts, so he said, "Do the application, get some letters and recommendations." I took the GRE over again, almost 30 years to the day after the first time I took the GRE. So, he took that all to the dean, and the dean said, "No, he can't come back." [audience aww] So, I thought, I wasn't that hurt, I wasn't that upset, so I tried, right? But David said, "Look, work with me for a year. Study, research, write. There's going to be a new dean next year. Let's try it then and we'll have a better case." [audience chuckle] So, I did that. 

I worked for a whole year. I wrote over 40,000 words, the length of a short novel, right? I got new letters of reputation. I went through the whole thing again. David went to the new dean and the new dean said, "No, he can't come back." He didn't look at the letters and recommendations. He didn't read the paper. He just said, "No, he can't come back. It's been too long."

And this time I was really crushed. I mean, it was like a blow to the stomach. I was so upset because I had thought, I'm not even sure I'm really going to do it if they ask me to come back. Maybe I'll come back. Maybe I won't come back. But now, I was crushed. I was trying to think about why. It took me almost two weeks to realize why. And that felt almost as bad as the bad news, because I realized that I wanted to come back because I thought if I went back to graduate school and I started over where I left off, that would be like none of that other stuff had ever happened, that the whole 25 years that I gave it back.

I started drinking in my early 20s, and I stopped drinking when I was almost 50. That's 25 years. It's like I went to sleep and woke up 50 years old. I mean, it's a lot of time to lose. It's a bitter fucking pill to swallow. When I first got sober, this guy Crispy said to me, "If you want to stay sober, Tim, you have to stop sitting around trying to have a better past." Now, first of all, if you're taking advice from a guy named Crispy. [audience laughter] But second of all, I hadn't even managed to take Crispy's advice, because here I was still thinking I could just have it all back. But then, something unbelievable happened.

When I had been preparing to try and get back into Brown, David said, "Why don't you apply a few other places?" I really wasn't into it, but I did it, and blah, blah, blah. I got an offer from the University of Iowa to come there to study next year with full support, even student healthcare. I might be the first person ever to go straight from student healthcare to Medicare. [audience laughter] [audience applause] 

It's not Brown, but Brown just felt like an attempt to relive the same thing and this feels like a fresh start. So, I'm going to Iowa next week. I don't know if I'm going to go there next year, but hopefully. Thank you.

[cheers and applause] 

Sarah: [00:06:50] That was Tim Sommers. Tim has told over 45 stories at Moth SLAMs. He writes a monthly column for Three Quarks Daily, and he's finishing a novel called Call Me Max, which is a comedy about the devil. He was also Prince's bodyguard for one night. 

Just after Tim told this story, he accepted the offer of admission to the PhD program in Philosophy at the University of Iowa. But most importantly, he says, he married Stacy, the girl who saved his life. To see photos of Tim at school and on his wedding day, head to our website, themoth.org. 

Emma Becker told our next story at a Moth SLAM in Atlanta, where the theme of the night was Intentions. Here's Emma.

[cheers and applause] 

Emma: [00:07:39] Okay. I was sitting at a plastic table, you know, in a plastic chair on one of those heinously overcrowded cruise ships in an open-air atrium. And the boat was somewhere between Vancouver and Alaska. I, myself, was floating somewhere between the 9th and 10th grade. It was summer, and my family was on vacation and I was taking a much-needed moment of solitude in my plastic haven. As is fairly typical for my family vacations, that solitude was interrupted pretty quickly. What was weird was that it was someone I didn't know. 

It was an old man, at least in his late 70s. His body looked lived in and his Hawaiian shirt was like, oh, man hanging off his shoulders. But his eyes were like this blue color, and they were sparkling, and he was smiling at me and he said, "Excuse me. I couldn't help but notice that you were writing a letter. And I never see young people writing letters these days. Could you just tell me, is it a love letter?" [audience chuckle] I wanted to tell him the truth. I fully intended to. And the truth was like, “No. [audience chuckles] My friend Vivian moved to Minnesota. Now, we write each other. It's like a whole thing. It's how we talk to each other.” 

But when I opened my mouth to tell him that, he was just looking at me, and he looked so hopeful. What came out of my mouth was, "Yes, I am writing a love letter.” Like, “You caught me." [audience chuckle] He smiled at me, and he nodded and he walked away. As is the case with heinously large cruise ships, I literally never saw him again. [audience chuckle] But I did go back to the paper in my hands, and I finished my letter by telling Vivian about this man and how I'd lied to him and how it had probably made his day. 

Our cruise went on. We made port in Alaska in an incredibly tiny town, and I went to its incredibly tiny post office and I mailed my letter south to Minnesota. And by the time Vivian had received it and responded and sent it back off, I was home in Massachusetts. I started checking the mailbox for that letter probably four days before it could have reasonably arrived. I sincerely hope that all of you have had the experience of getting a proper letter. Not a billing statement or a Christmas card, [audience laughter] but a letter for you, because it's the best feeling in the world. 

I loved getting letters from Vivian, because I thought she wrote about her life in the best way possible. She was interesting, and she was a photographer and sometimes she'd send me her pictures. She hated the suburbs that she was in. They were inexplicably worse than the one she'd left me in. She hated Minnesota. She called all the lakes, lesions. [audience laughter] And that letter arrived and I walked back up the driveway like I was flying. I read it. It was exactly what you would expect someone between the summer of 9th and 10th grade to write.

It was a lot about her life. At the end she said this. She said, "And Emma, about what you told that man on the boat that you were writing a letter, a love letter, I don't think that's a stretch at all, because that's exactly what I feel when I get these letters from you. It's love." This was [chuckles] way before I ever came out to myself and it was even longer before I came out to anybody else. [audience chuckle] I was in my success stage where there were women in my life that I deeply wanted to do the best in everything they ever wanted to do in their lives. I wanted them to succeed.

And now and later, I guess being able to look back on that correspondence, I can look at those letters and see that we loved each other without knowing it. And in a way that I think of as like, sincerely endemic to the suburbs and to youth. It was like a love that was without ambition or outcome. By the time either of us could have possibly acknowledged that it was happening, it was like past the moment where it would have mattered, and been actionable and just into this moment of once love that we really happily resided in for another five or six years.

We stopped being pen pals in senior year of college. And that was okay. When I think back on that written relationship and the way that it existed in my life, I think what I'm most grateful for is that old man and his sparkling eyes [audience chuckles] and his question that I would have never asked myself in that moment. And it gave me one chance in the time that I was writing those letters to say exactly what I intended to be putting into them, which was love.

[cheers and applause] 

Sarah: [00:12:45] Emma Becker is a Massachusetts transplant who's currently living in Atlanta working for an e-commerce company. A true progeny of the liberal arts and a new fan of Fried Green Tomatoes, she fills her free time with good books and farmers markets. Emma is still pen-pals with some of the friends she's met in her travels over the years. She says, "I'm still a firm believer in the letter as a form of communication. It's a unique opportunity to say everything you want to say exactly as you want to say it." To see photos from Emma's trip to Alaska and some of the letters she mentioned in her story, check out our website, themoth.org. 

Our last storyteller in this episode, all about moments of truth, is Kathleen Sheffer. She told this at a StorySLAM in San Francisco, where the theme of the night was Do Over. Here's Kathleen, live at The Moth.

[cheers and applause] 

Kathleen: [00:13:46] So, last May, I was sitting in Union Square talking to my friend Austin, and I was telling him that I would never get a heart lung transplant. It was a treatment option for the disease that I had, pulmonary hypertension. But it was so unappealing, because my immune system would be compromised for the rest of my life. I'd take a lot of medication. I'd have to wear a mask in crowds. I had friends who had gotten transplants before. Some of them were doing well, some of them weren't. The survival statistics weren't that great and I was 23. 

A few days later, I got on a plane and flew to Seattle for a photography job. But I never made it to the job, because I woke up in my friend's apartment and I was wheezing. I couldn't catch my breath. I was coughing up blood in her toilet. So, she called 911, I got in an ambulance, I called my parents. I texted my sister to tell her that I loved her, because I didn't know if I would be alive when she read that text. So, when my doctors at Stanford called me in Seattle and said that it was time to be listed for a transplant, it sounded like a pretty good option. [audience chuckle] I couldn't walk around a block on four liters of oxygen. And so, I was listed at Stanford. 

Usually, once you go active on the list, you wait for a year, three years. I had friends who are still waiting for transplants. I waited 28 days and then I got a call at 07:50 AM. I was woken up and went through a checklist with a Stanford employee who sounded more nervous than I do now. "No, I didn't have a cold. No, I hadn't received any recent blood transfusions. I could be at the hospital in two hours." My parents and my sister and I threw stuff in bags and got in the car, drove to Stanford. We got there at 10:00 AM and they said that my surgery was scheduled for noon that afternoon. So, we thought, okay, this is happening. 

But I didn't go downstairs. I didn't get wheeled to the operating room until 08:00 PM, so there was plenty of time for friends and family to arrive, for my dad to do the last IV medication pump change, and for us to spend a lot of time thinking about the people who were grieving while we were celebrating my new chance at life. 

By the time I went downstairs, I had 10 people to say goodbye to. We were walking in a parade of my hospital bed. [chuckles] And then, my parents waited outside the operating room doors with me. I chose that time to go over my last wishes with my mom, to give her my social media passwords, [audience laughter] it's important, okay, and discuss where donations should be sent in the event of my death, like, how they should have a party instead of a funeral, just normal things you talk about with your 23-year-old daughter. 

In the operating room, I ended up waiting two hours, because the organs were stuck in traffic. So, the anesthesiologist asked me what kind of music I wanted to listen to. [chuckles] So, I should also say, my heart rate was normally about 60 beats per minute. That day, it was 130 beats per minute and I could not calm down. So, I was trying to do some drawings to calm myself. I don't trust myself to choose the playlist for a party at my house. So, choosing the Pandora station for a room full of people tasked with keeping me alive for the next few hours was a whole new level of terrifying. [audience laughter] It might be the last thing that I listened to. [audience laughter] 

So it was stressful. Heart rate probably went up. But I chose Blind Pilot. And the only complaints [chuckles] coming from the room were about the anesthesiologist's lack of a paid subscription. [audience laughter] We listened to ads between songs. Then around 10:00 at night, they had visualized the organs. The surgeon said it was a go. They called my parents and said they were putting me under. At that point, I was really only concerned for the people in the waiting room, because I knew that my body would fight for me. I'd had open heart surgery as a baby and I knew I would keep going under anesthesia. 

So, last week, I celebrated 200 days post-transplant. 

[cheers and applause] 

And in December, I went ice skating with my friend Austin in Union Square. And yes, I am pretty shaky, because I am taking a lot of drugs. [audience laughter] I'm wearing a mask, but I'm really grateful for this second chance at life.

[cheers and applause] 

Sarah: [00:19:51] That was Kathleen Sheffer. Kathleen works as an event photographer in San Francisco, and she strives to make her subjects feel seen and loved. Since telling her story, Kathleen has actually photographed five live events for The Moth. We wanted to hear more from Kathleen about her recovery and how she's doing. Here's Kathleen reading her response.

Kathleen: [00:20:13] In July, I will celebrate four years with a healthy heart and lungs gifted to me by my heroic organ donor. My donor family has received my letters of gratitude, but I don't know anything about my donor. I've recovered well from one episode of acute rejection and a couple of colds. My lung function remains in the 90th percentile for my age group. For the first time in my life, I've been able to exercise. 

In 2018, I summited Half Dome, and in 2019, I made it to the Mount Whitney Trail Camp at 12,000 ft before retreating from a hailstorm. When I had pulmonary hypertension, I had to stay below 4,000 ft altitude, so my world has really expanded upward. I feel beyond lucky to turn 27 this month and to be living a relatively normal life. I'm so grateful to have had a million more chances to tell my sister and my parents that I love them and to fall in love with my new partner.

Sarah: [00:21:15] That was Kathleen Sheffer. To see photos of the exciting days and hours before she received her new heart and lungs, and to check out some of Kathleen's own photography, go to our website, themoth.org. 

That's all for us this week. In this time of social distancing, we hope you'll check out more of our stories on our social media, YouTube and on our website. And parents and teachers, head to our blog for weekly storytelling lessons from our Education Department. We're posting a new story with a corresponding set of journal prompts, activities and reflection questions for you and the whole family to get involved in. You can find it all at all at themoth.org/dispatches every Tuesday and Friday. 

From all of us here at The Moth, we hope you're staying safe and healthy. Have a story-worthy week.

Julia: [00:22:06] Sarah Austin Jenness is The Moth's Executive Producer, and one of the hosts of The Moth Radio Hour. Over the years, she's worked with hundreds of people to craft personal stories. She also launched The Moth's Global Community Program, which elevates stories from South Asia and Africa to highlight world issues, including gender equality and public health.

Sarah: [00:22:27] Podcast production by Julia Purcell. The Moth Podcast is presented by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public at prx.org.