At the appointed time, her patients will dial in, and the 100-year-old psychologist will pick up the phone. Increasingly hard of hearing, she presses her cordless handset tightly to her ear. She is partly blind, and can no longer rely on reading her own notes. For 45 minutes, several times a week, she listens intently to the pains and conundrums of clients who have come to depend on her counsel.
Sometime after the Covid-19 pandemic, when all of her sessions went remote, the psychologist, Marcia Brenner, started to notice an upsetting tendency. She’d find herself asking for details about her patients’ lives that she once knew so intimately. This loss of memory may be the most painful affliction she has suffered in her very long life.
“It’s terribly frustrating, but there’s nothing I can do except to say, ‘Remind me, tell me again, repeat that,’” Dr. Brenner said. “I do the best I can not to display my distress.”
And yet she feels she would let her patients down if she retired.
“It goes back to an Eastern European hospitality thing,” her son Evan Brenner said, referring to the family’s heritage in the Minsk region of what is now Belarus. “You don’t say no to a guest or somebody asking for help.”
A home health aide who helps Dr. Brenner with scheduling and billing said that when the psychologist was in the hospital with a broken hip, patients called to ask when she would return.
And so she continues with her weekly therapy sessions. “It’s an effort,” Dr. Brenner said. “But I automatically get into a work mode. When I’m into a session, I can be my old self.”
Over Passover weekend in April, just before her 100th birthday, family members milled around as she sat on a sofa in her vast, rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. She wore a leopard-print top and eyeliner, with her nails painted a subtle shade of coral, a petite matriarch with her grandchildren nestled beside her.
She had been asked to tell the story of King, the smart dog who regularly took the elevator from the 14th floor to walk himself, and everyone was doing their best to help fill in the gaps, including the time he was feared gone forever until he was found begging for scraps at the butcher.
And what about the caper with Harriet the parrot? Her son Daniel Brenner prepared to tell it, warning, “It’s a long one.”
“I have time,” his mother said.
Daniel, a psychiatrist himself, is convinced that she still has the gifts that made her so valuable to her patients.
“She comes to life as she listens,” he said. “Good psychotherapy is about paying attention to what’s happening now, not what happened last week. She gives incredibly practical advice.”
But he said her memory had gotten noticeably worse in the past two years. It was probably not Alzheimer’s, since she was keenly aware of it, he added. It was a mystery that silly songs in Yiddish were easy to recall, but deeper, personal memories seemed to be eroding. What she remembered about an early, painful marriage was how much she wanted a divorce when she was living in Israel — was that 75 years ago? And why was she in Israel anyway?
When Dr. Brenner mentioned her 100th birthday to acquaintances, she said they all pretended it was positive. “Oh, how wonderful!” she said, mockingly. Brooklyn-born, she added an effective swear word.
Dr. Brenner’s patients are decades younger than she is and continue to refer other potential clients to her, whom she now declines. At the height of her career, she worked 40 hours a week. The dilemmas she listens to, she said, are basically unchanged over the decades: depression, loneliness, relationship issues.
Was there ever a problem too intractable to treat?
“Low intelligence,” she said. “You can’t do anything.”
She has outlived countless patients in her 62 years of practice, but she could not recall ever dropping one, and always maintained a flexible payment system for those without insurance.
“I probably still owe her money,” Candice Belanoff, 56, a former patient, said. Her years of talk therapy, from 1998 to 2004, began as she was winding down from playing electric bass in a fairly successful punk-pop band, Walt Mink. Her income was minimal despite touring and making records. Ready for a change, she said Dr. Brenner had given her the “kick in the pants” she needed, nudging her to go to graduate school, to marry a nice guy, to have a baby.
Professor Belanoff ultimately received a doctoral degree at Harvard and is now a clinical associate professor of public health at Boston University. “I know that Marcia worked with a lot of struggling musicians and artists and is a repository of all of these people’s quandaries and quirks and peccadilloes,” she said. “Maybe that’s why she’s still working, because we all owe her money.”
Healthy habits have doubtlessly helped Dr. Brenner endure: regular exercise, home cooking, a varied diet, little alcohol, lots of friends. Vitamin supplements were another priority, about 20 daily, until doctors advised her to reduce her intake. “What is this hunger to live longer?” Dr. Brenner wondered. “Being 100 was never a goal.”
But losing memories is simply beyond her control. “When the loss increases every day, it’s no fun, especially when you’re aware of what you’ve lost,” she said. “And I can tell you that I’m aware of it every moment. And so, each day you wake up and think, What the hell is the point?”
She still has her husband, Marlin Brenner, known as Buzz, who is just 96. He is also a psychologist, with one remaining patient.
They met while studying at Teachers College, Columbia University, where they both earned doctorates, and married in 1963. Their apartment’s white walls are vivid with Buzz’s abstract canvases. In 2021, at 90, he published a book, “The Therapist Within,” inviting readers to explore self-analysis.
A Steinway baby grand sits in a corner of the living room, but macular degeneration has prevented Dr. Brenner from playing it because she can’t read the sheet music anymore. The piano, she said, was a gift from her mother, who pushed her to practice when she was growing up in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
Her parents were first-generation immigrants, fleeing antisemitism in Russia. The year Marcia Schwartzburg was born, 1925, Calvin Coolidge was the president, The New Yorker magazine was new and “Mrs. Dalloway,” “The Great Gatsby” and the first volume of “Mein Kampf” were published.
After World War II, having finished her undergraduate studies at Brooklyn College, she moved to Jerusalem. Her mother’s unpublished memoir said that it seemed like a good idea to send Masha, as she was then called, to graduate school there. Then the first Arab-Israeli War broke out in 1948, and her parents beseeched her to come home. She refused.
“I remember that you escaped bombings and bullets,” her nephew Ori Schwartzburg prompted her. “You rescued some teenagers who were trapped under fire.”
His aunt looked interested, as if she were hearing the story for the first time.
“You told me a story about working on codes and ciphers,” he continued.
Dr. Brenner seemed to expand with the memory. “I was in the intelligence service of the Haganah,” she agreed. “I never had a gun and did not wear a uniform.” But she could not recall how she got involved in a paramilitary arm of the Israel Defense Forces. It might have had something to do with owning a Hallicrafter radio.
In Israel, she married a man whom she worked with who was a playwright and a politician.
“He was very important, and I wanted very much to marry him,” Dr. Brenner said. Then she added, with some vehemence, “And I wanted very much to divorce him.”
It was unclear if Buzz could hear her.
Surrounded by her family, all of them voluble and happy in the swirl of activity in the apartment, Dr. Brenner seemed to exert a quiet gravitational pull.
“Getting older at some point in life involves losing rather than gaining wisdom,” she had observed earlier. “And at that point in life, I would start to think about not wanting to live too much longer.”
She did not seem particularly bothered by this revelation. “I’ve accepted change,” she said. “I have no other option.”
Her son Daniel launched into a macabre lullaby his mother had taught him, and she buoyantly joined in, remembering every line:
Last night our little baby died
It died committing suicide
Some say it was meningitis
But we know it died just to spite us
It was a lousy baby anyhow
It cost us forty dollars.
Family members erupted with laughter and tried to get her to repeat some Yiddish jokes they loved, but she drew a blank. She was tired.
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