Delejos

June 7, 2024·27 min·2 clips

Jose was assaulted walking home, his head hitting the sidewalk with such force he lost consciousness.

The episode opens with Julie interviewing her father about how he is experiencing anticipatory grief while caring for his dying mother, contrasting his experience with what Julie went through. Julie then narrates how she met Jose Zambrano, a Venezuelan-born virtual reality game designer, through Instagram in July 2019. Despite initial reluctance, she was drawn in when he appeared at her Brooklyn stand-up show and repeated every joke he liked. He called their outings adventures, numbered them 1 through 30, and planned activities including drawing naked people at a WeWork art class, touring Brooklyn's best fried chicken sandwiches, and starting a band named Julie and Jose's Fever Dream. Jose had fled Venezuela at 16 with his father due to tensions with the Chavez government, leaving behind his mother and half his family. Just four months after they met, on November 17, 2019, Jose was attacked at 4:30 a.m. by two men who asked him for a cigarette and assaulted him when he refused. His head hit the sidewalk with enough force to require two emergency brain surgeries at Bellevue Hospital. Friends and family flew in from Boston, Miami, and Venezuela. Jose's mother, whom he had not seen since fleeing a decade earlier, was reunited with him at his bedside. Julie began writing notes in her phone to share with him when he woke up, documenting everything happening around him. Jose died while Julie held one hand and his mother held the other. The night after, his roommates hosted a gathering that became a spontaneous party; Julie eventually slipped away to breathe in the smell of Jose's dirty laundry. In the months following, the clinical images of his death began to crowd out her memories of him alive. She began writing and recording everything she knew about Jose, eventually building a full one-woman show in her mother's basement called De Lejos, the name of a virtual reality game Jose had designed to explore his longing for Venezuela. She performed it 25 times over 16 months to over 1,000 people online during the pandemic. Jose's father, roommates, and mother all attended. Repeating the story changed her memories: she no longer pictured him dying, but as she had drawn him in her sketchbook. The episode ends with Julie and her father hiking to a mountain chapel in Puerto Rico near her dying grandmother, reflecting on why humans write down beliefs and build monuments to hold on to people after they are gone.

As heard by us

A grief story that turns memory, objects, and invention into a moving portrait of loss.

De Lejos keeps returning to grief without flattening it. Julie revisits Jose after his death, and the piece follows him through the things he left behind, from the hospital bed to the virtual reality game he had been building about reaching Venezuela.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want grief told through objects, invention, and the body.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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