Robert Allen (Deck) Deckert was born on 16 February 1935 in Southington, Connecticut, one of three children. His childhood and youth were lived in the days of Depression-era America and the years of the Second World War, which left lasting values embedded in him. One of the few people in his extended family to do so, he went to college and earned a Bachelor's degree - he was initially interested in physics but quickly realized that the math involved raised that bar rather high so in the end emerged with a BA in Psychology from UConn, the University of Connecticut.
Circumstances led him to abandon the
Northeast and follow his parents down into Florida, where he lived for more than forty years, carving out a career as a newsman in a number of regional papers. His first marriage gave him a ready-made family (his wife brought in two children from a previous relationship) followed by another son in the early 1970s. That marriage ended in divorce, and then the death of his first wife from cancer not long after that.
Deck retired from active employment in the newsroom to raise his son, turning to freelance work in order to be home for him. He became active in the early BBS message boards on computers, and then segued into what became known as Usenet, a knot of topic-based newsgroups where he quickly made a home in one particular one, known as
misc.writing, and became something of an elder statesman there. Lasting friendships from those days endured to the end of his life, changing vessels several times as social media evolved, and friends from thirty years before from the BBS era were present to witness his passing as we entered the second decade of the twenty first century - on 1 February 2021.
Misc.writing was the stage where he met his second wife, online, and pursued a long-distance courtship over several years. Many were skeptical of this relationship because of the age gap between him and his lady who was 28 years younger than him - but it was a meeting of soulmates, and the chronology was unimportant. They were married in July of 2000, and shared more than twenty years of solid happiness until Deck's death in 2021.
The Deckerts moved to Washington state in 2003, and four months to the day after their arrival there he was felled by a massive stroke which necessitated intensive care in the hospital and then an extended period of therapy and rehabilitation - but despite being left disabled, with his right side severely impaired, he fought his way through every obstacle in his way and returned home to take up all the domestic duties that had been part of the promise made to his writer wife - "you write, and I will cook and clean". He also promised her coffee in bed every morning - and aside for a brief period where he was physically unable to fulfill this task he returned to it as soon as he could and brought that coffee cup in for her every morning as she woke up. His recovery from his stroke was a small miracle, and he received "re-birthday" cards every year in June to mark the passing anniversary - and he would have "turned" eighteen in June 2021.
He was hospitalized for a badly-healing leg wound on 16 November 2020, and then, two days before he was due to return home after a short therapy-and-rehabilitation stint in a small regional hospital where he was sent for recovery, suffered a heart attack that left him clinically dead until he was revived by heavy-duty CPR. He was referred to the ICU of the major regional hospital and the cardiac ward of that hospital; several angioplasty procedures were performed, and then the insertion of a pacemaker, and then he was (in the era of Covid) placed in a nursing home for further therapy and rehab. The home quarantined him, separating him from his wife for two weeks without any physical contact permitted at all, and his health issues began to accumulate, interfering with his physical therapy and rendering him weaker and weaker. A critical decline in his potassium levels sent him back to the hospital in January of 2021, and he never left it again, except to be transported to the Bellingham Hospice House on the afternoon of 31 January 2021 where he passed in the early hours of the following morning.
Deck was a well-loved, respected, and deeply appreciated man - a good friend, an outspoken liberal, a beloved teacher (he taught life writing classes in Florida for decades), someone who loved people and was always ready to believe the good about them. He was courteous and kind, gentle, strong, stubborn, had a wicked sense of humor and a way of crying in sad movies. He was in love with the skies, and flew his own plane for a time, a beloved Stinson which he never forgot; he also jumped out of perfectly good airplanes, having acquired a taste for skydiving. He loved reading, honesty, bravery, imagination, stories, science fiction and an enduring vision of a brave new world to come. His was one of the great souls, compassionate and understanding, capable of enormous love. His life's mantra - which his wife promised to carve into his grave marker - was "it isn't insurmountable" - right until, one day, it was.
Deck is survived by many friends, descendants, and an older sister (his brother predeceased him a few years ago). He was friend, partner, webmaster, editor, cheering squad, protector, and great love to his wife of twenty years, and will leave a huge hole behind by his absence. He will be missed by many, always.
Robert (Deck) Deckert
16 February 1935 - 1 February 2021
This obituary was written by his wife, writer Alma Alexander, I have used it with her permission.
I met Deck online in 1992 on a local BBS. I was using the online handle Teardropp. He asked why I chose such a sad handle, I replied it depends on how you look at it. And our friendship was born. We would chat online for several months before I met him in person. After meeting him in person we could sit in his office chatting for hours. One day he told me he met a lady. I asked him to tell me about her, he replied you can read the book. Then a few years later I look him up and he tells me he married the lady he met. So I drove up to their house, before they left south Florida and met her. I could see the love they shared. I will be forever grateful to have known this gentleman I met online at a time when there weren't very many of those out there in cyberspace.
Teardropp
Circumstances led him to abandon the
Northeast and follow his parents down into Florida, where he lived for more than forty years, carving out a career as a newsman in a number of regional papers. His first marriage gave him a ready-made family (his wife brought in two children from a previous relationship) followed by another son in the early 1970s. That marriage ended in divorce, and then the death of his first wife from cancer not long after that.
Deck retired from active employment in the newsroom to raise his son, turning to freelance work in order to be home for him. He became active in the early BBS message boards on computers, and then segued into what became known as Usenet, a knot of topic-based newsgroups where he quickly made a home in one particular one, known as
misc.writing, and became something of an elder statesman there. Lasting friendships from those days endured to the end of his life, changing vessels several times as social media evolved, and friends from thirty years before from the BBS era were present to witness his passing as we entered the second decade of the twenty first century - on 1 February 2021.
Misc.writing was the stage where he met his second wife, online, and pursued a long-distance courtship over several years. Many were skeptical of this relationship because of the age gap between him and his lady who was 28 years younger than him - but it was a meeting of soulmates, and the chronology was unimportant. They were married in July of 2000, and shared more than twenty years of solid happiness until Deck's death in 2021.
The Deckerts moved to Washington state in 2003, and four months to the day after their arrival there he was felled by a massive stroke which necessitated intensive care in the hospital and then an extended period of therapy and rehabilitation - but despite being left disabled, with his right side severely impaired, he fought his way through every obstacle in his way and returned home to take up all the domestic duties that had been part of the promise made to his writer wife - "you write, and I will cook and clean". He also promised her coffee in bed every morning - and aside for a brief period where he was physically unable to fulfill this task he returned to it as soon as he could and brought that coffee cup in for her every morning as she woke up. His recovery from his stroke was a small miracle, and he received "re-birthday" cards every year in June to mark the passing anniversary - and he would have "turned" eighteen in June 2021.
He was hospitalized for a badly-healing leg wound on 16 November 2020, and then, two days before he was due to return home after a short therapy-and-rehabilitation stint in a small regional hospital where he was sent for recovery, suffered a heart attack that left him clinically dead until he was revived by heavy-duty CPR. He was referred to the ICU of the major regional hospital and the cardiac ward of that hospital; several angioplasty procedures were performed, and then the insertion of a pacemaker, and then he was (in the era of Covid) placed in a nursing home for further therapy and rehab. The home quarantined him, separating him from his wife for two weeks without any physical contact permitted at all, and his health issues began to accumulate, interfering with his physical therapy and rendering him weaker and weaker. A critical decline in his potassium levels sent him back to the hospital in January of 2021, and he never left it again, except to be transported to the Bellingham Hospice House on the afternoon of 31 January 2021 where he passed in the early hours of the following morning.
Deck was a well-loved, respected, and deeply appreciated man - a good friend, an outspoken liberal, a beloved teacher (he taught life writing classes in Florida for decades), someone who loved people and was always ready to believe the good about them. He was courteous and kind, gentle, strong, stubborn, had a wicked sense of humor and a way of crying in sad movies. He was in love with the skies, and flew his own plane for a time, a beloved Stinson which he never forgot; he also jumped out of perfectly good airplanes, having acquired a taste for skydiving. He loved reading, honesty, bravery, imagination, stories, science fiction and an enduring vision of a brave new world to come. His was one of the great souls, compassionate and understanding, capable of enormous love. His life's mantra - which his wife promised to carve into his grave marker - was "it isn't insurmountable" - right until, one day, it was.
Deck is survived by many friends, descendants, and an older sister (his brother predeceased him a few years ago). He was friend, partner, webmaster, editor, cheering squad, protector, and great love to his wife of twenty years, and will leave a huge hole behind by his absence. He will be missed by many, always.
Robert (Deck) Deckert
16 February 1935 - 1 February 2021
This obituary was written by his wife, writer Alma Alexander, I have used it with her permission.
I met Deck online in 1992 on a local BBS. I was using the online handle Teardropp. He asked why I chose such a sad handle, I replied it depends on how you look at it. And our friendship was born. We would chat online for several months before I met him in person. After meeting him in person we could sit in his office chatting for hours. One day he told me he met a lady. I asked him to tell me about her, he replied you can read the book. Then a few years later I look him up and he tells me he married the lady he met. So I drove up to their house, before they left south Florida and met her. I could see the love they shared. I will be forever grateful to have known this gentleman I met online at a time when there weren't very many of those out there in cyberspace.
Teardropp
Robert Allen (Deck) Deckert was born on 16 February 1935 in Southington, Connecticut, one of three children. His childhood and youth were lived in the days of Depression-era America and the years of the Second World War, which left lasting values embedded in him. One of the few people in his extended family to do so, he went to college and earned a Bachelor's degree - he was initially interested in physics but quickly realized that the math involved raised that bar rather high so in the end emerged with a BA in Psychology from UConn, the University of Connecticut.
Circumstances led him to abandon the
Northeast and follow his parents down into Florida, where he lived for more than forty years, carving out a career as a newsman in a number of regional papers. His first marriage gave him a ready-made family (his wife brought in two children from a previous relationship) followed by another son in the early 1970s. That marriage ended in divorce, and then the death of his first wife from cancer not long after that.
Deck retired from active employment in the newsroom to raise his son, turning to freelance work in order to be home for him. He became active in the early BBS message boards on computers, and then segued into what became known as Usenet, a knot of topic-based newsgroups where he quickly made a home in one particular one, known as
misc.writing, and became something of an elder statesman there. Lasting friendships from those days endured to the end of his life, changing vessels several times as social media evolved, and friends from thirty years before from the BBS era were present to witness his passing as we entered the second decade of the twenty first century - on 1 February 2021.
Misc.writing was the stage where he met his second wife, online, and pursued a long-distance courtship over several years. Many were skeptical of this relationship because of the age gap between him and his lady who was 28 years younger than him - but it was a meeting of soulmates, and the chronology was unimportant. They were married in July of 2000, and shared more than twenty years of solid happiness until Deck's death in 2021.
The Deckerts moved to Washington state in 2003, and four months to the day after their arrival there he was felled by a massive stroke which necessitated intensive care in the hospital and then an extended period of therapy and rehabilitation - but despite being left disabled, with his right side severely impaired, he fought his way through every obstacle in his way and returned home to take up all the domestic duties that had been part of the promise made to his writer wife - "you write, and I will cook and clean". He also promised her coffee in bed every morning - and aside for a brief period where he was physically unable to fulfill this task he returned to it as soon as he could and brought that coffee cup in for her every morning as she woke up. His recovery from his stroke was a small miracle, and he received "re-birthday" cards every year in June to mark the passing anniversary - and he would have "turned" eighteen in June 2021.
He was hospitalized for a badly-healing leg wound on 16 November 2020, and then, two days before he was due to return home after a short therapy-and-rehabilitation stint in a small regional hospital where he was sent for recovery, suffered a heart attack that left him clinically dead until he was revived by heavy-duty CPR. He was referred to the ICU of the major regional hospital and the cardiac ward of that hospital; several angioplasty procedures were performed, and then the insertion of a pacemaker, and then he was (in the era of Covid) placed in a nursing home for further therapy and rehab. The home quarantined him, separating him from his wife for two weeks without any physical contact permitted at all, and his health issues began to accumulate, interfering with his physical therapy and rendering him weaker and weaker. A critical decline in his potassium levels sent him back to the hospital in January of 2021, and he never left it again, except to be transported to the Bellingham Hospice House on the afternoon of 31 January 2021 where he passed in the early hours of the following morning.
Deck was a well-loved, respected, and deeply appreciated man - a good friend, an outspoken liberal, a beloved teacher (he taught life writing classes in Florida for decades), someone who loved people and was always ready to believe the good about them. He was courteous and kind, gentle, strong, stubborn, had a wicked sense of humor and a way of crying in sad movies. He was in love with the skies, and flew his own plane for a time, a beloved Stinson which he never forgot; he also jumped out of perfectly good airplanes, having acquired a taste for skydiving. He loved reading, honesty, bravery, imagination, stories, science fiction and an enduring vision of a brave new world to come. His was one of the great souls, compassionate and understanding, capable of enormous love. His life's mantra - which his wife promised to carve into his grave marker - was "it isn't insurmountable" - right until, one day, it was.
Deck is survived by many friends, descendants, and an older sister (his brother predeceased him a few years ago). He was friend, partner, webmaster, editor, cheering squad, protector, and great love to his wife of twenty years, and will leave a huge hole behind by his absence. He will be missed by many, always.
Robert (Deck) Deckert
16 February 1935 - 1 February 2021
This obituary was written by his wife, writer Alma Alexander, I have used it with her permission.
I met Deck online in 1992 on a local BBS. I was using the online handle Teardropp. He asked why I chose such a sad handle, I replied it depends on how you look at it. And our friendship was born. We would chat online for several months before I met him in person. After meeting him in person we could sit in his office chatting for hours. One day he told me he met a lady. I asked him to tell me about her, he replied you can read the book. Then a few years later I look him up and he tells me he married the lady he met. So I drove up to their house, before they left south Florida and met her. I could see the love they shared. I will be forever grateful to have known this gentleman I met online at a time when there weren't very many of those out there in cyberspace.
Teardropp
Circumstances led him to abandon the
Northeast and follow his parents down into Florida, where he lived for more than forty years, carving out a career as a newsman in a number of regional papers. His first marriage gave him a ready-made family (his wife brought in two children from a previous relationship) followed by another son in the early 1970s. That marriage ended in divorce, and then the death of his first wife from cancer not long after that.
Deck retired from active employment in the newsroom to raise his son, turning to freelance work in order to be home for him. He became active in the early BBS message boards on computers, and then segued into what became known as Usenet, a knot of topic-based newsgroups where he quickly made a home in one particular one, known as
misc.writing, and became something of an elder statesman there. Lasting friendships from those days endured to the end of his life, changing vessels several times as social media evolved, and friends from thirty years before from the BBS era were present to witness his passing as we entered the second decade of the twenty first century - on 1 February 2021.
Misc.writing was the stage where he met his second wife, online, and pursued a long-distance courtship over several years. Many were skeptical of this relationship because of the age gap between him and his lady who was 28 years younger than him - but it was a meeting of soulmates, and the chronology was unimportant. They were married in July of 2000, and shared more than twenty years of solid happiness until Deck's death in 2021.
The Deckerts moved to Washington state in 2003, and four months to the day after their arrival there he was felled by a massive stroke which necessitated intensive care in the hospital and then an extended period of therapy and rehabilitation - but despite being left disabled, with his right side severely impaired, he fought his way through every obstacle in his way and returned home to take up all the domestic duties that had been part of the promise made to his writer wife - "you write, and I will cook and clean". He also promised her coffee in bed every morning - and aside for a brief period where he was physically unable to fulfill this task he returned to it as soon as he could and brought that coffee cup in for her every morning as she woke up. His recovery from his stroke was a small miracle, and he received "re-birthday" cards every year in June to mark the passing anniversary - and he would have "turned" eighteen in June 2021.
He was hospitalized for a badly-healing leg wound on 16 November 2020, and then, two days before he was due to return home after a short therapy-and-rehabilitation stint in a small regional hospital where he was sent for recovery, suffered a heart attack that left him clinically dead until he was revived by heavy-duty CPR. He was referred to the ICU of the major regional hospital and the cardiac ward of that hospital; several angioplasty procedures were performed, and then the insertion of a pacemaker, and then he was (in the era of Covid) placed in a nursing home for further therapy and rehab. The home quarantined him, separating him from his wife for two weeks without any physical contact permitted at all, and his health issues began to accumulate, interfering with his physical therapy and rendering him weaker and weaker. A critical decline in his potassium levels sent him back to the hospital in January of 2021, and he never left it again, except to be transported to the Bellingham Hospice House on the afternoon of 31 January 2021 where he passed in the early hours of the following morning.
Deck was a well-loved, respected, and deeply appreciated man - a good friend, an outspoken liberal, a beloved teacher (he taught life writing classes in Florida for decades), someone who loved people and was always ready to believe the good about them. He was courteous and kind, gentle, strong, stubborn, had a wicked sense of humor and a way of crying in sad movies. He was in love with the skies, and flew his own plane for a time, a beloved Stinson which he never forgot; he also jumped out of perfectly good airplanes, having acquired a taste for skydiving. He loved reading, honesty, bravery, imagination, stories, science fiction and an enduring vision of a brave new world to come. His was one of the great souls, compassionate and understanding, capable of enormous love. His life's mantra - which his wife promised to carve into his grave marker - was "it isn't insurmountable" - right until, one day, it was.
Deck is survived by many friends, descendants, and an older sister (his brother predeceased him a few years ago). He was friend, partner, webmaster, editor, cheering squad, protector, and great love to his wife of twenty years, and will leave a huge hole behind by his absence. He will be missed by many, always.
Robert (Deck) Deckert
16 February 1935 - 1 February 2021
This obituary was written by his wife, writer Alma Alexander, I have used it with her permission.
I met Deck online in 1992 on a local BBS. I was using the online handle Teardropp. He asked why I chose such a sad handle, I replied it depends on how you look at it. And our friendship was born. We would chat online for several months before I met him in person. After meeting him in person we could sit in his office chatting for hours. One day he told me he met a lady. I asked him to tell me about her, he replied you can read the book. Then a few years later I look him up and he tells me he married the lady he met. So I drove up to their house, before they left south Florida and met her. I could see the love they shared. I will be forever grateful to have known this gentleman I met online at a time when there weren't very many of those out there in cyberspace.
Teardropp
