LORI GORDON

GORDON LORI HEYMAN GORDON Creator and Founder of PAIRS Lori Gordon, the creator and founder of PAIRS, a comprehensive education program designed to nurture and sustain healthy relationships on behalf of a safer, saner and more loving world, died peacefully Thursday morning at her home in Bethesda, Maryland. She was 90 years old. Ms. Gordon was the daughter of Julius and Bertha (Hahn) Heyman, and grew up in Staten Island, New York. Her father died suddenly from a heart attack when she was 15, and her mother died from cancer a year and a half later while Lori was still in high school. Determined, she finished high school and was accepted by Cornell University. In her sophomore year, she met and then married a law student after a three-month courtship. In 1950 she graduated from Cornell and they moved to the Washington, DC area. While raising four children, she went back to school and in 1963 received a Masters degree from the Catholic University School of Social Work, after which she pursued a lifelong passion in marriage and family therapy. She developed a very successful counseling practice and brought leading therapists from around the country to teach locally. In 1975, she was invited to become an adjunct professor at American University for a new graduate program on marriage and family relationships. It was there that she developed a 120-hour course for couples, which she called PAIRS (Practical Application of Intimate Relationship Skills), that was eventually taught to over a thousand therapists throughout the United States and internationally. The mission of PAIRS was to teach those attitudes, emotional understandings, and behaviors that nurture and sustain healthy relationships. It was one of the first comprehensive education programs in the United States designed to use relationship education to reduce breakdowns in relationships. The program continues today. In 2018 the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs licensed rights to make a version of Gordon's PAIRS program accessible to every Veteran family in America. VA chaplains and behavioral health professionals are actively involved in that endeavor, which is known in the VA system as Warrior to Soul Mate. Ms. Gordon's first marriage ended in divorce, but her second marriage, to Rabbi Morris Gordon in September 1982, was a true marriage of soul mates. They explored, taught, counseled and crusaded together. As Lori described Morris, he "makes possible the impossible and probable the improbable." In 1993, Ms. Gordon published her first book, Passage to Intimacy. In reviewing the book Clifford Sager, the Director of Marital and Family Therapy at New York Hospital - Cornell Medical Center, wrote, "After 40 years as a psychiatrist and marital therapist, the PAIRS program is my most valuable professional and personal tool." In 1996, she published her second book, Love Knots, which Harold Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, described as, "A treasure trove of liberating wisdom." Ms. Gordon lived her later years traveling between Virginia and Florida, where she became close friends with two neighbors, Jennifer Lanzillo and Tammy Blake, who watched over her. She returned to Bethesda in November 2018 to be closer to family. She loved her new home at Foxhill, where she was able to visit with her daughter-in-law, Lisa every day and son, Jon every weekend. She celebrated her 90th birthday in February at which time she remarked how young she felt and how happy she was to be surrounded by family and friends. Ms. Gordon is survived by four children, Jon, David, Seth, and Beth, their spouses. Lisa, Fran, Stephanie, and Daniel, 10 grandchildren, Lauren, Evan, Adam, Benjamin, Joshua, Sara, Jessica, Alex, Michael, and Zachary, and missed by her much-loved dogs, Daisy and Lady. Her late husband, Morris, was with her in spirit until the very end. They are survived by his daughter, Arlene, son, Albee, son-in-law, Ami, two grandchildren, Rani and Dana, Inbar (the wife of their late grandson, Guy), and great-grandchildren. Memorial services will be held at Washington Hebrew Congregation, 3935 Macomb Street, N.W., Washington, DC on Monday, March 25, at 10 a.m. Shiva will be held at the residence of Jon Eisenberg and Lisa Hicks Monday evening from 5 to 8 p.m. at 5300 Mohican Road, Bethesda, Maryland. Should friends desire, contributions may be sent to the Jewish National Fund, JewishNationalFund@jnf.org or the Montgomery County Humane Society, donations@mchumane.org.