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175. Writting to Reconnect: Uncovering the Truth About My Sister's Death -with Ona Gritz
69 Plays4 months ago
In this heartfelt episode, we chat with Ona Gritz , her new memoir, Everywhere I Look, won the Readers’ Choice Gold Award for Best Adult Book. We talk about her profound grief journey following the tragic loss of her sister, Angie. Ona unravels the mystery and tragedy of Angie’s murder and shares her own awakening to loss, grief, guilt, and the truth.
Ona Gritz holds a Master of Arts in poetry from the creative writing program at New York University. She is the author of August Or Forever, a Reader’s Choice and Wishing Shelf finalist in middle grade fiction. Her nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, The Guardian, The New York Times, River Teeth, The Rumpus, The Utne Reader, and been named Notable in The Best American Essays and Best of the Year in Salon. Her earlier books include On the Whole: A Story of Mothering and Disability and Geode, a finalist for the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. She won the Poetry Archive Now Worldview 2020 Competition and has received many other honors for her poems, which have been widely anthologized. Ona lives with her husband, writer Daniel Simpson, near Philadelphia. For more information, please visit her website: https://www.onagritz.com/.
To connect on social media: https://www.instagram.com/onagritz/
Contact Kendra Rinaldi to be a guest on the podcast or to find out more about her offerings:
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Transcript
Introduction to Grief and Loss
00:00:01
Speaker
You know, it was a grief journey in that in terms of like both being able to touch the grief that was already inside me, when fresh grief, learning just how hard her her life was in great detail and bearing witness to that. But it was also such an incredible healing journey because it felt like spending time with her.
Podcast Purpose and Guest Introduction
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between podcast. This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:00:54
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host. Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
00:01:16
Speaker
I am chatting with Ona Gritts. She is the author of Everywhere I Look. It's a book that she wrote inspired by her own grief journey and mourning process after the passing of her sister, Angie Andra. We'll be talking more about her own journey. You have a master's in poetry as well, and I could see that sprinkled throughout your book. I actually like wrote some of the pages. I'm like, oh, let's read this one too on the podcast. So
Ona Gritts' Background and Sister's Story
00:01:52
Speaker
it was wonderful. Welcome, Ona. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
00:01:56
Speaker
I am grateful for you being here and sharing your own journey, which started many years ago. And then the book has been part of this process for you. So I'd like to start off a little bit more about telling the listeners about your about you, your life. Where do you live now? Where did you grow up? And then we'll go from there. OK. Right now, I live just outside of Philadelphia. but I'm a transplanted New Yorker. I grew up in Queens, New York, and I was one of two daughters. And it it was a it was a difficult growing up in a lot of ways and and a lovely one in other ways. and
00:02:43
Speaker
I was the baby of the family and I was very beloved and very babied. And I adored my big sister and she had a much more difficult relationship with my parents. So she started leaving home when we were both still very young. She was a runaway at starting at about 12 years old when I was six. And so when she died violently in um 1982 at 19, I was so used to already missing her and in a sense already grieving her that it kind of complicated that whole experience for me and delayed it, delayed my ability to access my feelings.
00:03:31
Speaker
Yes, because it was something that you said, hold on, I'm trying to think of that part. Oh yes, I know what it was. That this is a little bit of that disassociation or say that there was parts of you that would kind of go into this place in general in your life that you'd always kind of go somewhere else, right? Yeah. Remind me in that part as I was, I'm trying to recall that part of it in what scenario it was that you would do this, that you'd kind of go into this part? i you know My sister has had this fabulous imagination and she taught me very early to play pretend games. And so when things got hard, when I was you know witnessing her not being treated well in the family, when things were confusing, I would just go into my imagination.
00:04:24
Speaker
and It was only when I made the decision that I wanted to to explore our story in this way and write this book that I realized that she wasn't the only one who ran away. I learned how to do it. I could be sitting in the room with you, but I was gone, which also was interesting in terms of memory. I don't have a good memory, which is a strange thing to say having just written a memoir. And at one point I thought, oh, well, maybe I should be hypnotized. Maybe I could have those memories back. But in fact, I wasn't present. So the memories weren't actually, I didn't actually live there because I wasn't in the moment. So the book became in part about that, about that.
00:05:16
Speaker
struggling for memory, having a kind of emotional amnesia that prevented me from remembering, from grieving, from holding on to her in the way that we hold on to the people we love and lose. Yes, you used this journey of finding out really what happened because she she did die very tragically and in the hands of others. We'll just put it that way because that is pretty it in in the intro. People could know that pretty much in the back. So we're not giving away.
00:05:50
Speaker
the whole story and it was not only her, but her child and her unborn child and her husband as well. And just the fact itself of just even how trauma itself works, right, to to disassociate even in those types of situations would also be very common and there's things within
Investigating Angie's Life
00:06:14
Speaker
that grief journey and again we're trying not to share everything in of the story as I mentioned to you that I noticed that you would do too is that you you could focus on like one aspect of it which was your sister but you you described and again your words were so eloquent the way something about like a thin piece of paper how you would describe
00:06:36
Speaker
trying to remember ray her husband, or ray wait like you're like it's as if it was like this yeah piece of paper or something like that, that you really could not access that emotion yet because the emotion itself of even your sister was already even too big for you. yeah Describe that a little bit. The image that I used in the book was that I needed to make my brother-in-law and my nephew as so thin as the photographs that were all I had of them. And it's true, I just almost erased them in my mind and focused on something that was already familiar, which was, Angie was gone again. Yeah. So yeah. Cause as, as a kid, then you're six years apart, your sister was 25 when she died. You were 19 and all your life pretty much you, since she had been running away since the age of 12 and in the
00:07:31
Speaker
book you'll, the readers at that moment, the listeners now, readers, when you read the book, you'll learn more of what even you discovered in your journey. It's really like an investigative narrative, but it's also a love story and a letter and a grief process, but you know, mourning because you're writing to her the whole book as you addressing Andra. and and And Andra Angie is the same person. So if we interchange that, it is the same person, so but which we'll go to that in a minute. So when you are in this process of years later, how many years later was it that you started? 30 years later,
00:08:12
Speaker
you starting to investigate more about her life and her upbringing, you find out things about her upbringing that you didn't know, which gives hints as to why it was you didn't see her when she was 12 or you didn't see her when she was 16 or you didn't write. So the the reader will get to know all that as well. And so tell us the and Andra and Angie, how did it how does she become Angie? And Andra was her birth name. Oh, actually complicated even more. and Her birth name is actually Andrea. And she was adopted into our family. She was born the day after the Andrea Doria sunk. And so the the story we grew up hearing was that her birth mother had named her Andrea after the sunken ship. And my mother
00:09:03
Speaker
When, before I was born, when Angie was three, I think, decided that maybe she wanted more ownership over naming the child, but she decided to shorten it to Andra. And another family story is, um, the day that she proposed this, my sister said, my name's not Al, my name is Aya. And her name was what, what is it? She pronounced it Aya. Oh, okay. And then. When at some point around the time that the Rolling Stones song came out, Angie, she called the house one day and said, from now on, I want to be Angie. And I don't remember specifically her saying it had to do with the song, but I always made that association. And in fact, my title comes from a line in that song.
00:10:00
Speaker
The title of your of your book. that yeah that were your for Yeah. Everywhere I look. And and the thing is that to the everywhere I look, you mentioned it at another part to within the book, if I'm not mistaken, it was the part of that. Everyone has something within their lives. that they sometimes don't know as well, right? Like that we we think that our lives are the only ones with a lot of drama sometimes, and then everywhere you look, everywhere, there is some other story to be found and uncovered. I think i believe you meant you kind of sneak that in there somewhere too with the title of the abddu id love what I remember.
00:10:48
Speaker
So you are now a mother, a wife, and you have now your own process. And you when you started investigating, you already had your son, Ethan, as well. So how was it for you starting to really unravel your grief? 30 years later, by finding out your your whole the whole story, how was it for you navigating your grief and at the same time parenting and also kind of taking your son and husband along since they had not met her? Yeah, that's a really good question. So Ethan, my son, was a teenager himself.
00:11:33
Speaker
and And I think that might've been part of what broke me open in terms of being ready to explore the story, be curious about the story, was realizing you know when when she was his age, she was sent away from home and and she had all these experiences that were really hard. And so i it's almost like the maternal person
Ona's Personal Reflection and Healing
00:12:00
Speaker
I was as a mother shifted so that I felt maternal towards her. And I had always been the little one and I had always looked up to her. And I also kind of got stuck at that age in terms of my thinking about her. You know, when I, the day that I saw it, I'm going to find out about this school that she had been sent to by my parents.
00:12:31
Speaker
it It was like a revelation that I actually had the capacity to do that. you know i I just thought about it the way I thought as a seven, eight year old girl, like it just was beyond me, but I was a librarian. Research was part of what I did for a living. And i I knew the name of the town. So all I had to do was call the public library and say, my sister was in a boarding school in your town in 1970. What might it have been? And that started the whole process. And once I found that out,
00:13:06
Speaker
I had to know everything. and And you really did dive deep into it. And not only with research of going to libraries, getting you know articles, newspaper articles, all these the kind of kind of things, but also reaching out to people, like as you were studying before, your own memory was not there necessarily of all these things. So you had to access the memory of others around you and long distance cousins or you know or or friends that they could remember or tell you more information as well. That's right. And you know our family, there was there were a lot of rifts in our family, so there were a lot of relatives we didn't even know.
00:13:50
Speaker
So why I had to lie sometimes, as I was a week with this one is what this one's the cousin or this one confused myself. that' but go ahead Yes. A lot of relatives. Yeah. So I found, I found our paternal cousins who I hadn't known growing up. And the amazing thing was they knew her before I did. So they could give me a picture of her early childhood. And then I had an aunt that I reached out to who was in in her mid eighties and. She knew the answer to some mysteries within the family. So I'm very lucky that I connected with her when I did, because she has since passed.
00:14:29
Speaker
um so and then And then in terms of the murders, I reached out to the prosecutor and I reached out to my brother-in-law's brother-law's brothers. And that was an amazing experience because it was a revelation to me again though it shouldn't have been, that that I wasn't the only one that this had happened to, you know that it impacted. I kind of carried it around as this little secret internal grief. And in fact, you know of course, Ray's brothers had the same grief that I had. The prosecutor worked really, really hard to make sure justice was served. There were so many people touched by it. And so I i spoke to quite a few
00:15:18
Speaker
And, you know, it was a grief journey in that in terms of like, both being able to touch the grief that was already inside me, when fresh grief, learning just how hard her life was in great detail and bearing witness to that. But it was also such an incredible healing journey because it felt like spending time with her.
00:15:47
Speaker
And just the fact of also writing to her as you're writing the book. That in itself is as if you're having this long conversation with your sister in this process as you're finding things out about her life. So tell us in terms of that, how did you choose to write your book or was it the other way around? Did you choose to first write to her and then it turned into a book or did you choose to write the book as if you're writing to her? What what came first? I chose to write the book.
00:16:23
Speaker
And I, for many years of a 10-year process of both researching and figuring out how to best tell it, i I didn't have it addressed to her at first. It was a more traditional narrative where I was talking about her life and referring to her as she But there was something missing. I wasn't getting close enough. And what was missing was me. My emotions, my revelations. And so once it was pointed out to me by by a really good reader that that wasn't there, at first I didn't know what to do about it. And then, you know, I do write poetry and I was in a workshop and I wrote a poem to Angie.
00:17:12
Speaker
which isn't an unusual thing to do, to write a poem, you know, that's a direct address, but it was like the light bulb went off and said, that's how I get close enough. So I wound up revising it and and it just became so much more intimate and so much more between the two of us, but not to exclude an audience because I think that intimacy is what readers look for when when you choose to to read memoir. you know to to experience somebody's life almost from the inside out. So I feel like that's what gave me the ability to do that and keith gave us back to each other in a certain way. Yes. that I have a sister who who died 27 years ago. And the way that I was 21 when she died, how I navigated my journey my grief process or my mourning process was by writing letters to her.
00:18:13
Speaker
So when I was reading your book and you talking to her and say, hey, you know, then and and and not like it just, it touched me because I remember that was the way that I myself had related to my own grief. process. It had been through writing, even though writing was not what I did per se. that was not it didn't but it was instinctive It was instinctive of how it was. I navigated my mic reef in that way. So when I was reading your book, I could really relate
00:18:43
Speaker
to that way of using writing as that tool. What other tools do you feel benefited you or that you realize now maybe that you had used in your grief journey that you didn't know were tools? Well, you know, what my parents didn't hold any kind of memorial when Angie died. And so there was no ritual around it. There was no talking about her or not very much. you know There was some about the crime and you know as it unfolded and the answers were coming to us, but not a lot of reminiscing. And so I feel like something I learned late in life is that talking about her was really important to me.
00:19:40
Speaker
and and doing the writing, but but but in that research period of you know reaching out to relatives and friends, it was just like, I was so hungry for conversation about her and to be able to share my memories, to be able to hear stories I didn't know, to the point where when I was given the some of the trial transcripts, I was amazed that there was so much personal information in there.
00:20:11
Speaker
because her friends were interviewed about you know how they were living and the defense attorney kind of looked at their lifestyle to sort of put the shift the blame on them, which was you know kind of an awful thing to do, but that's that's what they do. But but it it actually provided a gift for me because here I had these, first-person transcripts, people telling me, you know, I met her friend on on the page. i met I met this woman who helped her during her first pregnancy, got her to her doctor's appointments, taught her how to cook. I heard just anecdotes. And so even reading the transcripts felt healing because I got to spend time with her again.
00:21:01
Speaker
Yeah, you got to know her too because if she you were 19, she had been out of the house for a while. You'd probably talk on the phone every so often. It had been many years to some extent that you'd lived away from each other, one from the other. So you hearing who she was as an adult from other people's perspectives was was was a great way of you reconnecting. Now, in the years between you, her her death, and then you starting to really like dive into your grief and writing, how did you feel that you really not tapping into your grief affected your life? Does that is that question make sense? like how did you it Looking back, like how do you feel it affected you? You know, I had a lot of shame.
00:21:53
Speaker
around our growing up as the favored child, as the one who, you know, I got i i got the extra love and I, you know, as a little kid, I used it a little bit. but You know, I knew it if I tattled, she'd get in trouble. If she tattled, I wouldn't get in trouble, that kind of thing. And I i think because I didn't let myself feel the grief, the shame was that much louder. And so it was too hard to look at, I didn't want to look at who I was in that family. I didn't want to, you know, it's not like I, I did a good job of not looking at it. It was, it was almost as though I just put that aside, went on with my life as though it hadn't happened. But of course it was in there and it did a lot for my,
00:22:50
Speaker
my sense of myself. you know i i I would wake up in the morning and the first thing I would do just automatically is so it was the most natural thing, I would berate myself. you know I would just start thinking about all the things I felt I did wrong, I should do differently. And, you know, it was actually talking to one of Ray's brothers, her husband's brothers, who happened to be a both a psychologist and
Engagement with Grief and Healing
00:23:18
Speaker
a Vietnam vet who said, well, that's just PTSD. That's, you know, that's survivor-built.
00:23:24
Speaker
I didn't know that, you know? and And the other thing was because of the running away, i i and this is still true, I have terrible sleep habits. I can have trouble winding down at night because I keep thinking people I care about are gonna disappear. So it's like this vigilance that sets in. And doing the writing and and and tapping into her and letting myself really be sad um I started to have more compassion for her for the little girl that I was too.
00:24:02
Speaker
it's It's so interesting because time and things like this, like and in pain and in grief and in our life, well time in general I feel sometimes it's just such an illusion right as it says. And, and with this, the fact that here 40 years later, right. Let's see, two, no, two thousand four almost. Yeah. Years later that you, you are still, you know, just really unraveling all these emotions still in that, in that process of the grief. And it could seem like yesterday because you're just uncovering yeah all these things and learning also just about your yourself, not only about her, but about yourself in that process. So it's, it's very interesting how that works. So when people say in grief, like time heals it really but not necessarily. Well, I actually don't think that that is what it is. It's really, what do we do within that time? And well, how do we.
00:25:02
Speaker
quiet it So thank you for for sharing that part of of your of your journey. Now, yo your parents have since passed away, and they had already died when you started writing the book as well. Yeah. In fact, I don't think I could have written investigated this, had they been alive. Now, how in that process, because then you're also then uncovering other other living members still mainly of your generation, not the generation of your parents. They're mostly all have died. Some my ins and uncles are still living, right?
00:25:46
Speaker
Yeah. I had, I had the one aunt that was married to one of, yeah. Yeah. So that she was, she was still living when you were writing. So your dynamics then with your other distant relatives by writing this book, that anything change that you feel by uncovering all these family secrets for some some extent. My, you know, i I was so upset to learn some of the decisions that my parents made on my sister's behalf. It was very upsetting. And yet it felt really important not to vilify them, either in the book or in myself. So I tried to stay open to their story, you know, and I did through this one and learn more about my
00:26:42
Speaker
mother's childhood and I learned something about my father from a cousin that Allowed me to you know Or confirmed for me. I should say confirmed for me that people don't do bad things in a vacuum you know, it's it it comes out of how they were raised it comes out of their own experiences and so I really tried to be as loving as I could even even when I was furious.
00:27:16
Speaker
yeah yeah yeah you It gives you compassion towards them rather than an empathy towards what they've gone through rather than holding grudges against them, right, as you try to put yourself into their own shoes and their upbringing as well. I wanted to see if we could look into some of these things that I wrote down in terms of your, some of your poetry in the book. There was one regarding, I think this is the issue. I take notes, but then I don't understand my own writing as I'm like, so if if you see me here, so I'm like, what does this say? I completely relate.
00:27:54
Speaker
So the part, let's see, there was one that you wrote, I remember that you loved Elvis movies and celery with cream cheese and the smell of gas stations. I love that. Mostly I remember you loved music. i The part of the cream cheese and the celery, there were there was an instance in which you ended up doing that and you yourself were eating celery and cream cheese. So even within your own life, you might have done things to honor her and remember her that were
00:28:26
Speaker
things that she used to do as a way of staying connected. So how can we talk about that of some of the things that you feel? I'm like, media wasn't creeping, but yet I was trying to find connection. The celery with cream cheese, what other things did you feel? Do you feel that you started listening to some of the music she liked or what other ways do you feel you tried to have that connection with her? I love this question. Well, you know, most of when I was a teenager most of my friends were listening to disco because it was like the mid 70s at that point I was still listening to 60s music a little bit somewhat secretly because I didn't want to be uncool but but I think that that attachment to that time period was you know when we were very young and
00:29:16
Speaker
happy together. So I think that was a part of it. And then, you know, this somewhat unhealthy stuff where like, she was, she was a little, she's very open sexually. And so I got a little wild right after her death, kind of as a way to, you know, be both, be both the good girl and the bad girl, be the good student, but also start experimenting in ways that she did. And then there's just like expressions that like, I even say things and my husband knows that I'm doing and Angie, when I do this, I'll like if he does something he's not really supposed to do, I'll go, ooh, I'm telling.
00:30:00
Speaker
I love that. Like you just say it like what she used to tell to you, you say it to him. ask you i I like that too, that that part of you, how you felt six years younger, looking up to your sister. You had some medical issues when you were growing up as well, right? You wore a brace and certain things that you probably always felt like this awkwardness, right, towards yeah at certain a certain time in your childhood. And then, in the book, then there comes a part of you really looking at yourself in the mirror and seeing her as well as you were looking at yourself. That really moved me because you'd always looked up to her and then here you are seeing you seeing her through you as well. And that that itself was this connection that her legacy still lives on through you. Her sister who still holds her
00:30:58
Speaker
dear to your heart, you still continue sharing her story and now to the to the world. So I just wanted to share that with you, that that really moved me and how that the little part of the of the of the story. Thank you. that That was a powerful moment, you know, because I feel like I was reaching far and wide to try to find her and then to, you know, sort of take in that, well, she's in me. And you know, there's a there's a chapter in the book where I consult a psychic Most very good at looking at photographs and and and seeing things about people's lives and I reached out to him Recently when the book was about to come out to make sure that it was okay That I used his name and he was you like Jimmy something like that Jimmy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, okay And he was delighted and he said let me give you a free session as a thank you
00:31:55
Speaker
And the first thing he said to me when we got together on Zoom was, oh my God, she's all over you. And it felt like the nicest thing a person could say. Wow. Now when you, when you went back to him, again, I just, I, it's so hard for me when I do interviews after I've read the book, because again, I don't want to give up, especially this one. That's like a mystery as well. Cause I don't want to give up so much, but did you tell him how a certain things that he'd said, like how you were able to use those as.
00:32:32
Speaker
tools and your journey as of investigating her life and which ones you were able to pinpoint that were true. Did you tell him that? I actually, not so much because he had no memory of the session. It was such a life altering hour of my life. And he's like, Oh, I do so many sessions. I don't remember the details. Um, but you know, he knows that I found it very powerful and and effective. And it was it was interesting because we talked about whether or not she is able to be aware. you know We don't know, but but his sense was that she was delighted that the book was out, that the story, the truth was out, and that that it was in fact a collaboration. that He had this image of her hand over my hand as I wrote.
00:33:28
Speaker
And there's something else I was going to say about that. Oh,
00:33:36
Speaker
oh this is funny. I, part of the reason it took me so long to write this book is that I have this terrible habit of like not moving on until I've gotten this one sentence exactly how I want it to the next sentence. And then winding up, erasing everything and starting over. And that was that was a moment that he described back to me. I so you know i said something like, you know well what about the fact that it took so long for me to finally do this? And he said, well, you know time is different in the spirit world. But she does think it's funny how you kept erasing and going back and rewriting.
00:34:14
Speaker
Yeah, that it that that is just part of who you are. So within that process of it, it was still who you were as you were writing it. is you know it just it's just part of and Being a writer yourself, a poet you know and a poet and a librarian, I'm sure the the weight was heavier on you of how it was you were going to put these words on paper for the world to see, not just for yourself. So it's a big responsibility. So it's interesting that he still picked that up on your in your reading with him. Now, I want to ask you, because I always ask this right before we start closing, is have I, have I not asked you something that you'd want to make sure that you share with the readers in their own process or of your own process or something readers, readers, listeners about your journey or about grief? Well, your questions were fabulous. So I don't feel that you left anything out at all.
00:35:09
Speaker
And, you know, I, I guess if I had any wisdom to impart, it's just not to judge grief, not to have an idea about what it should look like or feel like or when it should happen. You know, I certainly wish that I had come to all of this much sooner, but I couldn't, you know, and we can, we can only do what we can do in any given period in our lives.
Themes of Forgiveness and Gratitude
00:35:38
Speaker
So.
00:35:41
Speaker
It's all forgiveness. And forgiveness. So yeah, because you did have to forgive a lot in your own journey as well as you were writing this, as you said, compassion towards others that are not even here anymore to explain their side of the story either, right right? So you had to do a lot of that forgiveness. Thank you for for sharing that, Ona. Ona, I want to make sure that the readers know I'll link your websites in the show notes, but how can they find your book? Where can they buy it? Is it everywhere I look? Can I find it? In fact, it is. It's on Amazon and Bookshop and Barnes & Noble and all all the places.
00:36:25
Speaker
And I have a website that's just by name altogether, onagrits.com. So pretty easy to find. So either on your on your website or any of the places that you buy books, you can find Everywhere I Look by Onagrits. Again, a memoir as well as a mystery solving process of grief as well. So thank you once again, Ona, for being our guest and sharing your journey and sharing Angie with us as well. Oh, you're so welcome Kendra. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you.
00:37:03
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so. Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.