Ona Gritz: What consulting a psychic did for my memoir, and for me

Ona Gritz
WHAT CONSULTING A PSYCHIC DID FOR MY MEMOIR—AND FOR ME

About a decade ago, compelled to write a memoir about the sister I lost to violence thirty years earlier, I began the painful process of investigating my own family. I acquired my sister’s school records, her birth and death certificates, read articles about teenage runaways written in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, the era she chose to sleep on the streets rather than in our bedroom, with its flower power stickers on the walls.

I also stared at photographs that, until this point, I had kept buried in a closet—partly due to grief, mostly due to shame.

I was the baby of our family. Six years after my parents adopted Angie, I arrived, the late-in-life miracle they marveled at and fussed over. The one who, they must have quickly decided, could do no wrong. Meanwhile, Angie was always in trouble. When I picture her in our childhood home, she’s sitting on the closed toilet, a bar of soap in her mouth. Kneeling on the kitchen tiles, their sharp gold specks reddening her knees. Punishments meted out by my mother while my father was at work in New York City’s subway control tower. She’s too wild, our mom complained to him, to other moms, to anyone who would listen. She’s uncontrollable.

With me, Angie was warm, funny, and protective. She taught me to dance and draw and pulled me into elaborate games of pretend. If I begged her to style my hair to match her own, she relented, even as she rolled her eyes at her copycat little sister. And yet, I also absorbed my mother’s good seed/bad seed version of her daughters and believed it. As the keeper of Angie’s secrets, I knew she fibbed, smoked, and flirted with boys. When, starting at twelve years old, she’d go missing for weeks, I missed her desperately. At the same time, I understood running away as one more example of what naughty children did.

The bad seed who was good to me. This confused me as a child. Of course, it did. And as I sat down to draft my first chapters all those decades later, it confused me still. I thought back to the first time I attempted to describe how differently Angie and I were treated in the family, for a third-grade assignment on fairness. “This makes no sense,” my teacher had written in red. “Explain.” But I couldn’t explain. Not then. Not now.

By the time I wrote that failed composition for school, Angie was barely ever home. She spent most of her adolescence on the streets, in a foster home, and places described to me as boarding schools. Eventually, she left New York for San Francisco, where she gravitated to the Tenderloin District and discovered drugs. Then, at twenty-four, her life took a hopeful turn. She met a kind, hardworking man who adored her. Angie got clean and, for the first time, seemed settled and happy. She and Ray had a child and were expecting another when they made the fatal mistake of inviting the wrong two people to share their small apartment to help with the rent.

I was nineteen when Angie, Ray, and their son were murdered. Immediately, a switch turned off inside me. My memories of Angie grew fuzzy and dim. I forgot how fond I was of my brother-in-law and latched onto the idea that had they lived, their children would’ve had a hard life. As for my sister, I’d spent so many years missing her, I’d already learned to tuck my sorrow in the same unreachable place where I kept my guilt over being so blatantly favored in our home.

By the time I sat at my desk, writing out every memory of my sister I could conjure and reading everything I could lay my hands on that seemed relevant to her life, our parents had both passed away. I was a parent myself, my son a few years older than Angie had been when she began running away. Among the details I uncovered in my research was that the supposed boarding schools where Angie had been sent weren’t schools at all. One was a mental institution. Another, New York City’s main maximum-security juvenile detention center. A place with locked cells and high walls topped with razor wire. Young murderers were sent there, but so were truants, runaways, and kids simply deemed wayward.

My parents had done that. Two people who’d loved, guided, and protected me had placed their other daughter on the path to danger. What could I say about that? What meaning could I make of it on the page other than that I came from terrible people. And that I feared–I’d always feared–that it was me, my birth and very existence, that had made my sister expendable to them.

Around this time, as I struggled to write and to metabolize my terrible discoveries, I came upon a box of slides I’d brought home when I cleaned out my parents’ apartment after their deaths. Having put it away unopened, I’d never seen these pictures of Angie as a baby. Nor had I ever seen my parents gaze at her the way they did here. Tenderly. Adoringly. The way they’d gazed at me.

I stared at the slides through a handheld light box, taking them in as proof that my fears were true. My parents’ adopted daughter had been loved and cared for until they took all that love and care and poured it into me instead.

My fault my parents sent Angie to juvenile prison. My fault she moved as far as she could from our childhood home. Following this line of logic to its devastating end, it was my fault she landed in the city where, just a few short years later, her killers arrived.

In my day job as a librarian, I taught students with research assignments to check their sources and cite them following bibliographic rules. But as a writer, I often spent hours led by inchoate voices and intuition. One afternoon, that intuition led me to try something I’d never considered before. I typed the words psychic and photographs into Google.

My screen filled with images. A woman staring into a crystal ball. A neon sign decorated with moons and stars. Finally, I found an article in a reputable Philadelphia magazine about a psychic people visited with pictures of their love interests, seeking relationship advice. Invariably, clients found him to be spot on.

Photographs were all I had of my sister. And right now, photographs were making me heartsick. I stared at my screen, at the face of someone who could, purportedly, look at a photograph and say something crucial about the person in it. Psychic: Jimmie Bay, I wrote in the notebook where all my memories of Angie now lived, along with notes on my stalled memoir draft.

At the start of my session with Jimmie Bay, our conversation felt light and chatty. But the moment we turned to a picture of Angie, he grew solemn and began to speak very quickly, like he could barely contain all he saw.

“Your sister had an erratic life. Nothing ever stable or secure. Abusive relationships, abusive family members, addictions. And she was a nomad, never in one place too long.”

Amazed, I stared at the photo. In it, Angie, at twenty-four, smiled mildly for the camera, giving nothing away.

From there we moved to photos of Angie’s infancy and childhood. As Jimmie shared what he gleaned from each image, my sister’s life unfolded in stark detail. Her birth mother’s cold relinquishment. My own mother’s resentment at getting so little help from my dad. Abuse at the hands of an uncle I’d been so fond of that when my father asked me to name my son for him, it pleased me to comply.

“When she tried to tell your parents about the abuse, they didn’t know how to deal,” Jimmie said. “So, they blamed her and shut her out. That’s when things started going downhill.”

“Are you still smarter than the teacher, Monkey?” my uncle liked to ask, using his pet name for me. “Not him,” I said quietly. But my heart revved and my hands shook, my body’s way of saying there might be something to this. Not cold fact or hard truth, but a lead worth following.

Because of various rifts in the family, I never knew most of our relatives. It took sleuthing to find my uncle’s two estranged daughters and his other surviving niece. Once I did, it took courage to pick up the phone.

As it turned out, my cousins were kind women, surprised and pleased that I called. I couldn’t ask them my question directly, certainly not at first. But I asked what my uncle had been like and, while nothing was said to convict him of the crime, they each alluded to darker sides of him than he’d ever shown to me. They also talked about my sister, filling me in on what they remembered of the six years she was our parents’ only child.

“She seemed lost to me,” one told me. “Clearly, your mom hadn’t been for the adoption. Your sister was starved for attention, and she wasn’t getting it. Not from your mom.”

My other two cousins shared similar memories. Angie ignored, scolded, shooed out of the house on a bitter winter day so my mother could clean. With a start, I realized I’d gotten exactly what I thought I wanted when I first sought a psychic reading. To be told it wasn’t my birth that had made Angie’s life so hard. Her troubles predated me. I had proof now. But no relief came with this knowledge. It devastated me.

I was on the cusp of my twenties when Angie and her family were murdered, but our relationship had stalled long before. More accurately, I had stalled. I was stunted, only able to see her through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl. When I reached out to Jimmie, I was nearly twice the age Angie grew to be. A mother, an author, a librarian who, just months earlier, had finally realized I could use my research skills to learn more about Angie’s life than the few half-truths my parents had shared. Still, when I viewed those slides of her as a baby, the person I saw in them was my big sister. Strapped into a carriage, wearing a bonnet, the girl who peered from under the brim seemed mature to me, able to handle anything. It was Jimmie and the cousins he led me toward who helped me see her as a small child in impossible circumstances beyond her control. From there, it wasn’t such a stretch to see that those circumstances were beyond my control as well.

“I hope to write a book about Angie,” I told Jimmie when we first spoke. “It feels like I’m meant to. Like it’s the one thing I can do for her.”

He assured me it would eventually come to fruition. What he didn’t say was that I hadn’t yet evolved into the person capable of writing it. Sure, I could be as hard on myself as on anyone else in the book, which is part of a memoirist’s job. But memoir also requires compassion. For me, this meant not just seeing Angie as fully as possible, but also the other hurt little girl in our family. The one who’d been blocking my view.

Ona Gritz’s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, is about sisterhood, grief, true crime, and family secrets. Helen Fremont calls it “profound and beautifully written,” and Lilly Dancyger describes it as, “Stunningly beautiful and fearless.” Ona’s nonfiction has appeared in Brevity, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Utne Reader, and been named Notable in The Best American Essays.