Julia Lieblich Journalist Death, Massachusetts, Torture And Trauma Writer Dies At 65

Julia Lieblich Death, Obituary – As Julia Lieblich traveled the world recording the terror and anguish others had endured, she became entangled in the suffering of others. As coauthor of “Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror,” she said in 2012 that, “sometimes the despair was catching, and I would need a break.” Dr. Esad Boškailo is a psychiatrist who survived six camps in Bosnia.

She knew that even when she conducted interviewees for her work, pain may reemerge. An Afghan mother told me she couldn’t tell me about her son’s passing because she had been having headaches for weeks.” An American woman who had been tortured in Guatemala “had flashbacks of her assailants” shortly after our chat. An amputee in Sierra Leone claimed to have nightmares after witnessing a young man brandish a machete.

Once, when discussing the horrors he had seen with Ms. Lieblich, Boškailo broke off and stated, “You have secondary trauma, Julia.” She maintained she didn’t, but when he repeated his statement, she caved in. She said, “I guess that was the terrible downside of being the repository of all things.” At the beginning of this month, in a location she thought of as one of her homes—her goddaughter Kendy Carmona’s mausoleum outside of Antigua, Guatemala—some of her ashes were scattered.

Ms. Lieblich, who had long struggled with bipolar disease, wrote a letter to friends requesting that last resting place before taking her own life in late November. She was sixty-five years old and from Cambridge. She was generous, caring, and highly intelligent. Before she passed away, her brother Michael, who is from Madrid, stated in an email that he had no idea how many lives she had touched. She failed to save herself in the process of trying to save the planet.

She will be greatly missed by many people. She covered several topics, including clerical sexual abuse, while she was the Chicago Tribune’s religion writer. Ms. Lieblich chronicled cloistered nuns for The New York Times, where her pictures of a feminist rabbi in Paris and the Guatemalan actress María Mercedes Coroy were also published. The Forward published an account in October of Ms. Lieblich, a Jewish woman, talking with an Arab woman in her mid-20s about the state of Israel and Gaza when they were seated together at a Cambridge Palestinian coffee shop.

But people seemed to connect more deeply with her perceptive books and essays about trauma survivors—especially when she talked about the impacts of torture. Boškailo said over the phone from his Scottsdale, Arizona, private office: “She gave to the world an awareness that this is happening.” Furthermore, Ms. Lieblich taught writing as an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. Remarking, “It seems that she genuinely thought that journalism could be used to make the world a better place,

rather than just recording wrongdoings,” was Angela Wells, a former Loyola student who now works as a communications coordinator for relief agencies in countries where war has sparked massive refugee movements. Wells stated that “she was the kind of journalist who didn’t think her job ended when the story was published.” “She spent years following people’s lives.” Because Ms. Lieblich “had the capacity to be present in a lot of darkness,

which is not something that many people are psychologically able to do,” Wells writes, her passing affected journalists, humanitarian assistance workers, and former students. She stated, “I spoke with one very talented journalist who knew Julia really well.” She said, “This has left a gaping hole in the universe.” Born on April 25, 1958, Julia Lieblich grew up on Long Island, New York, until her family moved to a St. Louis suburb. After that, she observed that their presence “tripled the Jewish population.”

Her father, Malcolm Lieblich, was a speech pathologist. Her mother, Beverly Cooper Lieblich, was a nurse. Ms. Lieblich penned a rough draft of a memoir about her multifaceted parents, who could be outgoing or clever one moment and angry or depressed the next. Before she committed suicide, she wrote this. Going to boarding school provided a break from home life. The remainder of Ms. Lieblich’s ashes will be scattered at her alma mater, Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan.

She studied literature at Washington University in St. Louis before earning a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. Erica, the daughter of architect Christian Ramanauskas, had Ms. Lieblich as her stepmother after their divorce. “I adored my stepsister and my goddaughters,” Ms. Lieblich wrote near the end of her life. She did, however, choose not to have children. She went on to say, “There has always been a ‘little war’ raging inside my head, as anyone who loves me knows.”

I think that nobody should be bipolar. Despite these challenges, she was able to build a profession that made her work visible to readers of Harvard publications, Fortune magazines, and newspapers like The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times. Sisters: Lives of Devotion and Defiance, her first book, was published in 1992 as a result of a 1983 Times article she wrote about nuns. Before relocating to Cambridge a few years ago,

she had held positions as a research fellow at the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University Law School and scholar-in-residence at the Chicago Newberry Library. Her reports trailed behind her as she left the war-torn regions where her journalism had exposed human rights crimes. A cab driver emailed her years after driving her throughout Sierra Leone for six weeks, saying, “Julia, over 300 bodies they have buried today.” Her phone lit up with the message.

After this encounter, Ms. Lieblich wrote about her experience in “Instant Messages From Hell,” an online article published by Religion News Service. In response to a phone question regarding their book collaboration—in which he detailed his experiences in Bosnian concentration camps—Boškailo said, “I didn’t need to explain, on a basic level, about torture.” She was also really sweet and a great listener. The sight in her eyes told me she knew she felt comfortable.

Marc Gopin, who oversees the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at George Mason University, claims that Ms. Lieblich “made it into a moral commitment” by “kind of pastoring” people. She was incredibly involved, and he said that “most people who do that often pay a price with too much empathy.” Gopin whispered, “She was one of the great empaths of other people’s misery. She had that gift.” I’m sorry it’s not there anymore.

Wells said that while though Ms. Lieblich often let herself be vulnerable to other people’s pain, “she also really loved life.” “She experienced life to the fullest and felt the highs and lows deeply.” She laughed, danced, and embraced life in a village in Guatemala near three volcanoes where Ms. Lieblich and Kendy’s families had adopted each other. In late April of last year, she went to Cambridge to meet Dan Gauger, a former engineer for Bose Corp.

He wrote to their friends when Julia died away, saying, “I was taken with her beauty, in awe of her deft touch with people, impressed by what she’d done with her life, and challenged by her focus on justice for those less fortunate.” They decided to tie the knot after moving in together. She said to Boškailo over the phone, around two weeks before she passed away, “I am the happiest you’ve ever known me.” But she was always aware of the hardship that existed overseas.

During a phone conversation, Gauger talked about how she used to sit in their home and cry as she read through Israeli and Gaza headlines, adding, “She took the pain into herself; she felt it herself.” He stated, “I begged her to stop, but she said she couldn’t because this is what she does.” The only immediate survivor of Ms. Lieblich’s family is her brother Michael, but both she and Gauger considered many others as part of a family she had nurtured over the years.

Private festivities honoring her life and accomplishments will take place. Gauger and her friends got together on February 1 during the funeral of Ms. Lieblich’s goddaughter Kendy, who was buried in Guatemala. Cindy Schneider, director of the education-focused NGO Nueva Generación, read aloud quotes from the often-quoted Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. Hanh responded, “I don’t see why we have to say ‘I will die,’ because I can already see myself in you, in other people, and in future generations.”

Ms. Lieblich wrote about people who had experienced trauma, but she also highlighted times when people were healing. As she worked on their book with Boškailo, she said, “Just as I had experienced secondary trauma, I was now reaping the benefits of secondary healing.” “Up until that point, the story I had been listening to was one of tragedy, but now it was one of possibility.”