Real Talk with Tina and Ann
Tina and Ann met as journalists covering a capital murder trial, 15 years ago. Tina has been a tv and radio personality and has three children. Ann has a master's in counseling and has worked in the jail system, was a director of a battered woman's shelter/rape crisis center, worked as an assistant director at a school for children with autism, worked with abused kids and is currently raising her three children who have autism. She also is autistic and was told would not graduate high school, but as you can see, she has accomplished so much more. The duo share their stories of overcoming and interview people who are making it, despite what has happened. This is more than just two moms sharing their lives. This is two women who have overcome some of life's hardest obstacles. Join us every Wednesday as we go through life's journey together. There is purpose in the pain and hope in the journey.
Real Talk with Tina and Ann
From Grief to Justice on Death Row: Sophia Laurenzi’s Journey
We share Sophia Lorenzi’s path from losing her father to suicide to investigating death row cases, tracing how grief, stigma, trauma, and systems shape lives. The heart of the talk: seeing people fully, not as problems to fix, and building care long before crisis.
• how invisible crisis can exist alongside visible treatment
• rising suicide rates despite reduced stigma and why access still lags
• 988 as vital crisis care and why prevention must start earlier
• community-based and peer models that move care upstream
• the four-hour window and limits of certainty in prevention
• death row investigations and the human roots of harm
• courts, prisons, and hospitals as systems misaligned with healing
• grief without blame and rejecting survivor shame
• boundaries, witnessing, and rituals that sustain healing
• writing as advocacy and the dignity of complex stories
To our listeners, if this conversation moved you, please share it. Someone you love might need to hear this today.
If you know somebody that is suicidal or you might be yourself, please call 988 or go to any local authority or anywhere that you can to get help.
You can find Sophia's work in Time, the Washington Post, and her Substack Surface Level, and many other publications. Follow her, read her words, and let them change how you see the world.
Welcome to Real Talk with Tina and Anne. I am Anne, and today I am so honored to introduce Sophia Lorenzi, a very gifted writer, by the way, someone who has deeply touched my soul. Sophia has spent years reporting on the lives of people navigating unimaginable loss and injustice. Currently, Sophia is pouring her experience as a death row investigator and her understanding of suicide loss into a forthcoming memoir. Through her writing in advocacy with Save, which is Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, she's made it her mission to make a mental health dialogue accessible and to help others find agency in difficult systems. I sat for hours reading your articles, and I am not kidding. I cannot wait for your memoir. I sat with them and I lived with them for actually a while. You are changing the landscape of mental health with your writing. You are removing stigmas, you are putting faces with suicide and are creating a space for people who are on death row. I have to tell you, I have never ever met someone who spent days, weeks, months trying to do everything that they could to rewrite the ending of someone else's story. The loss of your dad to suicide touched you in a way that caused you to want to reach into the depths of those who had been so horribly changed by abuse that you wanted to help them rewrite their own stories. So we will get to all of that. But first of all, I just want to thank you so much for being on the show.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you, and I'm really happy to be here.
SPEAKER_03:Okay, first of all, I am so sorry about your dad and what you went through. That was horrific. And I started your articles by reading with the one you were at your dad's condo and you left for the airport in 2018, and you never thought that he would take his life. Depression had returned. He had just come home from a voluntary stay at a psychiatric hospital, and it seemed like a normal visit with him. But 48 hours later, after you had left, he was gone. And in that gap between it felt normal and everything changed, what do you wish people understood about how invisible crisis can be?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's a really beautiful question. And I think his story illuminates something that's often missing from our conversations about suicide and crisis in general, is that he was a really great example of being open about mental health and his struggles and trying so many things. As you mentioned, he had just done a voluntary stay in a psychiatric hospital. He had been in outpatient therapy, regular therapy, seeing a psychiatrist. And then he also was doing his gratitude journaling and yoga and he had a sunlamp. And he was, you know, putting so much effort into getting better. I think a lot of times we hear the stories of, oh, this came out of nowhere, or someone was struggling, and you see the negative signs of their struggles. And my assumption or my understanding at the time, I was young when he died, I was 23. And for so much of my life, he'd been so open about depression and getting treatment. So I thought kind of like, well, if you do the things you're supposed to do, if you go to therapy, if you get the care you need, if you tell people I'm having a hard time, then like, of course, you don't die by suicide because you're doing the things that are supposed to stop that. And that's the thing that I would want people to take away. One is that you can try a lot of these interventions and not to take away from how important and meaningful they are. And it might still not work, so to say. And that doesn't mean that you did something wrong as a survivor, and that doesn't mean that the person who was suffering did something wrong. It's just that we still know, we still don't know enough about the brain and suicide and mental illness. And it doesn't negate how important it is to put in that effort and seek care, but that it's not a foolproof. If you do this, this will be the outcome. I remember when he died, my brother, my younger brother said to me within the next couple days, you know, he said, Sophia, some people get cancer and they survive, and some people don't. And some people have depression and they survive, and some people don't. And suicide is can be, you know, just an outcome of a disease that we don't have total control over the progression of it. And of course, that's not an exact, you know, parallel to a disease like cancer, but I thought that was such a wise thing for a 21-year-old, my younger brother, to say in that moment. Oh, yeah. Has stuck with me.
SPEAKER_03:Right, right. Your article that is titled The Problem with Saying Suicide is preventable is really powerful. And I know people that have died uh from suicide. And, you know, no matter how well you know someone, we don't really. And no matter how much preventative things we have in place, if they want to, they will. And your dad was one of 48,000 Americans who died by suicide in 2018, and the numbers are rising. The Surgeon General has called it a public health crisis. Can you talk more about that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's a a difficult kind of tension because I think we've had so much progress in reducing stigma and talking more about suicide loss and mental health in general. You know, I remember even as a kid growing up, these little moments of learning of people, you know, in the neighborhood who died by suicide and comments I heard about like, would their loved ones still get life insurance? Like for years you couldn't get life insurance if there was a suicide loss. Uh, for years you couldn't be buried in a Catholic cemetery. I grew up Catholic. So this is how I wondered about that with my dad. And they did change that. But, you know, both on an institutional level and socially, we talk so much more about these problems. We see celebrities uh open up about mental health and we like collectively mourn celebrity deaths by suicide. But at the same time, we're seeing these numbers rise. And I don't think it's that, you know, interventions aren't effective or aren't working. I think it's a combination of we don't know enough and we don't like access to care is still really, really hard in terms of affording therapy, getting, you know, therapists who are trained and competent in the different issues that people face. Um, and then we have kind of this still unknown factor of well, it's not quite unknown, but evolving factor of how is social media and the digital landscape impacting the mental health of young people is a really significant one. And we know that, you know, not well overall, but it's been, you know, not long enough to really be able to like parse that within the context of the suicide crisis um overall. So I think there's a lot of hope and there's a lot of amazing work that people are doing. And it can feel confusing when you see people are doing all these great things and there's still increasing rates of suicide and mental illness. And I think we we need to like live with both those realities. And it doesn't mean that the positive interventions aren't important and aren't aren't working. We're just dealing with a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it is, you know, continues to be the fallout of living through a global pandemic. You know, we just are facing a lot of global struggles too, that I think contribute to mental wellness overall.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, absolutely. You know, I loved Italy's model that helps people who are hurting so desperately, and they have created a peer-managed housing, which I just thought was brilliant. You know, California tried to replicate it with a$116 million uh project. But can you talk? You're you're starting to talk about it, but could you talk more about the lack of resources and having more access to mental health care in this country? Because I think that it's getting worse.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, a lot of the resources that we have, I'm glad you mentioned those models of community care, which I'm such an advocate for, and care that starts so much earlier and is preventative and is community-based. So many of the strongest mental health response systems that we do have are they're too late because they're when you're already in crisis. It's amazing that we have 988 now, the suicide hotline. Oh, yeah. But we need to be having resources 20 steps back before you're at that point, before you're calling 988. The same with inpatient care. Most of the time, if someone is either voluntarily hospitalized, and certainly if they're involuntarily hospitalized, it's because they've made a suicide attempt or are about to, or you're kind of at the brink already. And that's those things are really important. But those are kind of what builds the bedrock of our systems. And it's not enough to, first of all, it's they're overloaded. People can will stay in the hospital for a few days and then it's just like, okay, you can now you are back in your normal life. Um I think so much of it is integrating mental health care so much sooner, more in the way that we treat our physical health. You know, you go to your doctor annually for your physical checkup. We try to aspirationally, you know, exercise regularly, eat well, and sort of do these maintenance tasks for our physical health. Treating mental health like that is really important, but we don't have that literacy and education and system for that. You don't go once a year to a therapist to just have a check-in and say, like, okay, where are things at with you? Um, there's not an equivalent of a gym for mental health care or community um that supports that. Um, so those are some of the things that I would love to see more of. And and people are doing amazing work in those spaces, but it's hard.
SPEAKER_03:Yes. I know um a child who is pretty young and has gone from hospital to hospital. And even with that, uh lots of times while the family is looking to put them, you know, have them in a hospital for help, the hospitals are full. Yeah. So, you know, I mean, that's really telling to me across the country that kids' mental health is so uh they like you said, I don't know if it's social media or what it exactly is, but they are bombarded right now and they are not healthy. Our kids today are not mentally healthy, and our the hospitals are full. And you were also right in that within three days, you know, it's well, we're just an acute care, you know, we can't do anything else. We can't do anything. So we need to send them home. And um, all we are is like an emergency placement. We can take care of them for a few days and then we get them stable and then they go, and that's it. So I mean, it's like really a sad situation when that's our kids today.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's like the equivalent of if the only time you ever got medical care was when you went to the emergency room, which is true for, you know, some people who don't have health insurance and like the reality for some people, right? But that's that's how most people access the mental and access mental health care at all. There's not enough therapists for everyone to get one-on-one care. Um so it's a really challenging public health crisis, is what it is.
SPEAKER_03:Well, it needs to be more into the school system. And I don't know how they can do that, but I think if we reach them a lot younger, I think that it will help them because we're really heading down a scary place. Uh and I was also, you know, please talk more about all suicide cannot be stopped, even with the best efforts. I mean, even putting them in the hospitals and using the resources that we do have. I mean, there are just some that cannot be stopped. And I know that that's what you went through with your dad, because I know you've done a lot of research about this. If you've touched into the brain of somebody and and maybe figured some of that out.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is we don't know exactly the the factors that cause one person to die by suicide and one not to. Uh, one thing that I've researched is that often there is a really a relatively short window where someone is likely to take action. If I'm remembering correctly, it's about four hours. Um, and if you can kind of survive the four-hour window, you may still feel be suicidal, um, but less likely to take action uh and harm. But I think there's also, you know, variety there. I wrote that piece and I was nervous when I wrote it that it would come off as, you know, dismissive of so many advocacy efforts that people have put in. And the response I got was much different than that. And I I talked to a lot of folks who appreciated the honesty of we don't know enough. And that doesn't mean we don't try. But I think suicide is so distinct because it has this lens of agency in someone making a choice. And I think it's a really complicated question that I still write about and I struggle with of like how much is it a choice? It it this balance between making a choice within the confines of not many choices at all when your brain and body and experience feel the way they do. And also giving dignity to people's experiences that I can't under, you know, you can't understand. You know, I think the more we can understand it like other diseases that we're still always seeking treatments and cures for, and knowing that some we still are not going to save every single person who has a has cancer, for example, um, it makes it a little less stigmatized for people who are struggling with suicidality and people who lose others to suicide, because it can feel like, oh, well, if it's preventable, why what did I do wrong? What did they do wrong? We were trying, you know.
SPEAKER_03:Right, right. Because the shame and the blame that is associated with people who say, Well, you know, if you could have, if you should have, if I would have known. And that's not okay because, like you said, that felt like a double failure. And your father wasn't able to save himself. People around him were not able to. And you channeled your guilt, however, into understanding and advocating for suicide prevention. And I would say that you have done much more than that. You have made this a life's mission, and your dad is living on for sure. And you said that the best thing that you could do for your father or really anyone who had taken their own life is to acknowledge their pain and that their pain was real. So, yeah, could you talk more about that?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think there's um it's complicated. All grief is complicated. I think grief of us from a suicide loss is extra complicated in that, at least in my personal experience and I've heard from others, there's this instinct to be protective of the person who died. Like, well, I want to make sure that they're not defined by this one action in the same way that, you know, you don't want none of us want our worst moments or our hardest moments or our most challenging moments to define us, but they are also a part of us. And so much of my journey over the years since my father died is learning how to create space of remembering him for his whole self, his wonderful parts, his flawed parts, the way he died, and also the way he lived. Um and so I have found that to be really hard. You know, it's not something that came overnight. It came over years of thinking about this and writing about this, and um, through other experiences too, seeing stories from other people's perspectives that gave me a different lens on my own. And I think that first I just really wanted to protect that image of my dad and say, it makes sense why he died. He had depression, he had trauma in his life, and I'm not going to overcomplicate uh why he died or who he was. One, I allowed myself to see his pain as more complex and instead of wanting to make it very like cut and dry where I could tell the story in just a sentence or two. That allowed me to start seeing him overall as more whole and human and complex.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I loved your sentence about your dad. The way he died does not diminish how dedicated he was to growth and evolution, and it does not invalidate the countless ways that he chose to live. I thought that was so beautiful. Thank you. I want to talk more uh on your writing, and I spent so much time. I read every word of if then a couple of times actually. And before we even started this, I was saying how wise you were. I mean, you are wise beyond your years. You had watched a show when you were 11 years old called Prison Break, and I watched every episode, so I was very familiar with that.
SPEAKER_00:You know, yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Oh my gosh, I loved that show. And I have to tell you that I used to work in the jail system, and I was in the jail ministry with women, and I became very close to a woman who had murdered someone. And you know, I really liked her. Uh, we became friends, and I got to know her really well. And I think of her even often now, many, many years later. Everyone has a story, and after you saw the show Prison Break, you became obsessed with executions and you read so many of them. When you were 24, you moved away from your family and just and you had just signed off on your dad's condo after he had just passed. And your job, which your job was an investigator helping people who had been sentenced to death with their legal appeals, and you were obsessed with helping them. And your job was to help them try to get off of death row. And I can already hear people saying, but they deserved it. But you know, why would you do something like that? And I'm not advocating for or against that whatsoever. What I got out of your article was that I think was the most important thing was that there was more to the story. There was more to their story, and it needed to be told. And, you know, there was a man that you called Alan. And the more that you found out about his life, I think the more human he became to you. And he had been molested as a child by his father. And I think that that would be a common thread in the jail system.
SPEAKER_00:And yes, I'll add that every client that I worked with had some history of sexual abuse as a child, among other types of abuse.
SPEAKER_03:But you're exactly right. Yeah, and and his sister had been murdered and his mom was battered. You know, he he didn't have a chance in so many different ways. Your job was to give him the best chance that he could to stay alive. And you wrote, I mean, you said if you could find out why he killed, you could do something to keep him alive. And you wanted so badly to understand the person who had killed, you really believed that there was something that made them that way. And I sat in this for so long. Can you please talk more about this?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. I remember having that thought when I was 11 or 12 and saw that scene from Prison Break. And I think something just clicked for me of I have known the death penalty existed and we executed people, or it existed in my mind as sort of this historical thing, right? Like I read about, you know, Anne Boleyn and Joan of Arc. And I grew up Catholic and were constantly talking about Jesus' execution. And then that show made me realize, oh, we do this now. And this is the thing that people experience and have to go through. And it just shocked and and disturbed me so deeply. And as I read about it, I remember thinking, like, but there's no way that someone would kill somebody else if there wasn't something wrong with them. A very simplified version as a kid, but it's like a thought that I never really lost or or got rid of. And I pursued studying psychology and neuroscience in college. I thought I was going to go to law school, but I wanted to have this understanding of how can psychology and knowing more about the brain explain the choices we make and why we do what we do, but especially in this context of harm and violent harm and sort of the worst crimes that we then write people off as soon as they've committed these crimes. And it's, you know, you understand, especially for people who are victims or their loved ones are victims, it is often unimaginable. And I think that so much of what I learned leading up to working on that job, and then especially in that job, was that it's not as unimaginable as our gut reactions are, because there's so many circumstances. It's similar to what I was saying about when people die by suicide, is a pile of factors can just add up and add up and trap people in these boxes of their mind and experience that I don't think anyone would know how they might behave or might react in the moment if they had those things surrounding them and sort of suffocating them. So I always believed in the humanity of people who have done terrible things and also in the potential for change. I think that's another thing that's deeply important to me and just something I I have hope in and always believe in. And that's something that when we choose to have the death penalty and execute people, you erase that possibility of growth and change over time and you and you choose, you know, or the state chooses to stop it on a certain date. And yeah, to your point about the client that I was working with and what I saw in overall working with people on death row, they were so much more than what they did. And there was so much parallel between the harms that they had caused to others and the harms that had been done to them throughout their lives. Again, never an excuse, but it it helped create and give context to reasons of how these things come to be. So I think there's just and and the court system's really hard. I wanted to be a lawyer. Like I have so much respect for the law and our legal system and so much faith in it in some ways. And in other ways, it's really difficult because it's designed to be not only black and white, but it's like where there's winners and losers. Um, it's a it's adversarial, it's almost a competition of you say you win a case or you lose a case. And that doesn't really leave room for the nuance of this crime happened, this pain happened. How to how do we repair a sense of safety in a community? How do we best support the victims? Um, I think there's a lot of questions about what justice um looks like to different people.
SPEAKER_03:When I was in the jail system um helping the women, I actually ended up writing a book about my the um my experience there because um they referred to themselves as what they did. And I didn't want them to see each other for because they would introduce themselves to me and say, Hi, my name is so and so, and I'm a prostitute, or I'm in here because I murdered somebody, or and I would always say to them, No, I want to know you. I don't want to know what you did. And we would always, they would break down, there would be crying, and we would find out what was behind what led them to what ended up happening. And I can remember being in the parking lot and there was a woman who was getting released, and we were going to pick her up and take her somewhere because where she was going wasn't safe. And she said that she wanted to do that, and she came out into the parking lot and she looked at us and she looked at her what sugar sugar daddy who was parked not too far away from us, and she went and he just looked at her, and then he got in, she got in his car. And it was so heartbreaking, and I still can remember it like so vividly. And you know, that's what fear does. It really opened my eyes so much so because when they would leave and they would say, I'm never gonna see you again, and you know, and then very shortly after we would see them again, and I just saw this cycle that they couldn't get out of. And a lot of it, almost all the time, it sten it stemmed from the abuse that they had gone through when they were children. And the fathers were absent, and they really didn't have really great role models, and they had just fallen into some of the most horrific experiences, and they just could not find their way out.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think exactly what what you said that's such a powerful image and so true to what I've seen and the limitations in which so many people make choices, and poverty is and lack of resources is also a huge factor in this, as you were saying, with the similarities in the backgrounds of people you saw. And it just reminded me of when I first started working in this field. Uh, I was an intern in Louisiana and I went to Angola for the first time, which is where Death Row is. And it used to be, well, actually, it's still a working plantation. It's a very unsettling place. And I was driving down the really long path to the buildings with uh my supervisor. And I asked her how many people here on Death Row like paid for their own attorney, could afford their attorney when they went to trial. And she looked kind of startled and she said, Oh, none of them. None of them. And that was the same experience in Tennessee. You see it over and over. The people who end up in these situations are people who not only didn't have resources when they were facing criminal charges, but never really had resources and support systems, or it had support systems that were also struggling and had cracks in them, like you were saying, whether it's in within the family or within a larger social system. And that's a really hard, you know, reality to accept of. I I think there's so we we want to think of these things as individual failings and like evil people. And I think the challenge is to consider like how are we as a society failing people who need support and resources?
SPEAKER_03:Well, that's interesting because I had said to somebody at a church one time when I was still working at the jail and I asked them if, and he was the pastor of the church, I said to him, if the jail released right now, and you know, they didn't have anywhere to go to a church. Would your church accept them? How would your congregants accept them into their community? And he went, Oh wow, no. They wouldn't. And and so I mean that's very telling. But I do believe in people coming out and having um another chance when when they have done when they've done their time. And I don't think that we have that set up very well.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the recidivism rates are just extraordinary. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, too, with mental health and mental health systems. 100%. A lot of in a lot of places the jails and the prisons are de facto mental health facilities because the rates of people with severe mental illness in prison and jail are significant. We don't have like institutional structures in the way that we used to, whether or not those have they certainly had their problems in their in the 80s and 90s, but so much of the the actual systems that catch people who are in the depths of severe mental illness and addiction are jails and prisons. A lot of what people in who work in prisons, as you probably saw, are dealing with is like maintaining and trying to sort of help people as much as they can with mental illness. And the people who are have those jobs, that is not what their training is. That's not what their job is. The expectation, how we have it now, is not what that job is supposed to be. So we also put a lot of pressure on not only those systems, but also the individuals who are working within those systems.
SPEAKER_03:And and that also has to do with the hospitals because that is not really what they're trained for, the people that get them in the ERs. And even when they spend like three days in a place, I mean, they are not prepared to deal with the long term. And I don't think that they know how to deal with the long term. Not at all.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:Well, I want to talk a little bit more about your dad because everything was connected to your dad, I feel. And and you said that you could not stop your father from taking his life. But I think that you were trying to get this man, Alan, to not kill himself by execution. And you wanted him to want to live. Did you feel like you were just on this mission to save Alan or anyone from giving up their own life and it was connected to your dad?
SPEAKER_00:At the time, I didn't feel that consciously. I felt like I need to just process and move on quickly and do what I was supposed to do. I had wanted to do this work for so long as an investigator and work on death row. And my whole life changed when my dad died, and I thought this is the one I can't change anything else. I need to do the thing that I always wanted to do. Now it means even more because I'm doing something good and meaningful. But I didn't consciously think, oh, now I have the opportunity to like save someone when I couldn't save my dad, even though that is absolutely what was going on and added a layer to my death row work that, you know, I had always been passionate and cared deeply about it when I was studying fields related to it and interning. And then it did take on this, you know, much deeper and impossible. Of course, it's an impossible bar to live with. And I was, I think 23, 24 to 26-ish when I was working as an investigator. Um and I think back with so much tenderness towards that version of me because it's like that was so yeah, I I felt like, okay, now I'm an adult and I'm doing this is my first real job. And I just like see myself as so young and like what someone in their 20s trying to figure it out, like everyone in their 20s, but in this really intense context that I was putting a lot on myself that I really wasn't admitting to at the time. And it was only after I left the job that I could name that connection of, yeah, this was this was more about my dad than I I think when I quit or when I was starting to realize like I can't really separate these. And when I'm seeing and hearing these stories of abuse, you my father had been abused. It's just as all feeling like this is what I'm thinking about and doing in my personal life. It's what I'm doing in my prof professional life, and I'm not I don't think I can yeah, like I'm not doing the best job I can, but I also just don't know where it's all starting to blur together, I think was how I was feeling toward the end of that job.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. And you were very mature for somebody who was in their 20s and the things that you were dealing with. I mean, most 20 years old 20-year-olds are not doing that kind of a job. So I mean, that's really amazing that you did that. I um I want to talk about your dad a little bit more. You say that your father passed away, and you when after he passed away, you felt like you were dying without him. And you know, it's been 50 years this November. I'm showing my age here, but I was very young. Um when my dad passed away, he died. It'll be 50 years this November, and I still miss him like he just walked out the door. So, you know, talk about your dad. Tell us all the things about your dad.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, my dad was such such a special person. He was the kind of person who people remembered, you know, like he would go into a store at the mall and somehow end up talking to the salesperson for an hour and then come back two years later and they would say, Oh, Paul, it's so good to see you. He made friends. Yeah. He made friends with everyone, people at restaurants. He was, he had this really amazing ability to balance empathy and getting people to open up to him. I I think it was just his natural way. I don't know that he was, he wasn't trying to, but he just created a sense of comfort um with many people. And then he also had a really funny directness about him, where he was the type to call you out on your things, but in a way that always felt really warm and loving. And I think that created a sense of closeness that a lot of people had with him. You know, I think one thing that stands out to me so much about him is that he created such close relationships with my friends, both my parents growing up. You know, like we were the my parents I felt were kind of the ones who my girlfriends would like feel comfortable talking to, or we had the sleepovers, or we had the parties. Um, but especially as we got older, my parents ended up divorcing. And I had these childhood friends who I love dearly and I'm still very close to. We went to different high schools, we went to different colleges. And over breaks, my dad would always be the one to have us over for a dinner party. And it wasn't that he would just cook for us, he would cook for us and then sit at the table and say, Okay, girls, tell me tell me everything. What's happening in college, what's happening in my dating. And so he had that relationship. I give him a lot of credit for teaching me some of those ways of building community and and maintaining relationships. But I know that he touched a lot of my friends in that way as well, in a way that not everyone, you know, we he stood out as like, oh, not all parents are like that. And a lot of my friends as well credit him as like he's the first person who told me that first adult I know who said, like, I went to therapy, and therapy is really helpful. And I have like anxiety is a real thing, you know. It's I was growing up in the early 2000s, and it was definitely better, but still so much different from now in terms of how we talk about mental illness. And so the fact that he was open about that, I think stuck with people who I didn't even realize it did.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, from reading everything that you wrote, I could tell that you had a really special relationship with your dad, and you actually gave his eulogy, which I thought was beautiful. And you did say, if you called, he would answer. And it made me think how and how much pain he must have been for him to leave. He must have been in so much pain. Yeah. You know, uh your your dad came out to you when you were fifteen, and after your dad told you, he changed, you said. I mean, he was more free. You were proud of your dad and his story, you were proud of his bravery. What parts of it of him do you think that you have?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, it's I love that question. You know, I think I always felt so connected with him, and and people always told us how similar we were. I you may have seen pictures of him in some of my articles. We look very similar, um, but also a lot of our personality is very similar. And I was always so proud of that when people said, Oh, you're just like your dad, because I thought of my dad as like he's so warm and makes friends with everyone and like a loving person and so depthful. And I I like to think that I I hope I have and feel like I have a lot of those qualities, especially when it terms to in terms of connecting with people and being curious about people. Um, but that was something that was challenging as I grieved him because my understanding of him became more complex and flawed after his death. And it made me think, oh, I thought that I'm just like him and I want to be just like him. And what does that say about me if the person who I always wanted to be like is more complex and more and has done things that are really painful and are not were not the right thing. And so I actually think that that over time has allowed me to give myself a lot more grace. My dad was somebody who held himself to really high standards, far higher standards than he held. He held he had high standards in general. But for himself, he had almost impossible standards that I think were really hard for the struggles that he dealt with. And I see myself in that too. I see some of those the harder things of like being really hard on myself or expecting near perfection from myself. And I think that even since his death, I've continued to feel so close to him and learn so much from him because part of my grieving has been understanding that more in him, seeing it reflected in myself and being able to give myself, I think the grace that he gave me, but that he would have loved to be able to give himself, you know? So I think I also learn so much from our similarities because our similarities are some of these positives, like we love a good dinner party, we're chat with everyone, love to have really deep conversations, um, cooking and food and some of those kind of activities too really brought us together. And then some of his challenges are things that I share as well, especially when it turns comes to this, you know, always seeking a really high standard of success and excellence. And I've learned so much about how to be gentler on myself through him. Okay, even as he's died af after his death. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:Okay. Yeah, that's really important. So many great things. It sounds like you are so much like your dad. What I got out of your writing was no stigma, no judgment, no embarrassment, just my dad. You know, I just that's what I got out of everything that I was reading. Do you know how beautiful that is from your dad to Alan on death row? These are people. You know, you want people to know them, help them. And while you were helping Alan, I think that you were trying to find you and find your dad, help yourself. And you felt that there was always a way to change the ending. I I have no words. I mean, could you talk more about that? Beautiful. It was such a thread through all of your writing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think that in that period of my life, that's what I wanted so badly. I wish I could have changed the my dad's ending. I wanted to change the ending of my clients' stories on death row. And not to say that it's not possible to contribute to change and make a difference with these, with individual lives, but I just put so much individual pressure on myself. And it was hard for me to accept that there were all these other factors totally outside my control that would play into what the ending ultimately was. And I think that I've evolved to a point where I care so much about these issues and stories. And it's to me so much more about creating like non-judgmental space, amplifying stories and complexity. At the time, I was in a place of really wanting to be sort of the agent of changing the outcomes of people's stories. I wish I could have changed the ending of my dad's story. And I, on an intellectual level, knew that there were so many other factors at play as always. And I thought, like, oh, if I just do a good enough job or if I just you know work hard enough, I can like overcome those other factors. Um, and I think where I've evolved to now in my work and just in the way that I approach these issues is that I want to create space to have to really not judge, you know, as you were saying, like non-judgmental spaces to witness. And there's so much power in just witnessing a full story, the full humanity, the full complexity. And rather than seeing myself as, and I need to do X, Y, and Z to change everything, I can do small things through my writing, through my advocacy, and but know what's in my control and know that there's also a lot of power in just creating space and sharing stories. And that the thing that I do have control over in terms of changing the ending or changing the story is my own life. You know, I thought I was going, I had such a plan. I thought I was going to law school and I was going to go back to death row and work as a lawyer, helping people get off death row and live, you know, live in a southern state probably where the death penalty is most prolific. And that is not, you know, I be became a writer. I live in New York. I have really just taken a path that I didn't plan for. And that is such a beautiful feeling for me and a healing thing of knowing that I can open new doors for myself and explore those things. And that there's not a, you know, an ending or path that I must go down. And I can I can be so curious about where my life and my work takes me. And that is a very empowering feeling.
SPEAKER_03:I love that. One of the things that you did, you know, you you went to conferences and trainings and you attended many, and they all had to do with well, a lot of them you would choose the ones that had to do with trauma and how trauma impacted decision making. So we touched a little bit on that earlier with the threat of there being abuse in in the jail system and what happened with your dad as well. I mean, your your dad's family, yours, you know, but he was abused by a brother-in-law who was 20 years older than him, and then had that horrific situation with his sister walking in and then just leaving w while it was happening. I mean, I just felt the betrayal, the hurt that he must have gone through. I mean, it was just so much pain. A place where your dad was supposed to feel safe, he was being hurt beyond measure. And I think so many times that when in our own home, that's the worst place that we could be hurt. When did you find out about your dad's story? And how did you find out?
SPEAKER_00:I first heard about it when I was 18. I was a senior in college, and it was a couple years after he and my mom separated. He and just moved into a new condo, and he sat my brother and I down like before dinner, which we had dinner together all the time, but there was definitely a seriousness. And he just said very bluntly, I I remember like we stopped talking to that branch of my family, who before then I'd been very close to. And it was kind of confusing to me, of course, as a kid. And like, all of a sudden we don't see them. We don't see my cousins, they're not at Christmas. And my dad first asked, like, Do you know why we don't see them anymore? And I said, No. And well, I actually remember my mom had said that the man who abused my father did something illegal. And it never crossed my mind that it was something like that. I thought it was financial or anything. Something. So my dad said when I was 12, he abused me. And it was a really cut and dry sentence, just like that. Um, actually, I think he used he used the word molested, I remember, um, and didn't describe it anymore. It was clear that he was even saying that out loud was so painful for him. Unusual because my dad was just so the type to be very expressive about his feelings and how are you feeling. And I it was so different from, for example, when he came out as gay to me and my brother, there was such an open conversation of like he was very emotional, but he said, like, this has been so hard for me. I'm I'm still your same dad. Like, I hope you, you know, it was very like we're in dialogue about it. And as compared to this moment, was so it was like, here is a fact that I'm gonna say, and I can't really open the door to a conversation. And so that's the only time he and I ever spoke about it directly until he died. And then after he died, I started to learn more about the extent of the abuse through, you know, I got his record, his, you know, personal files, his medical files. I heard from my mom and people in my family. I was asking questions, and I realized that it had been much more extensive and gone on for years, and that there had been a really complicated response in the family of wanting to keep it contained, of wanting to I think good intentions in terms of wanting to support my dad, but also prioritizing that we can't let people know about this. And that's a story I that you have probably heard. I have heard dozens of times with and this this fear of judgment from the outside world, when in reality, I mean, that's a it's a particularly dark situation, but there's so many parallel stories or stories that are maybe not as extreme where our instinct, and especially in family systems, the instinct is like keep this within our little world. And it's just so painful to think how many places that's happening kind of like behind closed doors over and over instead of allowing it to be something that's talked about and people can have support from. So my learning about that experience was such a unfolding over time of I thought I understood it in this way. And then I was like, actually, no, I was wrong about that. And now I know more. And now it keeps becoming some other worse thing over and over. Um, and that was hard because it made me question very much a family secret. But then I think secrets are both the the fact of whatever happened itself, and then also kind of the way that it's framed and some of some sense of betrayal and confusion can often come from well, I knew this basic fact, but the actual reality of it is something so much different than I understood. And that was my experience with learning about how my father had been abused.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I mean, I think most of the time that the people who have been sexually abused, and you know, I even look at the women that stood in front of the Capitol building, I think it was that from the Epstein case, and they just want uh people to hear them. I think most of the time, really all they want is some they want to be heard and they want some validation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that really is just the minimal thing that you can we could give to somebody is just to listen to their story and to say, I'm so sorry that you went through that. So, and I think that, like you said, the stigma of it and people looking at them as if they had done something wrong. I think that that keeps the secret what it is, because they don't want to tell. What I do like though is that your dad wrote his abuser a letter. And I'm so glad that he did that. What that must have meant to you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I did not know that letter existed until after my dad died. I had never seen it. So it was painful. It's something I avoided reading for a couple months. But it also gave me so much context on the depth of his pain and how much, you know, I saw this with my dad in his life. He was somebody who It definitely was control issues in in some capacity of like just wanting to, you know, if I can just do this thing a little differently, then I think everything's gonna be okay. If I just do this, if I just do this. And I saw, I understood so much of like how deeply rooted that was reading that letter. You he described his pain so deeply and how much he also just talked about, I just want to move on. Like if we just, if you can just admit it, if if this happens, if X happens, then I think I can just finally move on and be okay. And he wanted that so desperately. And, you know, like I said, with his issues with depression, he was always he tried, like he tried so many things. And I think that um instincts applied too to how he was reacting to his abuse and trying to find a solution. You know, he's a very solution-oriented person. And sometimes I don't want to say necessarily to a fault like it's a bad thing, but I believe that there are certain certain things that there's not an there's not a cut and dry solution that will fix a problem. And some problems need to just be like softened or held, or like you learn to live with, and maybe that changes over time. And so I I just understood my dad so much more from reading that level letter and had I felt so much pain for him. And I saw my clients in that letter too, these like glimpses of imagining what it must have been like for them as children to be abused and be unsafe. And that's whatever type of abuse it is, like you said, when it happens at home and you really lose that sense of safety, it it creates this lack of trust in yourself for a lot of people because I don't have control over what's going on around me. I don't know when something is going to happen to my mom, to me, to my body. And so I I don't know how to trust my own instincts and my own actions.
SPEAKER_03:I love that you're continuing to fight for your dad, you know, when you're telling his story and you're helping so many people because of it. That just takes so much courage to just pick up that baton and just keep going with it. So you also, with that letter, and it was proof that your dad had been abused. There was a lot of proof in there, but he had taken his life and you tried to build a case for this. I mean, what happened?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I was really investigating what my dad had been through and why he might have ended his life at the same time I was investigating my cases. So I had this investigator hat on, and I felt so much anger toward what I saw as systems that failed my dad. And I wanted accountability. I thought, can I sue the person who had abused him? I even considered, like, had something gone wrong in the hospital. And I wanted an explanation, I wanted accountability. Like in that sense, I know it's not different. It was my dad who took his life, not somebody else who took his life. But I could have a deeper sense of understanding for the people who lose loved ones to violence and are impacted in the justice system because uh it's such a deep feeling of like, I just want somebody to be held accountable and admit that what they did was wrong or what they did was harmful. And so I I talked to some attorneys about whether there was any possibility of a lawsuit given my dad's letter. And I was so frustrated with this culture of secrecy and covering things up that I just wanted it to be so out in the open. And it's ultimately like the people I talked to said that there's it's really hard to draw that connection legally, even if it's you know written down on paper, it would basically have had to say it would have to have been a case where my dad like wrote a suicide note that said, This is why I'm ending my life, which he did not. And even with that, it would be a really high bar. And I realized, you know, I was never, I never wanted a specific outcome beyond just accountability and kind of clearing the cobwebs of secrecy, which I guess in some ways I have done anyway, because I write about it and very out in the open in that way. So I've kind of found my own path. But I also had a glimpse of how this, you know, from my personal perspective. And this was something that my dad dealt with too, of like he never wanted to press charges and go through a le a legal process because it's so painful as a victim and survivor to relive it over and over. And it's not about sharing your story, it's about facts and figures and being right and wrong, as I mentioned before. And that's often not something that's something that can often be just so draining and people don't want to relive. So I got a tiny, tiny glimpse of that as I was considering is there something that I can do to change that story? And I think ultimately what I've done is, like I said, try to focus more on on how this has what it has become in terms of my own story and doing something with it in that regard.
SPEAKER_03:And you know, so often, unfortunately, the abuser ends up having more rights than the victim. So it's it's so hard, like you said, with the letter. And it would have had to have actually been written out, and still even then, it's hard to prove, which I don't know why it is, and why we have to like scream as loud as we possibly can to be heard, and then it's still not loud enough, and then you feel like you weren't seen or validated, and that almost like they don't believe me. So I mean that that just slams the door on the pain that is locked inside you, and I think it's it it causes it it makes it worse. It's a whole nother layer of pain. Yeah, yeah, definitely. A couple of your quotes I'm gonna talk about a little bit because this was really powerful to me. None of those scenarios were the reality. The reality was that my father had felt enough pain that he decided to end his own life. The reality was that Alan was on death row, away from his family, and he could not separate that from the decisions he made about his life. Their choices were a product of their experiences that I could never really understand, no matter how many questions I asked or documents I memorized. I love that you recognized this and their stories and their pains and that you saw them. And I think that you're seeing every your writings are seeing everybody that is in these types of situations. It's beautiful.
SPEAKER_02:Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_03:Another quote that you left your job six months after you were unable to help Alan, which he's still on death row. You said in your okay. Yeah, I mean, and that's really hard. But another quote that you said six months after you had left um that job, you wrote, I did not know how to make my job stop feeling like my life, and my life stopped feeling like my job. You had talked a little bit about that earlier. I am that kind of a passionate person. I kind of enmesh what I'm working on and my life and the pains that I've gone through, and then that's become like a mission to me. You know, I just wanted to ask you if you could talk more about that and your mission and what you want to do with all of this.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, thank you. That's a that's a lovely question. Um, I think I want to continue being a witness of these stories and being a Voice that amplifies other people's voices, that allows space for nuance, that looks at systems that are often really inhuman, often really complicated, and finds and brings out the very human personal stories within them. I think it's a way that we can make change when we break down or look at these kind of huge structures or huge problems and can see the individuals like living within them or living in spite of them in some in some contexts. So my mission is not only to be an honest storyteller about my own life and let my experience be, I hope, an example and a way, a sort of a channel, a way for others to feel seen and connect and start conversations that maybe they've been avoiding having or grieve in a way that they maybe haven't before, but also to question what our assumptions are about the systems that we have in place and how are people really operating within them. And so if I can continue to just tell those stories and amplify them in new ways that aren't often the way that we hear about them, that makes me feel really fulfilled and is something that I know you you mentioned earlier, and it feels so resonant to me and to hear you say this like non-judgmental way of writing and seeing. And I think that that is, you know, at the core of what I do and want to do is to be somebody who can kind of sit with sit with complexity, sit with harm, and let it be what it is amongst a lot of other things. A lot amongst joy, amongst forgiveness, amongst dignity and agency and all of these things do exist at the same time. It's really hard. It's hard to see that in other people. Sometimes it's really hard to see that in ourselves. But those are the things that drive me.
SPEAKER_03:That's a lot.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I'm busy.
SPEAKER_03:Oh, but it's amazing. I do want to say this because I love that you are finally, you know, and maybe before this, but in my own reading about you, you were starting to finally live for yourself. You wrote any number of mirrored realities like these would have been a more satisfying, more triumphant, more impressive ending, but they are not what happened. Sometimes it is not a matter of finding the right explanation. Sometimes the option simply does not exist. The words are not there. What did happen is this this is what I love. I sent Alan a card on the anniversary of his sister's death, and I put money on his phone books, and I visited him, and we played cards in the family and friends visitation room. I stopped obsessing over why my father died, and I instead I walked in the woods with his best friend, and I added anchovy paste to his favorite pasta recipe, and I gave away his beloved ugly cow print bar stools I once thought I could never part with. When my aunt, the one with the soft skin who remained married to Jean, the one who abused him, offered to meet up and talk. I told her no. I wanted to hug you, I wanted to scream when you said that. I mean, it was so empowering to me. How did it feel to write that?
SPEAKER_00:It felt, you know, was something that was just such a change from how I had operated for so much of my life. But the power of letting go of control and trying, just trying to make everything work and everything kind of change was so freeing. You know, that's I think the right word. It was a relief to write that and also a relief to live that before I put the words on the page and you know, feel so much more balance in wanting to make change and do meaningful work and also not taking it on so much as my own life, you know, being able to close the laptop and being able to say, Oh, I couldn't, I actually I want I really wanted to interview this person. I thought it would make a difference. And I couldn't get a hold of them or they wouldn't talk to me. And being able to just like let that pass on instead of taking it so personally as a failing on my own part. Yeah, was such a so so freeing. And you know, writing it and living it as you asked, it gave me so much space, like letting go of all those things that you just quoted and that you described, like in the space where I let go of those things. I had so much more space for joy and for myself and for complicated feelings to just exist and be and not need to be solved as puzzles that I wanted to put in neat little boxes. And it made my life and my memory of my dad and my grief, all those things much more full and sort of flushed out in a way because I wasn't trying to make them a certain way and answer a certain question. Um, so I I think that it also gave me so much space, like a breath to experience that and write that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, there's layers of healing, and it felt like there was a big, a big slam on the abuse, you know, like it was like you helped your dad at that moment, you stood up for yourself, you let her know what she had done as well. And I thought that that was just so powerful that you what the word no does, oh my gosh. I mean, to set a boundary up like that is it really sent a message. One simple word, one huge message. You also you wrote, I had accepted that to know someone is not to solve them, but to see them. And I loved that, you know, you were speaking right to me when you said that. And you know, there are so many people that you're helping with your words. So thank you so much for everything that you're writing. And I can't wait for your memoir. Could you tell me more? Like, is it coming out soon? What's what's happening?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I'm in the process of like long publication process with my agents. So I don't have an official date yet, but it is moving along. I'm very, very excited about it. And um, I in the meantime am continuing to publish like the articles and essays that you've read. And I also have a substack where I write and explore these topics in more depth, get a little bit more personal, and also where I um send updates and kind of behind the scenes uh information about the book too. So that's called surface level. And it's been really beautiful to write in that space as well.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, I was gonna ask you to talk about that um surface level and how people can get a hold of you at Substack. Is is there any other way that they can get a hold of you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so uh the Substack is called Surface Level. And then my website, you can also read my work and contact me. It's just SophiaLorenzi.com, my name.
SPEAKER_03:Sophia, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for sharing your heart, your story, and your father's legacy so openly. What you've done through your writing, your advocacy, and your courage, it gives voice to pain that's often too heavy for words. You remind us that behind every statistic, there's a person. Behind every label, whether suicide, death row, or mental illness, there's a story. And stories like yours help us see the humanity that's been hidden by shame and silence for far too long. I think one of the most healing things that we can do is what you're doing, refusing to look away, choosing to stay in the hard conversations and the uncomfortable truths. Because when we look closer, we see that healing isn't about fixing, it's about seeing. Your line to know someone is not to solve them, but to see them will stay with me forever. That's what this show is about. Seeing people fully in their pain and in their purpose. To our listeners, if this conversation moved you, please share it. Someone you love might need to hear this today. If you know somebody that is suicidal or you might be yourself, please call 988 or go to any local authority or anywhere that you can to get help. You can find Sophia's work in Time, the Washington Post, and Substack, Sir her Substack, Surface Level, and many other publications. Follow her, read her words, and let them change how you see the world. Until next time, remember there is purpose in the pain and there is hope in the journey. I am Anne, and this is Real Talk with Tina. And Anne and Sophia, thank you so much again for being here.
SPEAKER_00:Thank you so much, Anne. It was an honor and wonderful to talk with you.
