Work

It means a lot.  I think it’s an opportunity for me to use my skills and my knowledge from my years of schooling, but I get to connect with people on an individual level on a daily basis, and really have the honor of [their] telling me their struggles, working through that with them, and giving them the skills to be their own therapist in the future so they don’t need to come back. It’s also really important to me to have work/life balance, because I do have two little kids, and the work I do gives me the ability to be home with them when I need to, and work when I want to.

Well, success for me would be, if I had a headstone, I would say, "She tried to do some good." And in terms of my devotion to nonprofits, it's the core of everything.  Its mission, why they exist, why they were founded.  If I like the mission I will really go gung ho for that,  So it's trying to do some good through the work as well.

Just do a lot of yoga. I do not know how much you guys know about yoga or even if you have ever done it before, but it is not just a physical practice.  There is a meditation aspect to it.  Even though I was raised Jewish I identify heavily.  It’s the spirituality of meditation and Buddhist mindfulness practice, just because it answers something that no religion has ever answered for me before, which is just to connect with yourself a little bit and not necessarily to care about—just doing good deeds for the world and not putting it in—I guess for me it was always you need to go synagogue, you need to do these things, you need to, and not putting those needs as just something you should work on for yourself.  So being more gentle with yourself. So if I go home tonight and I do not do all my dishes I will not beat myself up and think I am a horrible person because I did not do all of my dishes. I will just try and do better tomorrow.

I have a lot to say about women and education. I think there is such pushes to—I don’t even know how to put this. I think that my biggest challenge from kindergarten to defending my PhD thesis. Why don’t you talk more? Why don’t you smile more? Right, I think there’s such—it’s hard to crack past that. It’s hard to yell over the guy who’s saying nothing, but saying a lot of it and getting all the attention. I think that’s really tough. And I found that and some of it is personality and some of it is gender.  There’s plenty of women who are falling off their chairs answering questions, but I found that the professors I worked with, it wasn’t really male culture it was either patronizing or it was diminishing. I could not wait till when I came here. And Mark got his job and he was teaching, and I was finishing up, I couldn’t wait to get out of Princeton. Smith was fine [laughs]. Smith should have prepared me for the rest of it.

So I have many anthropologist friends that could never work with the families. One of the—I think one of the reasons people are attracted to archeology and anthropology is because you don’t actually have to talk to people. And you’re sort of behind the scenes. And I never minded, as an anthropologist, getting along with people is an important thing, but also understanding them. And so I have dealt with people from all different walks of life under the most horrific circumstances. And that was extremely important to me. And then to transfer that to this job, being director of the Molly Bish Center, it's extremely important that I understand the perspective of the victim, of the survivors that are left behind because they in fact are victims themselves, they’re just not deceased. And, you know, they’re the walking wounded. And when I was at the medical examiner’s office I couldn’t believe how many people had been impacted by that that you would never know just walking down the street. And so it became a very important part of who I am and what I did, but being able to translate that because I can get up in front of a professional audience at the American Academy of Forensic Science meetings and I can talk about skeletonized remains that are traumatized. I’ve done all sorts of trauma and had to explain that, on the stand as well as at professional meetings, intellectually. But viscerally, what happens when you’re in a courtroom, and you’re describing that.  Like when I was in a courtroom for the Bulger testimony.  Really, really hard to see the expressions of the families and to see their loved ones.  They didn’t know where their loved ones were for sixteen to twenty years. And to be able to translate what I do into to telling that victim’s story and also doing it in a way that is respectful so that I’m keeping all of that in mind as the families are looking at me and some of them had to get up and leave, which I totally understand. And to be able to be a voice for those has been something that’s just—people say, “How can you do what you do?” and a lot of people don’t understand it. And that’s, that’s physical, that’s manual, you know, the nasty part of the decomposition. Yes, but that’s physical. It’s the emotional stuff and being humane and human and being professional is really important to me. And that we’re bringing these kids, these families—most important is bringing them home. And then telling their story.