Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

Sketching an Unlived Life: A Tapestry of Gratitude, History, and Ancient Wisdom

• Natalie Zett

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Episode 32 is a wild blend of personal stories, historical reflections, ancient wisdom, and a sneak peek into the future with voice cloning and multilingual adventures.

📺 YouTube Buzz:

  • Uploaded podcasts featuring Barb Wachholz of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society and dropped some eye-catching YouTube Shorts.

🎤 Tech Adventure & Polyglot-ing

📚 Ancient Wisdom & Modern Gratitude

  • A theological trip back in time to explore the enduring concept of giving thanks. How an ancient parable finds resonance today.
  • The Power of ‘Thank You’ in Today’s World: The transformative nature of gratitude, rooted in ancient wisdom but utterly relevant in the modern world.💌 

Podcast Intro in Slovak, German and Polish!

YouTube Shorts


YouTube Podcasts


Music (Artlist)
We Found Each Other - Birraj

Misc links


Natalie:

Hello, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 32 of Flower in the River podcast. And before we get started, I wanted to remind you that, in case you haven't listened to the last two podcasts and they are the interviews with Barb Decker-Wachholz, the co-founder of the Eastland Disaster Historical Society they're published, they're available and I highly recommend listening to them, not just because Barb is an excellent storyteller she is but it gives a deeper background in some ways about the entirety of the Eastland disaster from the perspective of Barb's grandmother, who survived. And not only did she survive, she told the story many, many times throughout her life, and Barb's grandmother is. Her storytelling ability is the reason we have the Eastland Disaster Historical Society, which has been so valuable to families like mine.

Natalie:

I was thinking about what life would have been like without the Eastland Disaster Historical Society, and these folks were founding this organization at the very same time that I discovered my family's connection to the Eastland disaster and I thought what would it have been like for me? How would my journey have been different? I suspect my journey would have gone along. I suspect I would have scoured and found things and been rather relentless, as I am when I'm on a mission, thinking I need to do something, but it would have been a lot more difficult and a lot more lonely. It's not as if I've been in contact with them throughout the years. It's been more sporadic and in the last few years I've been in closer contact. But for the most part they were immediately helpful to me. They found an old newspaper clipping with my great aunt's photo on the cover, and it was just so lovely to see that. So I'm really grateful to them and Barb's really quotable too.

Natalie:

So I think that there are just so many lovely things from those two interviews with her and as I was working with her audio files, she indirectly inspired me to start posting more of my podcasts to YouTube, and so I beefed up my little YouTube channel and I added the two podcasts with Barb and I decided to take those files and make a couple of YouTube shorts out of them. I've never done this before. I know that they are really popular and I have been looking at shorts as well and I thought, huh, they are kind of intriguing. And so I took some very quotable quotes from Barb, put them into a 30 second YouTube short and posted it, and it's getting a lot of traction. And it probably sounds like I'm just into the marketing of this and I am for the Eastland Disaster Historical Society because I want to always promote them. But it's not the marketing, it's the message. She had some profound words to share about life that can apply to anybody, so that's why I think that those particular quotes were so important. The gist of it was they had this dilemma and they said someone has to do something, someone needs to do something about this, and again that's almost a battle cry. At this point it's like what are you going to do? How will you be of service? I mean, that's the underlying message. So I had fun making the shorts. I made another one just for the Eastland Disaster, and I'll probably do more of those and I will put the links in the show notes to these two YouTube shorts and you can see what you think about them.

Natalie:

And speaking of experimentation, I should tell you that I dabbled last weekend for the very first time in voice cloning. Yes, I know it's very controversial, but when it's your own voice and you have agency over that, it's a different thing. There's a company called Eleven Labs and they have very mind-blowing applications within their suite of applications. And I heard another YouTube content creator I guess that's what he's called he's my grussel from the United Kingdom and he's always experimenting, and I heard him clone his voice into different languages and I thought I want to do that too and see what happens. So what I did was take the intro to my podcast and I put it into this application that Eleven Labs has, and I had it translate my podcast intro into Slovak, german and Polish, because those are some of my ancestral languages. They're not all of them, but I just wanted to try with those three to see what happens. And I do have a very elementary understanding of them and I can sort of beak them, but not very well, truth be told. So I couldn't wait to hear what happened after the cloning and dubbing had taken place, and when I heard it, it was mind-blowing I don't know what else to say. It was mind-blowing, it was amazing. And it was my voice definitely my voice, but speaking in these languages with the what sounded like the proper accent. And to test that, I sent the links to some of my family in Slovakia and the compliments that they gave were it's not too bad. And another one said I can't believe how spot on this is. This is also one of my wishes. I want everyone to understand the work that I'm doing, regardless of which language they speak, and it's one of those things that I'm always working on in my spare time.

Natalie:

About 15 years ago, I worked for a company where I was in charge of 15 translations. Now I had to work with, of course, translation companies and translation software at the time, but I really got a pretty good feel for the differences of all these languages, including languages like Korean, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Japanese. Those are the languages that we were dealing with, as well as about 12 or 13 European-based languages. It was just so much fun, and when I was doing that job, I could see the possibilities and how important it was to have a global mindset. That's one part of that, but the other part of it is because my family we really are recent immigrants to the United States.

Natalie:

As in all, four of my grandparents came from Eastern Europe, central Europe, and they all spoke different languages, and my desire has always been to become somewhat fluent in all of them, and I was fortunate enough to grow up when these people, many of these people, were alive, so I could hear them speak the languages. And so, in the case of my grandfather who lived with us, he actually taught me different languages. He actually taught me to swear in three or four different languages. But that was, grandpa, for you At any rate. The languages are really important to me and global outreach is super important to me, so it was a joy to experiment with this.

Natalie:

I don't know what will happen. Ideally, I think. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to take my audio book and run it through that translator and have it come out okay? Now that's as someone who's worked with translations. You do have to have a native speaker evaluate how things are going there Because, as you probably have done with Google Translate, it doesn't quite do what you think it ought to do sometimes. So it's progressed quite a bit and it will only get better and it will be, in a sense, a dream fulfilled for me and for a lot of people. So that's why I go through all this fuss with this stuff.

Natalie:

One of my friends, I think, was getting impatient with me and saying well, it's enough that you're doing what you're doing, you don't really need to do anymore. And I don't agree with that. And also it feeds a desire of mine. I've always been one of those very curious people and I do want to learn how things work and I've always been kind of a tech geek and I've always loved rolling up my sleeves and digging in and opening the hood or the bonnet of the car to see how does this thing work. And sure, there's always the exploding cigar moments, hiccups and misfires and things that don't go the way you think they ought to or they should go or whatever. But eventually, if I experiment enough and am open to changing my approach and getting feedback from people who are more experienced in a certain area than I am, eventually it does all click into place and it's quite wonderful.

Natalie:

When I worked as a writing teacher, whether at the university level or at the law literary center. I would always push people because I wanted people to see what their limits were, but also I always wanted to create a great space for them to experiment so they wouldn't be afraid. I wanted to create a shame-free place for people to grow. And I realized too that I had to give myself that same gift as I've been doing all this stuff, because I really do step into some stuff that would be considered uncharted territory, but I think that's the name of the game Giving one's voice cloned and having the ability to speak in different languages or to take an audio thing and make a visual thing out of that audio, as I did with Barb's interview. All these things are new, they're experimental, some work, some jive with people, some don't, but it's all part of the process of learning and feeling free to learn. I think to learn you have to feel free to color outside the lines and to go outside the boundaries.

Natalie:

Also, today I will announce that it is a very special day to me because it's my birthday. I'm talking on an October Saturday, a very beautiful October Saturday, as my late mother used to always say. I was born on a very beautiful fall evening. I guess it took a while for me to arrive, and in the last couple of years I've really come to think about my birthday very differently, and it was really driven home to me during that year or so that it took me to narrate the audio book as I read my own writing over and over again to try to get it the way I wanted it to be.

Natalie:

Something else was happening. It was an awareness that, again at a deeper level, had my grandmother not given her tickets to the Western Electric Picnic to her sister, I wouldn't be here celebrating that birthday, my sister wouldn't be here, my mother wouldn't be here, and it's really overwhelming in a good way. Sometimes we need to be, sometimes I need to be overwhelmed to stop me dead in my tracks, and saying I'm so grateful to you is such a powerful thing. And, as I've said probably more than once, my book, this podcast and everything else is not just done in the memory of the 844 who were killed, but it's also one very long thank you letter to my great aunt. She died before she got a chance to really live, and I'm going to segue into chapter five of the book. It's called Sketching an Unlived Life and that's exactly what happened in the fictional account as well as in my real life that was going on at the time.

Natalie:

My biggest conundrum at the time is that learning about my family connection to the Eastland disaster actually learning about that whole side of the family was brand new to me, and that was shocking enough. And then when I went researching and found so precious little about this major event that took place in downtown Chicago in 1915, that just blew my mind. And I'm talking about again the late 1990s, around 1998, 1999, when I was doing this research and putting things together as a journalist. I'd never been stumped like this before, and sometimes I would just sit at my kitchen table and cry and think what do I do about this? I felt like I was being teased and pulled along, and then I would always hit my head against the proverbial brick wall. And this was unlike any brick wall I'd collided with before or since as a journalist. As someone at that point who had pretty extensive writing and journalistic experience, I felt I had met my match.

Natalie:

I thought I'm never going to be able to pull this off, and so, just to switch things up a little bit if you listen to this podcast, you know that I normally wait until the end of the podcast to read a chapter from the book, but this time I'm going to jump in now and start reading. And I will begin reading a very short excerpt from chapter 6, which is called Sketching an Unlived Life. And when this part opens, zara, who's the main character, is contemplating the direction that her dear friend Ellie had just given to her. Ellie's pushing her and Zara's afraid. Ellie's telling her that she has to go out there and visit Chicago, visit the grave and visit the world of her great aunt, in order to do proper justice to this article that she's trying to write. So chapter 6, sketching an Unlived Life, from the Book Flower in the River by Natalie Zett. Ellie was right. It was time to write about Martha and Zara had a guaranteed spot for the article. She rang the bugle's editor Go for it, zara, sounds fantastic. He said. Just get it to us right after Labor Day. Still, she only had a sparse narrative and wasn't sure how to proceed.

Natalie:

Pearl had recently sent additional photos that she'd hoped would provide inspiration. As she lined them up on her living room coffee table, she watched Martha evolve. At age five, martha was adorable, sporting an oversized bow and smiling eyes. At age 12, standing next to her sister Louisa. She was still cute, but something else was going on. She stood erect, hand on hip and gazed into the camera as if she was daring it to break contact. First, she appeared to be gauging her surroundings, unsure if she could rely on them. Totally, zara shuddered. This was eerily similar to many of her own childhood photos Still by her late teens. Martha was posing, growing into her beauty and possessing a flair for style. And then there it was, the last picture taken during her final year, featuring Martha flanked by several young women, all of whom were dressed in men's clothing. By then, martha appeared no longer innocent. In this case, a picture is not always worth a thousand words, especially this one. What was the cross-dressing about Aunt Martha, what do I carry of you inside my veins and how do I bring you into my life?

Natalie:

As a writer, zara was known for capturing her subject's unique imprint on their world in one thousand words or less Word count limits for most publications. After winning first place for commentaries in the annual community newspapers associations Best of Competition, one judge wrote it's as if you sculpt with words. Writing about strangers was easy. Family Not so easy. Could she do it, constructing a plausible narrative from shards and fragments torpedoed her confidence. How can I write about a family I'd never known and a time and a city in which I'd never lived? Still, this story was bequeathed to her and she must render it with her usual style. Something was at stake, but what? Her life, her family's life, the past, the future? The phrase make it yours echoed in her head. Who are you, martha Pfeiffer, and what do you want from me, zarapy? Sentences together and things clicked. Words flowed and fit into their places on the page and the momentum intensified. The story's voltage flooded her being and after a few fits and starts, she crafted an exceptional essay about Martha and the Eastland. This is damn good, damn good. No, maybe it's not. The ending is kind of clunky. She rang Ellie. That's the end of that section.

Natalie:

Of course it's a lot longer, but I wanted to stop there to communicate the anxiety, the confusion, sometimes in a situation where you normally have confidence and it just seems to be taken from you. That's also a lot of what was going on there. People often say that a certain experience or person changes their life, and this did that for sure for me. But to be more precise, this event, this revelation changed the course of my life. In other words, I'm not sure what direction I would have gone in before I got this document from my mother's sister, this family history but it wouldn't have been this one, and I allowed it to change the course of my life. I was curious, I wondered what would happen and I was also pulled by the story as well.

Natalie:

And yes, I've described this change of course as coming out of a sense of obligation, but unfortunately, obligation has such a heavy and bad connotation with it. And it's not that kind of obligation. It's a privilege. Because, again, had my grandmother not given her sister that ticket to the Western Electric Picnic in 1915, most likely I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't be having this birthday right now. And the other thing that's it's hard to describe this, but having this awareness, this sense of obligation, this connection to the past is super motivating for me as well to get up and do something about this. And in life I've had many bad days, some very bad years, and bringing this to mind is one of the things that, while it doesn't always lift me completely out of a bad time, it can very quickly put me on a place where I can see this will come to an end and other days, better days, are ahead. And keep your eyes on the prize, and that prize would be continue to express gratitude for being alive. So hopefully I've explained why that piece is near and dear to my heart.

Natalie:

But you might wonder again why call that chapter sketching and unlived life? Well, it's because this is the first time I had to capture an essence of a person that I'd never met and that is a delicate art, and it's also a person I'm related to. And I found myself piecing together fragments, the photos from my Aunt Pearl, oral history, what little I had, and some of the writings, and then having to go back and forth in this dance and fill in a lot of gaps with my imagination. And in a sense, each piece is like a brushstroke that contributes to a larger portrait, albeit with some colors forever missing, because I did not have the full details. And indeed that is where the folks at the Eastland Disaster Historical Society came in and because of the work they did, I was able to fill in a lot of the gaps. But it was indeed like building something and then, sometimes, taking it apart, rebuilding it.

Natalie:

I had many false starts, many different approaches, many experiments on the way to what I ended up creating. I also want to say too a lot of times people are almost frozen. They won't do anything unless they have all the information and unless they have a guarantee that, with all the information they are going to, I don't know meet success or pass a test or whatever. And here's the thing even if you have quote, unquote all the information, that does not guarantee anything other than the fact you have a lot more information to sort through. In a sense, not having all that information really forced me to become even a better researcher than I already was, but also learning to be quiet.

Natalie:

A lot of times I would just sit in my little apartment where I was living at the time, close my eyes and just talk to Martha, even though at that point I really didn't believe that a dead person was occupying space with me. But I just thought well, let's just pretend. And I kept saying what do you want? What do you want me to tell the world about you? What do you want to tell me about you? How do I bring you into this century? When you died so long ago, you were just 19. Your life didn't have a chance and I already knew some of Martha's interests, that she was very artistically inclined, that she wanted to be a writer, that she wanted to paint. She just had so many ambitions and she wanted to travel the world and again, according to my book Distribution Analytics, she's gone all over the world. The story's gone all over the world. So that is so cool.

Natalie:

But I want to add another layer to this story and it popped in my head yesterday as I was thinking about this podcast how about some ancient wisdom? Yeah, as you may know, and you probably should know, I do have a master's degree in systematic theology from Luther Seminary in St Paul, and that was a very difficult academic degree. By the way, I had to study a lot of let's see Greek, in Hebrew, I took some theological German, a bit of Latin. Learning how to interpret ancient texts was the thing that I wanted to focus in on. I love that stuff.

Natalie:

I'm not, again, a religious person in the sense that a lot of people might think of religious people. I'm not, but I have deep respect for ancient literature and deeper respect for ancient wisdom. But it's important to remember that a lot of the ancient wisdom not all, but a lot of the ancient wisdom that comes to us, at least in Western culture, is largely coming from whatever Bible we've been exposed to or whatever sacred texts we've been looking at. I cannot speak for Islam because I know very little about it, but I know a fair amount about Judaism and a fair amount about Christianity's origins, and so these ancient stories that pop up, particularly in the New Testament, they often have origins elsewhere, in even deeper, more ancient texts. And so when I talk about these, it's not to preach, even though I can do that it's to talk about how old a concept is, how archetypal a concept is.

Natalie:

And I'm going to talk about the concept of giving thanks, and you might think that's just a polite thing that you're forced to do, or it seems like one of those things where it almost seems contrived, and if you spend any amount of time on any sort of social media, which I think most of us do, you see a lot of people expressing thanks for this, that and the other, and sometimes it almost seems rote. It seems, I don't know, kind of like a recipe or formula, because somebody else said this, I'd better say this, or I'm going to appear to be not grateful, or whatever, and what it ends up sounding like is the same thing. So in a sense, you no longer hear people's gratitude because it's almost like a hum in the background. So I want to return to maybe over 2,000 years ago to this story. It's an origin story of gratitude, or one of the origin stories of gratitude, and I'm talking about a parable that was shared.

Natalie:

It's from one of the books of the New Testament, the Book of Luke, and it was about 10 people who were suffering from a terrible disease that we now call Hansen's disease. Back in those days it was called leprosy and the people who were suffering were called lepers, but that term is really fallen out of favor. And this Hansen's disease is quite horrible. It's tremendously contagious, tremendously disfiguring and it affects people's skin, nerves, mucus, membranes, and it's quite awful. I think it's largely been eradicated, but not completely. So that's the situation, that's what's going on there.

Natalie:

To set the tone Back, long ago maybe not that long ago people who had this Hansen's disease were isolated, treated badly, and in this story, jesus somehow heals 10 people of this horrible, horrible disease. And there's so much that's remarkable about this text. In other words, the people were wanting to be healed and, as far as I can tell, and at least in the translations I've looked at, jesus didn't do anything that you could see, but they were healed and he told them to go get it examined by those in authority. And, beyond your way, they go off, run off. They're so startled by what happened and because they've been living with this, they've been living isolated, they've been treated badly all their lives. Only one outcast among the outcasts pauses and returns to Jesus to express gratitude.

Natalie:

Now, on his way to Jerusalem, jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee and he was going into a village. Ten men who had leprosy, otherwise known as Hansen's disease, met him. They stood at a distance and called out in a sing-song voice Jesus' master, have mercy on us. When he saw them, he said go, show yourselves to the priest. And as they went, they were cleansed. One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him, and he was a Samaritan. In other words, this guy was an outcast among the outcasts. Jesus asked were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? Has no one returned to give praise to God, except this immigrant, this foreigner? Then he said to him rise and go, your faith has made you well. So here's the kicker inside this story. So, presumably, from what we can tell, the ten people who were healed of Hansen's disease, nine of the people who were healed, they were similar to Jesus in terms of ethnicity. But there was one who was a Samaritan, and Samaritans did not get along with people who were of Jesus' ethnic group, that's the best way to say it. So this outcast person was the only one who stopped and paused and went back to say thank you.

Natalie:

Well, I'm surprised too that that little story, that parable, found its way to the surface of my mind. But and I never thought an age old parable could resonate so much with my own life but here we are. I've always felt a bit like the estranged, the proverbial black sheep, dark horse or whatever in the family, and yet I sometimes find myself in the role of the person who returned to give thanks to realize that my life was a gift. There is a connection to this story when, when the person was hit by oh my gosh, I shouldn't be here, and goes back to Jesus and says thank you, it's not the perfunctory thank you, it's my gosh. My life will never be the same.

Natalie:

And what I've found is that deep and profound gratitude gives birth to all kinds of good things. I think it's the well from which so many things spring. It's a bit of a stretch, I'll grant you that, but I felt a resonance, and that resonance reverberated and created these internal reminders that I frequently need. It's like my life is a gift. It doesn't really belong to me. It's a gift, and what am I going to do with that life? How do I say thank you?

Natalie:

In my story, this is what I have done. Your story might be something dramatically different from my story, and I think that it's important to become aware of that and realize, however unique or even challenging your story is, there always always is something that you can pull from it. In my case, I think it's pretty simple. I've been drawn to express gratitude to a woman whose absence has left an indelible imprint on my existence. It was as if some cosmic force beckoned us to come full circle, to pause and acknowledge the often unseen pillars that hold up our lives. But the lens of history, the lens of storytelling, gives a way to contextualize our relationships, to give voice to the voiceless and to extend a line of gratitude that might otherwise have remained forever silent. That's what I see the folks at the Eastland Disaster Historical Society have done to people that they aren't even related to, and this is what I've done to a person I am related to.

Natalie:

And sketching an unlived life isn't just about connecting the dots of what was. It's not a sentimental journey, but there's nothing wrong with being sentimental. Sometimes it's an emotional journey, and from that emotion comes the power and it taps into the might-have-bins, the what-ifs, the dreams, unfulfilled, yet infinitely impactful. I'm going to end this right here, because this one is packed with all kinds of stuff that I'm going to even have to further distill. But thank you for joining me on this ride, and I hope you will hop on over to YouTube to take a look and listen to the podcasts and to the YouTube shorts. And for sure I hope you will listen to the Slovak, german and Polish intros to the podcast. See what you think. Maybe you'll want to give it a try yourself. Make sure you experiment with something new this week and I will catch you next week. Take care, thank you, thank you.

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Natalie Zett

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