September 30, 2004

Son charged with murder, Pomeranz finds comfort in family and friends

Gilah Pomeranz with her sons, Michael Rittenhouse, left, and Nicky Rittenhouse, during their annual Mother’s Day trip to the Cincinnati Zoo in 2003.

By Diane Chiddister

A lifelong avid reader and lover of language, Gilah Pomeranz often thinks in terms of metaphor. The metaphor that best fits her life these days, Pomeranz said, is that she’s drowning.

Then, miraculously, someone raises her head above water.

What is it like to have your first born child accused of killing another mother’s son? What is it like when prosecutors announce he is facing the death penalty? It’s horrendous, said Pomeranz, yet there are, just enough to get by, surprising moments of grace.

“I can’t imagine a worse nightmare than what I’m experiencing now,” she said in an interview Sunday. “But the other part is that people have been amazing. The people in this community have been angels.”

Pomeranz’s nightmare began Feb. 18 of this year, when she returned home from work to find Greene County sheriff’s deputies in her Allen Street yard, searching for the remains of Tim Lopez, who had been missing since Jan. 22, 2002. The next day her oldest son, Michael Rittenhouse, was arrested for aggravated murder and just after midnight on Feb. 20, Lopez’s remains were found buried in the yard.

Two weeks ago, after seven months of investigation by Greene County prosecutors, the Greene County Grand Jury returned an indictment against Rittenhouse for aggravated murder, with a death penalty specification.

It’s impossible, Pomeranz said, to simultaneously hold in her mind the thoughts of her oldest child and the death penalty.

“I just have to believe that it will be resolved in such a way that the good that Michael has will be allowed to be in this world,” she said.

In the meantime, Pomeranz goes on, putting one foot in front of the other. While nothing in Pomeranz’s life will ever be normal again, she is back to most of the routines she knew before Feb. 18. She starts most days with a 6 a.m. workout at Curves, then drives to work at Sinclair Community College. Later, she returns to the home she shares with her youngest son, Nicky, an 18-year-old student at Yellow Springs High School. Pomeranz and her ex-husband, Bill Rittenhouse of Springfield, separated three years ago and divorced in early 2004.

“I get through the day because I have two sons who need me to get through the day,” she said.

Once a week Pomeranz visits Michael in the Greene County jail, squeezing her time between visits by other family and friends, who are allowed, all together, a half hour a week.

“It’s the saddest thing I can imagine,” she said of her visits. “But I always remember that there’s another mother who would trade places with me in a heartbeat. I’m grateful to see him.”

The awareness that whatever happened in her home on Jan. 22, 2002, resulted in the death of another young man never leaves her, Pomeranz said.

“We as a family don’t forget for one minute that Tim’s family is living with this tragedy,” she said. “Never for a second do we forget.”

Pomeranz said she has no memory of what happened the first several days after the sheriff’s department, Yellow Springs police and other law enforcement officials descended on her home, although she does remember the bright lights from the news trucks that shone in the house all night through the following weekend, and the helicopters that flew overhead.

After her concerns for Michael, Pomeranz said, the first thoughts she can remember from that time were her fears that she would be ostracized from the community she loves, where she was born and has lived 44 years. But that fear lessened, she said, when the phone began ringing.

“The darkest moment never became as dark as it could have been because the phone calls started immediately,” she said. “I knew I wouldn’t have to do this alone.”

The hundreds of friends and acquaintances who called, wrote notes and delivered food in those first weeks conveyed love for herself, for Nicky and for Michael, Pomeranz said. And while people expressed support for her family, Pomeranz said she also felt that they were supporting Tim’s family as well, that it wasn’t an “either-or situation,” but rather “love for us both.”

The shock of Michael’s arrest ground to a halt her active life in Yellow Springs. Pomeranz stopped going to work and ceased her volunteer activities with Chamber Music Yellow Springs, the Yellow Springs Community Foundation and the Antioch Writers’ Workshop. She also stayed away from her Curves routine, she said, partly from not wanting to create an awkward situation for the regular group of women who gathered there each morning at 6 a.m.

But her Curves friends wouldn’t let her stay away, and Pomeranz’s eyes teared up, as they do frequently, when she described the letter the women sent, asking her to return. Her co-workers and administrators at Sinclair, including the president, also contacted Pomeranz, assuring her that they wanted her back on the job.

Pomeranz took her friends’ advice and at the beginning of March returned to work, where she credits a close group of colleagues with helping her through the rough times. They stand by her when she has a “little meltdown,” Pomeranz said, then “help me suck it up and get back to work.”

The commute to and from Dayton also proved therapeutic and served most days as her “crying time,” Pomeranz said, “when I could cry and not make everyone else uncomfortable.”

But until mid-March Pomeranz hadn’t yet braved that most ordinary but now terrifying aspect of life in a village — running into people downtown. One Saturday morning, she said, she gathered up her courage and walked down the bikepath to her regular haunts on Xenia Avenue.

Between the Credit Union and Current Cuisine, Pomeranz said, she ran into at least 10 friends who greeted her warmly but without words. “On that first day, we just looked at each other and cried,” she said. “There were hugs and tears. And no one crossed to the other side of the street.”

While most of Pomeranz’s friends have rallied around her, some have drifted away. She feels saddened by “some distancing of some people from me and my family,” she said, but she understands why.

Pomeranz also understands that some people simply don’t know how to respond to her. She remembered one man who approached her hesitantly, apologizing that anything he said would be the wrong thing. On the contrary, she recalled replying, what mattered was that he cared enough to try, and she assured him that “anything he said would be the right thing.”

Most of all, Pomeranz holds close the outpouring of warmth from those who offer it, a wide assortment of friends that begins with her lifelong best friend, Carolyn Bailey, and includes friends from childhood, from her current work, from her past jobs at the Yellow Springs Credit Union and the Antioch School, and the parents of her children’s friends.

Pomeranz finds strength in her sons as well. She described Nicky as “an amazing kid with this fortitude and serenity like no one I’ve known before.” Nicky’s friends have rallied around him, she said, and have “every step of the way shown love for him and in a physical way have surrounded him and made sure he has what he needs.”

Pomeranz also draws strength from Michael. The grand jury may have behind it the force of law but it doesn’t have the force of a mother’s love, and no court will change Pomeranz’s love for her son.

“I know Michael not just as a mother to a son but also as one human being to another,” she said. “I know there is not a grain of evil or violence in him. Whatever happened, I still know who Michael is. That’s never flickered for me. Not for an instant.”

She is not angry with Michael, she said, but rather feels “sad and bewildered.”

Seven months into a life she never imagined herself living, Gilah Pomeranz can go about her daily routine, and can find comfort in her family and friends. But for now, that’s as good as it gets. Asked if anything brings her joy or peace, Pomeranz seemed at a loss. No, she said, not yet. Later, she said, “one of the hardest things is wondering what part of this is because I was not the mother I should have been. That’s why I don’t think about joy or peace.”

She often has trouble sleeping, Pomeranz said, but at least she sleeps some, which is better than in the beginning. But nightmares frequently wake her. When they do, she said, she reaches for the basket of cards she keeps by her bed. They are cards from her friends and acquaintances, cards that tell her she’s loved, that her sons are loved. She reads the cards, takes a deep breath, then reads them again.