It's Alright

I hadn’t thought much about my reaction. Truth is, I’d always kept that little bit of hope, that micro-glimmer – if there is even such a thing – of hope deep in the recesses of my mind that there’d be a “we” again. The card in tonight’s mail disabused me of that dream.

            It was from a friend saying he knew “Friday” (that’s tomorrow!) would be a difficult day but he knew I am “stronger” than I think and I will “endure” this.

            Strength; endurance; great words. Words of hope, and perseverance, and grace. Like I said, I hadn’t thought much about my reaction. Then I read the card and I felt the air go out of me … for a brief moment. Then I did the unexpected, at least to the old me. I opened my Bible and read Psalm 103. For six years that Psalm, “Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me bless His holy name,” has sustained me. I read that Psalm moments after I decided, sitting in that cell at the jail when all was lost, that I would go on because God expected me to never give up.

            There was something about those words that told me to endure, persevere, overcome. Every difficult decision, every bad day … or night, I’ve turned to Psalm 103. The pain, the sorrow and emptiness is still there, but it’s ok.

            “How does it feel

            How does it feel      

            To be on your own

            With no direction home

            A complete unknown

            Like a rolling stone”

            Dylan is blaring through my headphones. It’s always Dylan tunes on nights like this. Before I had my CD player in here I just wrote his lyrics down from memory, dozens of his songs, as if those words would suddenly open my minds-eye to what all this means. So I play “Like A Rolling Stone” a dozen times; I hear “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright;” I’m listening to Bob and the Band sing “I Shall Be Released” –

            “They say every man must need protection

            They say every man must fall.

            But I swear I see my reflection

            So high above this wall.

            I see my light come shining

            From the west down to the east

            Any day now, any day now

            I shall be released.”

            And of course, I play “Forever Young” over and over. How could I not? Those words were the first words I spoke/sang to both our sons moments after they entered their new world. “Our” sons; “Our” wedding; “Our” grief; “Our” is no more.

            As I write this, it is the eve of her remarriage. It was inevitable and I’ve accepted it (funny, like I could do anything to convince her otherwise). Every night since that August day in 2008 I’ve finished my day with prayers. They’ve always included her and her happiness and well being. I never prayed for reconciliation. Oh, I hoped for it; I daydreamed about her coming to see me, telling me she really did love me. Those were dreams. But my prayers – I knew what had to happen. So I asked God to watch over her, let her be happy.

            I’m not a strong man. I am weak and I am broken. God, however, in His infinite wisdom keeps telling me to go on. I do. I’m not sure why; I just know I can’t go back, I can’t stay here, I have to go on. I work out five days each week with a young Salvador-American. “O” is cut like a running back. We move weight the likes of which I never imagined I could lift. I’m his “project,” rebuilding me, muscle by muscle. Everyone around here notices how lean and muscular I’ve become. My body no longer looks like that of a 55 year-old man.

            Other guys have worked with us and quit. “Too intense,” they’ve said. I tell O “I’m not a quitter. I won’t give in; I’ll die first.” I have a quote pinned inside my locker from Ernest Hemingway. He wrote,

            “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

            I love Hemingway’s simple understanding of the human condition. I see those words as I jot this down. Hemingway, you fucking genius! You know what I’m saying.

            I never got to tell her goodbye. I never got to say how sorry I am and how I only ever wanted her to be happy and love me. I don’t think she ever understood how I felt/feel about her, how I can’t listen to “Shelter From the Storm” without seeing her and wishing, wishing things were different.

            That’s not in the cards. Maybe that’s why I turned to Psalm 103. It says God is bigger than all this and He’s to be trusted. Maybe it’s just a placebo, but I always turn to Psalm 103 and I always go on, and this time is no different.

            “When you go nothing

            You got nothing to lose”

            Bob is right you know. It’s easy standing strong when there’s nothing left to pull at you and say “but what if …” The toughest thing for me these past six years was not reacting, not fighting back, not playing “what if.” So many times in the last year I wanted to write her and say, “please don’t” when I learned she was moving on. But, I couldn’t. “In love.” I learned what those words meant after August 2008. You love someone, they break your heart, still you do what has to be done. My friends tell me how courageous I’ve been; how strong. No one knows how much energy it takes to not write, not fight, not get angry, not quit.

            I look at my watch and know the vows are being exchanged. So, I open my Bible to Job:

            “Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

            And naked shall I return there.

            The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;

            Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

            And, I’m ok because I know what Job is talking about. I get it. My buddy DC checks on me. “Main man, you good?” He is always there, a brother I wouldn’t have recognized in his days of death and destruction, days of violence and a dead heart; here he is, a man who I love like a brother who knows what tonight is. He sees my smile and he knows I’m good, I’m through this.

            I’m thinking of Jim Croce. It’s November 1981 and my best man’s fiancé; a beautiful girl with huge expressive eyes and the voice of an angel is singing “our” song, “Time in a Bottle.” The song ends, the organist hits the first note and I look to the back of the church and I see her for the first time that day … and she is more beautiful than I could imagine. My life is in front of me; my life is perfect.

            Jim Croce died in a plane crash, too young and too soon. I think of him singing tonight, but it isn’t “our” song, it’s “Operator.”

            “Operator, oh could you help me place this call?

            Cause I can’t read the number you just gave me

            There’s something in my eyes, you know it happens every time

            I think about the love that I thought would save me”

            He laments the loss of his love and wants so badly to call and say “I’m good; I’m happy.” But, he then realizes there isn’t any reason to call her, to say what’s on his heart.

            “Operator, oh let’s forget about this call

            There’s no one there I really wanted to talk to …”

            No one there. Yeah, Jim, you were right. What was so long ago isn’t anymore. And that’s alright. All I can do is move on from here, be the best me I can be, and live, love and forgive. Don’t think twice about it; it’s alright.

            “So long honey babe

            Where I’m bound. I can’t tell

            Goodbye is too good a word babe

            So I’ll just say fare thee well

            I ain’t sayin you treated me unkind

            You could have done better

            But I don’t mind

            You just wasted my precious time

            Don’t think twice, it’s alright”

I Was Brought Low. . .

This is about death, a subject that scares the hell out of me. The other day news broke in Richmond about a horrendous murder. In a poor neighborhood on Richmond’s Southside an eight year-old boy was murdered. His head was crushed with a block by an assailant who was attempting to rape the little boy’s nine year-old sister. The little boy came to his sister’s aid and was murdered. One moment, two children playing; the next, a senseless murder.

            This facility has a connection to that tragedy. Friday afternoon the guy in bunk “70” was called up to the booth. “You need to go to the watch command.” The dead boy was his son. The assailant a fourteen year-old from the neighborhood. It took less than five minutes for everyone to know. And what do you say to a man doing five years for drug possession who is told his son is dead? There is a heartfelt moment in “The Shawshank Redemption” where the protagonist Andy Dufresne, looks at his years in prison and tells his friend, “I made mistakes and I’ve paid for them … and then some.” I’ve told myself the same thing. I’m sure Job muttered those same words. Even those words fall short when I look at the man in “70.” What does it all mean? “I was brought low and He saved me.” For what, I wondered.

            One of my close friends here is a Navy retiree – 25 years as a Master Chief, E8, in the U.S. Navy. Four years out of the service, living a good life in the Virginia Beach area, and he gets drunk and drives. He drives through a red light and hits a car. A grandmother and her eight year-old granddaughter are in that car. The impact kills both. My friend walks away without a scratch except, except he sees the little girl in the car every day. He can’t go back and get a “do over.” He can’t undo his stupid behavior. He does his sentence and tries to atone the best he can. But, the girl is dead; the grandmother is dead; and he can’t wash the blood off … and he shouldn’t. I can’t make sense of any of it. Good people do bad things; bad things happen to good people; life goes on, even in death, life goes on.

            Bug splat. That’s our military’s jargon for an errant drone attack; like two weeks ago, six kids playing in a rock-strewn courtyard somewhere in Afghanistan. One moment they are there, the next vaporized. “Wrong target. Bug splat.” Hell of a phrase.

            The other night, the state of Oklahoma tried to execute a convicted murderer. The guy lying on the gurney won’t get much sympathy. He raped a young woman, shot her three times, then buried her – still alive. So he’s condemned to death by the state. Problem is, there’s a shortage of lethal injection drugs so the states are trying all sorts of combinations of “other” drug. We aren’t far from giving a guy on death row a twelve-ounce bottle of anti-freeze.

            They strap the guy down, finally (after multiple attempts) find a “viable” vein – in his groin – and start pumping drugs into him. A “good” lethal injection leads (1) sleep (2) breathing stopping (3) heart stopping. This doesn’t work out that way. The first drug doesn’t knock him out. By the time number 2 is pumped in, the vein has collapsed and the drugs are seeping and pooling under his skin. For over forty minutes the condemned moans in pain until he suffers a massive heart attack (ironically fifteen minutes after the head of Oklahoma DOC stops the execution because it’s been so badly botched).

            And most folks’ reaction? “So what? He was a cold-blooded killer who didn’t think anything of torturing and killing poor girl.” I shake my head and realize all the talk about forgiveness, all the mom and apple-pie, July 4^th talks about “rule of law” doesn’t stand a chance against bug-splat and botched executions.

            Death. One truth I understand is, we’re all going to die. And most of us don’t get to pick the time, place or manner. Those that we leave behind try and find meaning in it all, like the guy in bed 70 trying to figure out the cosmic connection between his crime and incarceration and his son’s death. And my friend, he tries to atone – if that’s even possible.

            So often we act nonchalantly about death as it surrounds and invades our daily life. It doesn’t directly hit us; we breathe a sigh of relief. At times – like Newtown or Columbine – when we’ll hug our kids a little tighter, when our chests clutch ever so deeper, when we realize we aren’t in control and it can all be taken so suddenly, and callously, and without a moment’s thought. And we’re scared and confused.

            “Show me the way

            Take me tonight to the river

            And wash my illusions away

            Please show me the way.

            Give me the courage to believe

            I’ll get there someday

            Please show me the way.”

            None of it makes sense, the guy suffering in bed 70, the grandmother and little girl in the car, the kids in the courtyard, even the murderer on a gurney … and I close my eyes and hear David’s words, “I was brought low and He saved me.” And that has to be enough to get me through.

About H.L.

Imagine the unimaginable.  One moment you have everything.  In the next your entire adult life’s work stripped away.  The future is hopeless.  The present meaningless.  It’s all gone.  It doesn’t matter.  I thought about all that as I listened to “H.L.” during a TV interview this week to remember ten years after the towers collapsed.  It seemed appropriate that as I listened to “H.L.” I recalled my daily devotional reading from Job.  Appropriate it seems when we ask why, why God, why.

“H.L.” is Howard Lutnick, CEO of the bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald.  On the morning of September 11 Lutnick – a man admired and feared in bond trading circles, who oversaw a billion dollar trading company – took his young son to his first day of Kindergarten rather than heading straight to his company offices on the 105^th floor of the North Tower.  While at the school his cell phone began vibrating nonstop.  A teacher finally told him, “A plane tore through the building”. 

Lutnick raced to the towers.  What he saw was complete carnage:  people streaming out of the towers; flames and black, acrid smoke billowing up and out, engulfing the floors where his company was housed.  Within minutes the towers collapsed and with them 657 of the 900 employees of Cantor Fitzgerald.

In the mere wisp of a minute, Lutnick lost his brother, his closest friends, entire divisions of his company, almost every business record the company possessed.  Cantor Fitzgerald owed $75 billion in bonds bought and not yet paid for.  He had no way of paying the debt, no company.

He was covered in dust, bewildered, frightened, numb.  Imagine – six funerals every day for over 100 straight days.  He called his wife to tell her he was alive and learned she had spoken to his brother only minutes before the building collapsed.

What do you do when everything is gone, everything you worked for destroyed?  Lutnick couldn’t get home that night.  He walked to a friend’s home – one of the few executives at Cantor Fitzgerald who survived - and knocked.  His friend answered.  He had somehow survived, getting on an elevator before the attack.  He was covered in blood.  “Are you hurt?”  “No”, his friend said.  “It’s not my blood.  I don’t know whose it is.”

So that night these two men talked.  They had lost everything in their professional careers and the people who were with them and believed in them were slaughtered.  Lutnick made a decision.  He could fail, he could die penniless, but he wouldn’t let the lives of those people not count for something.  That night, amidst the carnage and despair and fear of 9/11, Cantor Fitzgerald was reborn.  Against impossible odds, tears, setbacks, funerals, Cantor Fitzgerald rebuilt.  They became a stronger company after 9/11.  And Howard Lutnick?  He became a better man.

“What does that have to do with prison?”  You might ask.  Prison breaks you.  It tears you apart.  I look around this compound and see the men – so many, too many – who have given up.  They believe in their heart that it is hopeless.  Their lives are and always will be defined by their crime, their screwed up childhoods, families, and loves.  They have been letdown by friends, betrayed by spouses who said they loved them then left when things got tough.

And then there are the ones who fight back, who find meaning in their imprisonment and a reason to go forward.  They will succeed in spite of what their families think; in spite of the bias and prejudice they encounter.  They will overcome.

Howard Lutnick is a hero. He’s no saint.  He was and is a hard-driven, perhaps arrogant CEO making way too much money for what he does.  But when he stared into the abyss of his future on 9/11 he found faith and courage, two qualities that too often are in short supply.

Dr. Martin Luther King said,

“Faith is taking the next step when you can’t even see the stairway.”

For me and so many other inmates, King’s words, Lutnick’s actions, are motivation for us to overcome.  In everyone’s life there comes that day where evil is thrust upon you or your sins catch up to you and you confront the mystery that Job saw.  You can ask why or you can take the next step forward.  Faith, redemption, begins with that step.

Sinner or Saint

I began reading Nelson Mandela’s recent best seller Conversations with Myself the other day. It is a remarkable text based on his letters and diaries written during his nearly 27 years of incarceration. Mandela entered prison at a fairly young age of 46. He never tasted freedom again until after his 72nd birthday.



I paused as I read an insightful passage in a letter he mailed to his wife, Winnie in February, 1975:


“…the cell is an ideal place to learn to know yourself…Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others – qualities which are within easy reach of every soul – are the foundation of one’s spiritual life…At least, if for nothing else, the cell gives you the opportunity to look daily into your entire conduct, to overcome the bad and develop whatever is good in you…Never forget that a saint is a sinner who keeps trying.”


I thought about Mandela’s words as I tried to come up with a conciliatory response to a letter I received. Over and over I heard his words roll around in my head, “a sinner who keeps on trying.”


I smile as young men in here gravitate to me, asking for whatever advice I can offer on a wide range of subjects. I enjoy their company. Somehow, having them around me makes the sting of separation and alienation from my own sons more manageable.


I found an anonymous quote that really hit home. “Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before.” The key, I realized, was enduring in the right spirit. That’s the tough part. I still struggle with accepting other people’s failures, weaknesses. Ultimately, that is what creates a forgiving heart.


I have a number of bad habits. One is to immediately respond to any attack. I know I screwed up; I know I risked and lost the people I loved most by my impulsive, greed-driven behavior. I live with that every day. Still, when someone you love blasts you in a letter, my gut tells me to point out their flaws. Wrong approach.


I’ve received a fair amount of news the past few weeks that has made me question God’s infinite wisdom. I’ve actually come to appreciate Job’s argument with God, his “what are You doin’ to me,” discussion.


It hit me that I’d come so far. My heart is broken, yet today, after a very difficult visit, I prayed asking God to just let someone be happy and feel loved.


Forgiveness and love are painful. I have done so many reckless, hurtful things that cost me more than at times it seems I can bear. Yet, in the quiet of my bunk, as I prayed, I placed my trust in God that it will all work out. I keep trying. Right now that’s all I can do.