Letters to the Soul

Our college students in the student development class were given the assignment to write a letter to their younger self ten to twenty years ago with words of advice about what these years since have meant. Letter writing is an outdated form of communication for most. In here, however, it’s the way many of us communicate. And, writing to yourself? It’s tough. Three days after my arrest I began keeping a journal, a daily recitation of my life in here. This blog grew out of that journal – almost 1500 pages front and back to date. I began the journal so I’d remember all of this and in the hope that after I’m gone someone – my sons perhaps – would read those pages and understand what “this” really is.

            Letters to your younger selves. That’s a hard assignment. It’s tough looking back critically without saying “if only I …” because “if only I” doesn’t exist. The past is closed and unchangeable. We can learn from it, but there is no “Groundhog Day.” We don’t get second, third or even fourth chances at our past; there’s only the present and the future.

            I waited to see what these men would write. My expectations were not very high. Most of the guys in here don’t disclose their true selves. Fears and failures are both embarrassing and dangerous in a place like this. So bullshit is the chief form of oration in here. I expected more of the same. What I read and heard instead was profound. These men opened their souls on paper. Their stories echo in my head. They are gut wrenching, and oh, so human. As I read and edited. I felt moved. I went to one young man, Matt – a vet – and told him as an editor I found his syntax and grammar persuasive. As a father, I hugged him.

            Here are brief glimpses in these men’s stories: Matt wrote of watching his best friend die in a firefight in Iraq. “When this happens to you, remember to forgive yourself. You did all you could and you helped load his body on the plane to return to his mother.” I read about his nightmares, and his anger, and his guilt and I thought about my own support of a war my sons never had to fight. It was – it always is – the Matts of this country, the blue-collar kids, who fight, bleed, and die for America while those of us with education and money talk of geopolitical conflict and politics without a shred of sacrifice.

            My friend “O” wrote about his parent’s desperate travel to this country illegally to escape the horrors of El Salvador with its leftist guerrillas and its rightist death squads killing, bleeding the country to death. “They sacrificed so much, became citizens, worked for their children to have a better life and in my arrogance and impulsiveness I let them down.”

            As I read his words, flowing with Spanish colloquialisms, I felt shame. Thousands of children being sent to our borders as families seek to save their young lives. How are they met? By flag-waving protesters crying “go home.” We are pissing on the plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty.

            “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …”

            Yeah right; F- you Lady Liberty. O knows; his family lived it. And in spite of the Nativists (as is anyone really can claim “native” status in this country) and their ignorant protests people will still come. Ignorance can never kill hope.

            I read papers from Cubby, and B, and John Wayne, and Bugsy who told their younger selves about watching friends die from drug abuse. Drugs, alcohol, quitting school; these men all saw a part of life I never experienced. And in this class they felt free to talk about it. “Drugs kill.” “I drank too much and repeated the same behavior my mother did.” “He died in the chair next to me, overdosing on heroin.”

            There was Mike. Locked up since he turned fifteen for first degree murder; charged and convicted as an adult; given fifty years. He stayed in juvenile custody until age 17 then he was shipped within days of his birthday, to Southampton. Southampton (closed in 2006) was known for holding Virginia’s violent, youthful offenders. Gang rapes were commonplace as were brawls, stabbings, extortion. Everything you think you know about prison could be summed up in Southampton and fueled by youth it was a zoo on speed.

            And Mike, Mike wasn’t your typical teen killer. He wasn’t black, in a gang, poor, or on drugs. He was a white, middle-class kid with two educated, employed parents. He was smart, very smart; he was a loner … and he did a horrible thing. Strange, I look at Mike and wonder why, how he did what he did.

            They tested him after his arrest. Everyone wanted to know if he was a sociopath. TV shows called his parents, “Let us interview you. We want to figure out why he did it.” Know what the doctors found? He was just like any other fifteen-year-old kid … and he took a knife and stabbed a neighbor teen to death … 

            Mike wrote to his 17 year old self and said the following: “You’re soon going to head to Southampton and it is scary. You’ll be afraid and face a number of occasions when your humanity is tested. No matter what, be the decent man you will grow to be.”

            Letters to selves before they head the wrong way. My dear friend DC let me read his. I so often forget the man DC was. He was for years – one of Virginia’s worst offenders. He was violent and predatory. Twice the commonwealth prosecuted him for murders committed inside the notorious “walls,” Virginia’s since destroyed penitentiary on Spring Street in Richmond. Twice they tried to have him executed; twice he escaped the death chamber.

            He was in the midst of twelve years in solitary confinement at Mecklenburg Virginia’s Super Max facility. They moved him and fifteen others (the worst sixteen the state had) in the middle of the night with dozens of heavily armed state police – and he wrote his parents and his wife: “I will die in here. Forget me …” DC’s soul was dead; he was cold, his heart black; life was nothing to him. He was, in penitentiary – speak (old style violent cons still know this term) “down-in-law.” That meant he lived by his own accord. He took, he killed, he was the law for himself and being close to him was a life sentence, or worse.

            “Your Pops will show up at Mecklenburg and the officers will drag you from your cell to see him. And your Pops – the man you love and respect more than anyone in the world will tear into you. He’ll tell you being a man means doing right even if the load you up with fifty or sixty years. ‘You made this mess, you clean it up,’ he’ll say. ‘And don’t even think you can walk away from your responsibilities as a husband, a father, a son, a man.’”

            Forty-two years behind bars and I read his letter and know what happened afterward – that day DC gave up his life of violence, and anger, and death. “It won’t be easy but you can do it,” he writes. And all the respect and brotherly love I have for this remarkable man wells up inside of me.

            I realize as I read these letters that no man is beyond redemption. So many times in my old life I said I believed that. After all, isn’t that the point of the cross – that God’s grace can redeem even the darkest hearts, the most hopeless of lives? I read and know grace, true God-given grace is real.

            DC asked me what I thought of his letter. I recite to him William Ernest Henley’s poem, “Invictus.”

            Beyond this place of wrath and tears

            Looms but the Horror of the shade,

            And yet the menace of the years

            Finds and shall find me unafraid

            It matters not how strait the gate

            How charged with punishments the scroll

            I am the master of my fate

            I am the captain of my soul.