02.05.09
From the ferry: 2/4/09
My commute to and from the prison includes a twenty minute ferry crossing plus however long I get to sit in line to wait to board. It’s a good time to reflect on the night at Monroe, to record first impressions and document those moments that are resonating with me the most before I have a chance to filter them or make them academic. I’ll post these thoughts from the ferry each time I go to Monroe.
Tonight we talked about resurrection, the stage of the hero’s journey when the hero is on the road back home, about to return to the ordinary world that he left so long ago (or perhaps not so long ago — not all journeys are long, right?). At this stage in the journey the hero must both shed the parts of himself that no longer fit who he has become AND he must figure out how to go back to a world to which he, in many ways, no longer belongs.
The guys get this stage. They understand going away and returning and not recognizing themselves amongst their surroundings. They understand having changed, having grown, havng left behind old selves, but returning to a world that does not understand the journey they were on. A world that does not understand the dangers the hero has faced. A world that was perhaps hoping that the hero hasn’t changed much at all. I know my fellow MFA students can relate to this. We go away to our residencies in Boston, ten intensive days of being writers surrounded by writers, and when we return who really knows what we have gone through? How can we describe it? Does anyone really want to listen? Most of us discover that the journey was personal. It was shared only by those who were there with us and not those we left behind and so we must set aside our ego and even our enthusiasm and return to “normal” life. But we are changed aren’t we. We are walking amongst “normal” but we are changed. Now imagine going away for years, to prison, and then returning. One man wrote tonight about lives that have passed while he was “down” (locked up) and lives that have begun. One man talked about realizing that upon his release this time he won’t be able to return home. He has changed that much. There is no going back — not if he wants to keep from going back to prison. He has to give up the dream of his family, the desire for reunification. His journey forces him to let go of his dream of having what he’s never been able to hold on to, nurture, care for and face a new reality of having to go his own way. He’s scared. Shitless. Wouldn’t we all be?
Don’t we go on journeys hoping to be celebrated upon our return? How often does that happen anymore? Not often. Instead we go on journeys and perhaps people barely notice our absence. Or they are confused, frustrated, even angry that we are no longer the person that they knew and loved before.
I think about my journey with cancer. Am I just now in the stage of resurrecting a new life out of that whole experience? I think so. It can take a long time. I’ve been “down” for a year and a half and I’m well on my road back, but not everyone recognizes me and many who once knew me don’t know me anymore. So there is loss. There is grief. But at the same time there is rebirth. It’s a messy stage. A messy, beautiful stage. And if you can just keep from jumping off the path altogether (which is really impossible I think, if you are true to the journey — how can you deny that you have changed) then there is a new life, amongst the old life, to be created.
My therapist says, you can’t always expect folks to show up and give you a parade every time you make a significant change in your life. People may not cheer when you return. But you know. You know where you have been and what it has meant and you just have to hold on to that. Hold on tight.
01.22.09
From the ferry: 1/21/09
A twenty minute ferry ride doesn’t seem like nearly enough time tonight.
Perhaps because it’s been more than a month since I’ve been to the prison, which is enough time to gain some distance, even, maybe, to forget a little. Life out on the outside is busy and full and though the men at Monroe are a part of my life now, it doesn’t mean that when I am gone long enough they don’t fade away a little. Only a little. But enough that when I go back after an absence the intensity of working on the inside comes back quick and hard. You get used to how protected life on the outside is, how we don’t ask the hard questions of one another, how easy it is to conceal and hide what we don’t want to discuss, how politeness dictates what we do and do not ask about one another or of one another, how our concept of time is endless and loose and even idealistic and so we are in no rush to talk about what is tough.
Perhaps twenty minutes also doesn’t feel like enough because tonight the opening question to the group: what have you learned from a time you faced death, danger or defeat? initiated a conversation about death, choosing to die, death in prison. One member of the group shared his experience with liver cancer and nine months of Interferon treatment. The same treatment I would have faced had my own cancer diagnosis been as worse as originally feared. He shared how he choose to stop taking the Interferon, despite the doctors wanting him to stay on it another thirty six months. Thirty six months! I was flooded with memories of listening to my oncologist tell me about the side effects of Interferon (including depression, suicidal inclinations, general inability to get up and do much of anything, the reality that I would have to drop out of grad school) and the small percentage it might add to my survival rate. I don’t blame this man for stopping treatment. I was undecided about even beginning it. Next month he will find out if the nine months he suffered through had any effect. If not, he likely has less than two years to live. His statement to the group: maybe it’s not so bad. I don’t expect to ever be paroled (he’s already served 26 years) and I don’t want to live another 26 in here. It’s about an honest of a statement someone can make, and it’s a statement that only someone who has had to face the question of quality of life when faced with limited time can truly even ask. When the question is no longer theoretical, but reality, you are surprised at the answers you come to.
Then a man in the group asked me, what did I think about choosing to die? And I found myself talking about how we don’t honor the process of dying well in this country. We fight death to the bitter end, and I wonder what sort of dignity there is in that sometimes. How often do cancer patients hear, you have to keep a positive attitude, you have to keep fighting. Yes and yes, to a point. At some point there is also dignity in facing death as the inevitable and natural process that it is (even if it has arrived much too early and without consideration for your plans and schedules, hopes and dreams). There is strength in not fighting, but rather living your final days as well as possible. To deny someone facing the end the right to talk about their death, to insist they keep fighting, where is the dignity in that? If the man with the liver cancer finds out he has two years to live and that is a relief to him, then let him be. I found myself saying to the group that it is a question you have to answer alone, and I imagine that you feel even more alone if you are asking the question in prison, but the truth is no one can go there with you, no one wants to support you in letting go, no one wants to say goodbye, no one will give you permission.
I have been thinking a lot about cancer and prison and tonight reinforced some of my thoughts about how the two are connected. Being given a “sentence” can take many forms. And whether you are physically behind bars or emotionally behind bars, the truth is, you are alone to face the darkest parts of yourself. Neither journey is for the weak.
And now the ferry is docking already. Twenty minutes, gone like that. It was good to be with the men tonight. I can’t thank them enough for asking the hardest of questions and then waiting patiently for me to respond. I can’t thank them enough for how they remind me that story telling and story sharing is what reminds us we are all human and we are all going to die, despite our crimes or our good deeds.
12.22.08
The story we make
Stereotypes are used by a speaker to position others within a particular storyline. – Perry R. Hinton, Stereotypes, Cognition and Culture
Nine months ago prisoners, prison and teaching on the inside were not a part of my personal story. My particular story line up until March, 2007 included many things – being a doctor’s daughter, a graduate student, a female, a writer and a cancer survivor. It was already a full life. Then I went and made it more complicated by taking something that I could keep simple if I chose – namely my ideas about who was good and who was bad — and making those ideas more ambiguous, making them something I had to reconsider, reflect on and incorporate into a new personal narrative.
In Hinton’s book she writes about how one of the only ways to change a stereotype is to bring two different groups together and have them interact. The basic premise, I think, is once you’ve looked someone in the eye it’s harder to look away again. And once you’ve heard his story, even if it includes terrible and/or criminal things there’s no turning back from the fact that they’ve become human, less a stereotype and more an individual.
This is a good thing, right? Most days.
Somedays, however, I think it might have been easier if I had chose to keep my story more simple.
But then I think of the cancer. Some experiences we choose to add to our story and some we do not. Regardless, we change. You survive cancer, but you don’t go back to life before cancer. I may someday not work with prisoners, but there’s no going back to not knowing who they are, not being able to imagine a man in a cell alone with his transgressions and the pain that can cause for some. For enough of them.
When people find out I have had cancer they think they know certain things about me. They assume they know a part of my story. But they don’t. Not until they sit with me and listen. Then, I’m not a cancer survivor, I am me, with my experience of cancer, which is different than any other’s cancer story. These men in prisoner, they are not a “they”. They are individual men with individual stories. The stories aren’t the easiest to hear or the easiest with which to make peace, but then what good stories, what good life, gets to claim it was easy?
