Last week, I published the introduction to A Muddled Brotherhood, the collection of portraits I’ve been sharing here over these past months. This week, I thought I would complete the circle with the Epilogue, written several years after my release from prison.
EPILOGUE
Gratefully, I received a reprieve due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was released after serving only eighteen months of my sentence. But I was confined to home incarceration for three years, the most restrictive form of house arrest.
The moment of release is a kind of fool’s gold. A conviction to make amends, start over, rebuild a life. But returning home from prison, the relief fades sooner than you’d think. The old failures still reside there, and prison makes the trip home with you.
The experience of incarceration: its agony, sense of exile, isolation and the misery of day-to-day confinement lingers long after the arrival home. Even in the relatively low-security environment of a federal prison camp, confinement becomes an internal form of torture, no matter its locale or facility.
Home incarceration is a more internal form of isolation, but I used the time to complete these profiles as a requiem for this exiled incarcerated class and for all of the inmates I lived with, including the guards, who are as incarcerated, in some ways, as much as the rest of us.
It’s been four years since my release. Some equilibrium has been restored, but the surprise meeting with a past associate, the uncomfortable encounter, the unanswerable question is never ending.
I’m still disconnected from humanity, and I haven’t reached out to any of my former inmates. I’m not sure why that is. But that’s what prison does to you, it takes everything you came in with and everything you left behind. I still think about them, many of them are probably in those dreams I have every night that I can’t remember in the morning.
I’m uncomfortable around good people. The self-loathing, the residual guilt that the guards instilled in us every minute of incarceration, lingers long after the arrival home.
I’m connected to a group of former white-collar felons—a kind of AA confessional for the formerly incarcerated. I’m the worst kind of member, still wallowing in my own brokenness, and reluctant to share and truly connect with their honest and open confessions.
But I think I know what makes life meaningful and worthwhile. I got that much out of prison. I’m not sure I didn’t know it before.
My most vivid memory at Devens is the cemetery alongside the track, that I passed every day during my daily walk. An eerie tableau of perfect rows of pure white crosses. It was rumored that several former inmates were buried there and I often contemplated the prospect of being buried there alongside of them.
It always reminded me of conversations with my wife who told me she wants to be cremated, and her ashes spread over the little river near our first house on a beautiful pristine hill. But that was before we knew anything, as it was the beginning of our lives, really, and of course we weren’t aware of it as you never are when you’re young marrieds and the last thing you’re thinking about is how you want to be buried.
But after all my time at Devens, passing those graves of inmates I never met, but part of my brotherhood just the same, I decided that I don’t want to be ashes and spread anywhere. I want to be put in a box and know the weight of me will be felt by some unknowns who struggle lowering me down there, next to the other buried inmates I had never known. And it doesn’t matter that they don’t know me, but only that they know that there’s somebody in there that was alive once, and I’ll take comfort just knowing that.
But please don’t make me ashes and spread me anywhere because no matter where you spread them it’s really nowhere and I was here once and at least I’ll know that there’s a place that says I was here no matter what I was or wasn’t.
Up Next on White Collar Journal:
Wednesday (Justice Notes): Criminal Justice Reform
Thursday (Notes from Exisle): Log/Verse: Daily, fragmented reflections
Sunday (Prison Camp): More Stories from prison
If you’re new to White-Collar Journal, you can read earlier chapters and essays on incarceration, justice, and reentry at whitecollarjournal.com.
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