A Case For Hope, Part 1
Either you choose to permit that circumstance to define or destroy you, or you choose to make a new you, a better and more resilient you.
When a court of law dictated that my life was no more, this was not something that immediately sunk in. I vaguely remember the lawyers trying to keep me calm. But I was calm, wasn't I? Maybe I had stepped outside of myself for a moment. Or, did I step within?
Honestly, I don't know. I was numb, I know that. The process of realizing this kind of loss is a lot like the seasons that carry us through the year. We know that spring follows winter and fall follows summer. But to know a year, to really understand what a year is, we have to live it through the changing of the seasons. And so it is with a life sentence.
The jury speaks it, the court prints it, and people sign it. But none of that means anything until you start to live it. In many ways a life sentence is like being an unwilling witness to an execution, except in this case it happens to be your own.
Not as quick as a hanging or firing squad, though in that moment I would've volunteered to be drawn and quartered if it would've saved me from having to here the platitudes and false assurances of a lawyer who had failed in his duties on so many levels.
But, as it was, such options were not afforded me. My execution was to be the slow process of watching a rain puddle dry, or observing how a stone deteriorates under the pressures of water and time.
I remember scuttling out of the courtroom with the cold steel of the leg shackles digging into my ankles, thinking, so this is justice? My life has just been erased for a crime that I did not commit!
It's hard to admit, but, in that moment, I was suffering from Victor Frankel's delusion of reprieve. My philosophies and religious doctrines had not prepared me for a guilty verdict.
And now I felt like a fool for having shown up to a knife fight with nothing more than good intentions and optimism to defend myself. Even more painful, still, was having to say goodbye to the false comforts of faith.
From childhood to adolescence there was one particular belief that resonated with me more than all the others, especially when it came to seeing the improbable and seemingly impossible come true before my eyes.
It occurred to me that life wasn't just about luck or chance, being born into the right family or circumstances, so as to have the life you wanted. There were other factors to account for, such as hard work and intelligence. And I have to admit, that even as a child I preferred effort and reason over prayers and hope.
Little did I know at the time but I was essentially trading one ideology for another, although it seemed at the time that I was inventing my own. And the more I committed to it the more life yielded to me. After a time it almost seemed like I was getting good at life, if such a thing where possible.
I became more confident, arrogant, followed shortly thereafter by feelings of discontent. Something I was familiar with from my youth, though the causes were now most certainly different.
I was discontented because I felt like a man who had devoted himself in heart, soul and body to a particular type or brand or product of happiness only to then find himself rereading the product’s claims on the box and suddenly realizing that it's not so. I had to walked the yellow brick road, hurdled the obstacles and slew the proverbial dragon only to get to Oz, peek behind the curtain and realize that I have been pursuing a false hope and lie.
When I heard a jury read a verdict substantiated by lies, followed shortly thereafter by a judge dictating a sentence based on a false premise and injustice, there was nothing that my crumbling ideologies and beliefs could do for me. Religious notions of hope and faith had failed me, and the only person I could blame for that was myself.
Because when you hear that cell door closed behind you there is nobody else. It's in that moment when the ideologies of youth and naivete come crashing down on you like a wave from a tsunami breaking your life into a million little pieces. Some say that from there you are left to pick up the pieces and maybe there is some truth to that.
But for me, it was about leaving the pieces right where they were on the concrete floor of my cell, so that I could walk on them with my bare feet. I don't know why, but I both needed and wanted to feel and, even cry out in pain, for each and every piece of my life that was no more. I wasn't interested in picking up the pieces, because I simply couldn't see the point. There wasn't enough glue in the world to repair what I had lost.
Then it came to me one cold afternoon January, while I was standing alone in a cage, not so different from a dog-run, and it occurred to me that I had instantaneously lost every single thing that I had ever wanted out of life. The material things were of little consequence.
The possessions and the worldly success were insignificant details compared to having lost my daughter, my family, not to mention any and all notions of self, manhood, and, in a very big way, even my humanity.
It further occurred to me that the Japanese had had it right all along, life is but a dream within a dream. I had just awoken from one of those wonderful dreams and the tendrils of my mind were desperately clinging to all that was and never would be again, in hopes that enough could be rescued so that the illusion could be remade.
But, as we all know, once the dream is dreamt, that's it, no mental reconstruction can ever get close enough to make you believe. Because you have seen the strings and met the puppet masters and the magic is forever lost.
This state of dejectedness of walking barefoot over the broken shards of what was once my life continued for the better part of three years. The department of corrections calls it solitary confinement, but in all candor it's more like a recipe for madness through the torture of solitude that had every intent on killing me. Instead, it forever gave me an asterisk that dangles above my head, with a message that can only be read by those who have likewise walked through what is known as the dark night.
Being hopeless is not the same as being hopeless the limitations of language prevent us from expressing what we inherently know to be true: one is not the other. Nevertheless, it gives you an idea of where I was in my ruminations the particular cold afternoon in January when the realization of my loss had finally struck me like a cue ball on the break.
Everything I had ever wanted was forever lost, and the task before me, if I so chose, was to rethink and reinvent a new life with a new me. I had lingered in a blinkered state of questionable existence for long enough. A choice needed to be made. Either I was going to live or I was going to die. More than anything I wanted the latter, but I was only willing to get there through the former.
As it often happened in those years, in The Penitentiary of New Mexico, the heating went out one Friday afternoon and there was nothing that would be done about it until Monday.
The cells were cold enough to see your breath in and the nights were endured while fully dressed, shivering under a thin wool blanket. The bed was a slab of concrete that protruded from the wall, and as many can attest, it was warmer beneath the slab than above it.
The problem with slidding yourself into a small cubbyhole for warmth, beyond the claustrophobia, of course, were the Brown Recluse spiders. But on that particular night my fears of venomous spiders and confined spaces were no match for the cold.
It was my first night beneath the slab, following my realization in the cage, and it was there where I found the most unexpected of messages scratched into the most unexpected of places, with what could’ve been someone's fingernails.
I believe through any trial,
there is always a way
But sometimes in this suffering,
and hopeless despair
My heart cries for shelter,
to know someone’s there
But a voice rises within me, saying hold on
my child, I'll give you strength,
I'll give you hope. Just stay a little while.
Naturally I didn't know at the time that those words were copied from a famous poem left on the wall of a World War II, German concentration camp, the author unknown. I wouldn't come to know that until years later. But that mattered little to how those words affected me when I read them. Because for the first time in a long time I didn't feel alone.
I simply read the poem a few more times, my eyes grew heavy, and I pushed thoughts of spiders and cold from my mind and drifted off into a blissful sleep.
What I also didn't know at the time was that as I read those words a decision was being made. It was finally time to pick the broken shards of me from the soles of my body bloody feet, and then sweep up what was left of me from the floor of my life. There was nothing to be gained from lingering in the past, because whatever power I still had was not there, my power was in the present of now where it had always been.
In those early years I filled volumes of journals with enough scribbled nonsense to fill a small library. I even name the volumes things like Betrayed. Shattered Expectations. Pointless Pride. Foolish Faith. And, Hopelessness. There were plenty of others, every last one of them as spiteful as the last. I was far from being healed, but at the very least I felt that I was on the road to being healed.
At times it almost felt that the pages would speak back, telling me to forget the past. Advice, whether real or imagined, that I wholeheartedly ignored. I guess you could say, I was busy being spiteful with life.
I had had what I wanted, lost what I had, and now like a petulant toddler I couldn't be convinced to choose another toy. My grip on life was still clenched tightly to the memory of what was. Which is to say, to nothing, because I couldn't see beyond my own misery.
Would I ever recover from such a jolt?
At that point it was hard to say, at best it was a coin toss. Death was a constant and faithful companion in those early years of solitude and blinkered madness. But every day I would put her off with the smallest of tasks. Exercise. A book that I had always intended to read. Cleaning. A letter. A journal entry.
And finally, a novel that I have been writing for years but had never finished. Eventually, I guess death got tired of waiting for me because, one day, she was just no longer there. For a time I didn't even realize that she had left.
It was at about this time that I was finishing my novel when the most unexpected visitors appeared at my cell door. A tall, bald, Buddhist monk. His name was Ray, and without a doubt we were destined to be friends. Because from the beginning we had something in common, in that we had both been someone else in a previous life within this life.
He a well-known and regarded internist, a father and a husband; and me, the same except I was the businessman and entrepreneur. His family had grown up and dispersed itself throughout the world, his wife battled dementia and a terminal brain tumor, and his path to becoming a monk and a priest was some what of a new development for him, about as new as being a convicted felon was for me.
Call it kismet or dumbluck but Ray's arrival and friendship in my life was well-timed. Unlike most religious volunteers that trickle through prisons like ticket scalpers to a sold out event–i.e., heaven, eternal bliss, or whatever they want to call it–Ray was an atheist, which I appreciated more than he ever knew. Because what I needed more than anything was a real advice and tools to help me out of the hole that I had fallen into. And that's exactly what he gave me.
Through letters, books, and the occasional visit through the door he taught me to embrace the silence so as to arrive at a place where all internal dialogue finally ceases. And with Ray's help and guidance I miraculously discovered a place within me where I had never been, a place of absolute silence.
And for those of you who don't know, I'm not referring to the external silence of a quiet room or cell, I’m referring to those brief glimmers of life and hope when all internal dialogue has ceased and you're permitted a momentary glimpse of the soul. Some call it the moment of truth, others say enlightenment or clarity, or the gift of seeing all things as they truly are.
I don't pretend to know what is was. All I can say is that the veil or blindfold of delusion, they had apparently been over my eyes for all those years, I began to slip and I was beginning to see.
For the first time in quite possibly my entire life I was thinking clearly, not with ego, self interest, or for that matter, expectation. There were no plans or schemes, it was just pure unadulterated thought.
The kind of purity that comes with a child's laughter, wet sand between the toes, or the smell of renewal after the rain. And with the clarity came a single question.
Who are you?
A question that literally inundated all my thoughts until it became the very center of my existence. Like rushing water.
And what was even more curious was that I actually knew the answer. At first, I couldn't put words to it but I knew it was there. And for a time, that was enough. Then came another question just as important as the first. Wy is your life worth saving? Perhaps because suddenly it wasn't enough that I was innocent of my crime to give me cause to go on. I needed more.
I needed more because I had lost everything that I had ever wanted in life, and the brutal truth was there were no take backs and all the innocence in the world couldn't give it back to me. But the more I visited my place and moment of internal silence and solitude the more I found, and the more I found the more I came to know myself.
I am someone who has survived enough trauma that death no longer holds sway over my life. Because of which, I'm someone who will speak truth to power. I am someone who will give voice to the voiceless.
I'm someone who knows that love and empathy will do more to repair the traumas and wounds of life more than any doctrine or false hope. And this was reason enough for me to fight.
This me, this someone who revealed himself to himself in the painful silence of the dark night, is worth fighting for.
My fight, the reason that I wake up every day and confront this god awful reality that makes suicide seem appealing on some days is because, from experience–not faith, mind you, but experience–I know that even the most difficult of moments afford us both an opportunity and a blessing.
Whether you wake up one day from your dream and find yourself in the nightmare of suddenly being a double amputee, or in a concentration camp, or a prison, or you're fired from your job or marriage, or maybe you're bankrupt or deathly ill.
Whatever it is, either you choose to permit that circumstance to define or destroy you, or you choose to make a new you, a better and more resilient you. That's life.
To be continued…
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