Death by Ross Ulbricht for Medium
GNN Note – Sometimes physical death is a blessing. / END
My future died that day in court when I was sentenced to life without parole. When I got back to the federal detention center, I did not go straight to my cell block as usual. This time, I was interviewed first to judge whether I was suicidal. I wasn’t, and thankfully, I convinced them I wasn’t, or I would have spent a few days in one of the dreaded “suicide watch” cells. I understand why they did that though. Lots of lifers are suicidal. There is no parole in the federal system, so life means your whole life. It is the same as a death sentence. It just takes longer.
At 29 years old, my own death had always been an abstraction, something far in the future. Now it was right in my face. As I looked around at the painted concrete and steel bars, a voice in my head pointed out to me, “This is it. This is it until you die.” I mourned the death of my future. I mourned the death of my freedom.
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I never considered suicide. Early on, I resolved to put the thought out of my mind. For one, it would cause even more pain in those I love. (On top of the pain my imprisonment has caused them.) I would endure anything to avoid that. But even if all my loved ones were gone (and that’s very possible after a lifetime in prison), I resolved to go on living.
Deep down, I fear death. I fear it so much I don’t even want to think about it or acknowledge it. I pretend I have all the time in the world, that the days will just keep coming and coming as they always have. Normally they do just keep coming, year after year, decade after decade, and then one day, they don’t. Most people don’t prepare for that day. We don’t want to think about it. We cling to life until we are too weak to hold on. But coming to prison changed that for me. Suddenly the days didn’t just keep coming and coming, not like they used to.
Prison is a kind of afterlife. My life before — my life in freedom — feels like a distant dream now. My memories from before prison don’t even feel like my own. My family and friends mourned my loss of freedom in the same way they would have mourned my death.
But I am not dead. I have died without dying, and by going through this experience, I have been disabused of the illusion that my days are abundant. No, life is short indeed. I see that now. Every day I spend in this cage is a day lost, a day spent in death. I can fast forward in my mind the years and decades ahead of me until the day I breathe my last. I have met men who have been locked up continuously since the 1970s and 80s. That’s me in 2060, still here in the afterlife, in purgatory.
