Confession #23: Things are not going well
Surprise, surprise prison didn't fix him.
Authors Note: This letter contains thoughts about death. Please take care in reading.
I have imagined him dead one-hundred times, in one-hundred different poses.
I’ve seen him splayed out, lifeless on the bathroom floor. I have envisioned his lips blue on the couch, him curled into one final fetal position on his bed.
I have found his body hanging from the underside of the deck, hanging in my garage, my barn, my basement. He has been dead out in the yard, frozen to the ground; sitting upright with his back against a tree on the edge of the woods, a gun fallen to his left side.
I’ve imagined the phone call from some random number, some frantic girl I do not know in a motel room with him. I have seen the cops standing at my front door at 3am.
“We’re sorry,” they say.
I am not only the mother of a man who has been incarcerated, I was first the mother of a man who struggled with substance dependency which led to prison, and before that, I was the mother of a boy with mental health aches which led him to self-medicate.
Everyone has a longer story.
Today, I am the mother of a parolee, and I have spent the last 14 years believing that we have turned a corner only to find we're just on another dark street.
Parole is just another street.
And while I welcomed this newest turn, I, of course, did not fully know what I was welcoming. My boy, now a man, has re-emerged and with him, the mother of all of the parts of him has too.
Three months in, things are not going well.