“I do so I can get clean of it,” Stefan told him.
There was this kid not much older than he who was a child molester. The little boy this prisoner raped was six or seven; for his sin, the molester was labeled a “chomo.”
There was the word that went around that this was the day they would beat the chomo down. “And the deal was, for me, I was fresh fish, and you beat him or you join him.” Stefan could still make himself throw up he said by thinking of what happened that day, behind one of the metal shelves in the library, that young man’s empurpled eye and ripped lip, the pallor of his cheeks and the back of his neck as he cowered in submission. “But it was worth it. It was worth it for me because then I could say my own terms, I mean, without ever really saying anything. I could be an indy. There were a few dozen. Not part of anybody’s gang. Just yourself.”
He lived all his prison days in either boredom or fear or both, unable to even conceive of how it must have felt for those who faced twice, three times, four times as long a sentence. The aggregate of all of that extreme emotion would be that, sometimes for hours at a time, he would feel sorry for himself. And feeling sorry for himself was how he knew, he told us, that something was changing in him for the worse, and that he would need to change it back to become whole again.
Hence, the plan my son had conceived and was ready to embark on now.
Back at the flip chart, Stefan said, “I owe something to the world. I’m also scared to death of the world. I’m more scared of ordinary people these days than I was of scary people in prison. I’m always afraid they’re going to see right through me. But I’m fighting it. So I am hoping that through this path and through my everyday work and just living right, plus my friends, plus you both, I’m hoping it will all be enough...enough to redeem myself.”
He went on, “I think of it as a kind of renewal, for myself, and for other people. And just maybe, it will work on my head. And I’ll really believe that I deserve to live.”
Right then, I wished my son were in a locked ward at our local hospital, stripped of belts and shoelaces and sheets, and I was sitting there with him, saying, please no, please don’t leave. Death is not a fanfare or a tunnel terminating in beautiful light, death is the balm of hypotensive shock. That’s why people who survive near-death experiences say nothing hurts, not because there is really a life hereafter, it’s just a few seconds of biology, a little parting gift from your good brain. It’s hearing maybe one trill from a bird, remembering how good it was on a summer night, through an open window, to hear music from the radio in somebody’s car going past, but by then it’s too late, sound is all there is, a last rasp of fluid settling in your ears, and then nothing at all.
I was reminded of riding up in the hospital elevator to the locked ward that fateful night, how that elevator was fitted with an odd series of outside-looking windows, like an amusement park ride, so that inside I could watch the parking lot drop away and glimpse the distant hills with their muddle of red clouds forecasting dawn. Then, and now, the image reminded me of being at Disney World with Jep and Stefan; how, at eleven, Stefan was still unselfconscious enough that he gladly held both our hands. Ten years ago. Only ten years ago. How could I fit that boy into the boy in the locked ward, and both of them into the man he was now?
There is in every incident a lesson, said Father Kanelos, even if the lesson is not immediately apparent; this is true even if it is never apparent.
The lesson in my experience seemed to be that, in whatever present circumstance you happened to find yourself, there was not necessarily a seed of the inevitable.
How would Stefan ever get past the place he had arrived at where taking his own life was always the default? Shit, it was probably possible to commit suicide even at Disney World, if you wanted to badly enough.
Maybe this new plan of Stefan’s, this plan of renewal he was about to reveal, this plan of how to move forward, would become his new default. At least I could hope.
But first, we had questions:
What could this Healing Project achieve?
How would the process work?
Who would be involved?
Remorse was the inspiration. Hope and renewal would come through the project. The project plus the inspiration equaled healing. At least, it equaled the beginning of healing.
To participate, you had to have remorse. But you weren’t ready to move forward if you didn’t have a plan of action to make amends.
The plan you created to make amends had to be something real, something to act on or teach or try to change, Stefan said. Not everyone would succeed. But everyone would be required to commit to a plan of action and a way to make it happen. Some participants might get a financial subsidy—money enough to see their plan through, if they incorporated that into their strategy. So that for instance someone could run a bike repair shop for a year, or buy tools, or complete a year of the culinary course at a junior college, or buy a laptop, or get one’s teeth fixed or take driver’s ed. Money would never be directly given to a participant. It would flow through a sponsor who would help find a funding source, then document every transaction involving funds or services. The sponsor could be from AA or be a minister or a social worker, one of the tutors in prison, or a former supervisor. Just not a relative.
Each participant would receive a folder: Stefan and Julie had already created a prototype, two dozen of which were donated by a local printer. The illustration on the front was an arrow, half embossed in silver, half in gold, that arched like a rainbow from the word Healing to the word Project. Inside was a brief history of the program and its rules, which were very specific: The expression of remorse had to be one page or less, handwritten and hand-signed, although there could be help with revising it—no excuses, no exceptions, no evasions. This was key. Describe the nature of your offense or offenses in detail. Name and describe the person or people to whom you wish to express remorse. Suggest the manner by which you will express remorse. Describe in detail the plan for your renewal. The letter had to be written on the notepaper provided; each page was embossed with a wing. This was Stefan’s belief that making something beautiful of the letter would solemnize the effort. Other forms had to be filled out as well, including a brief history of the participant’s inspiration behind his or her project. Each would also make reference to Stefan and his crime: He had insisted.
Merry Betancourt, the youth minister at Julie’s church, had volunteered to be the clergy face of The Healing Project. For two weekends when we thought Stefan was busy with landscaping jobs out of town that Luck Sergenian arranged for him, Stefan and Merry had attended a training in Fox Lake, near the women’s prison at Taycheedah. It was for the nationwide Forgiveness Project, which gave victims and families the chance to initiate forgiveness of the bad guys; it was the only organized program that approximated what Stefan wanted to do. “One thing different from the familiar tradition of the Forgiveness Project,” Stefan said, “is there would be no scenes of families from both sides embracing and crying together. Volunteers would meet separately with the crime victims and their families and with perpetrators and their families. But the injured families would never have to lay eyes on the wrongdoer—at least under the auspices of the program.”
“This program you’ve come up with is damned impressive, son,” said Jep.
“A lot of it was with Julie’s help,” Stefan told him. “And we don’t know yet if it will work.” He added, “But it’s what I can do now. If it does gain momentum, we might get some publicity for it, newspapers and TV and stuff. They like so-called good news. My story could become good news.”