Prison: How Memories Help Us Survive

Prison, like any other world, is a collection of memories born out of experiences. Some good, some bad; some humane; others not so much.

Take for example the memory of my younger brother, Patrick Eugene Sinclair.

In 1967, Pat lied about his age to join the U.S. Marines and fight in Vietnam to serve his country.

He was part of L Company, 3^rd Battalion, 7^th Marines.

On Sept. 6, 1968, Pat was on patrol near Dai Loc, a rural district in Quang Nam Province in the South Central Coast Region of Vietnam.

It was raining heavily that day.

Pat’s patrol was crossing a swollen river. A fellow Marine lost his grip on a life line and was swept away. Pat went after him. Both young men were swept away by the currents and drowned.

Their bodies were recovered five days later down river.

Pat was the youngest Marine and second youngest soldier of the more than 58,000 soldiers to die in Vietnam.

Our mother discovered that Pat had lied about his age to get into the Marines. He begged her over and over not to report him. She did not.

“They brought my baby home and I could not even open the casket to say goodbye,” she cried each time she thought about it.

“I don’t even know if that was my baby’s body in that casket.”

The grief of Pat’s loss crippled mother for the rest of her living days. She always felt responsible for his death.

The last time I saw Pat was in 1967. He was in the visiting room on death row at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

Visiting me.

Dressed in military uniform and fresh out of boot camp, he spoke his final words to me through a thick mesh wire screen:

“Billy, you broke mother’s heart. Now I’ve got to go and try to save it.”

Nearly 25 years later, as I sat next to my mother’s death bed in a Baton Rouge hospital in 1992, she would call out Pat’s name or speak to him as though he were a child standing before her.

It was the delirium of impending death.

“Where is Pat, Billy” she asked in moments of lucidity.

“He’ll be back in a minute, Momma – he just went out to get a Coke … he’s coming back, I promise.”

Tears welled up in my eyes. The pain of a lost family engulfed me.

Prison rules allowed me to have either a two-hour “death bed” visit or an attendance at mother’s funeral. I opted for the visit.

The breath of death had so changed mother. I barely recognized her.

Of course, Pat never came back, and neither did mother. She passed shortly after I was escorted from the room where the handcuffs were returned to my wrists.

That is one of the prison memories that revisits me from time to time, especially the last haunting words I heard mother utter before I stood to leave—words spoken at death’s gate:

“I see heaven, Billy Wayne – right over there … see it.”

I turned and walked away, back into a prison hell.

When I think of Pat to this day, I inevitably think of mother – and I hope there was a heaven just over the stream where Pat was waiting to embrace her, saying:

“It’s okay now, Momma – you are home at last.”

We all have our memories, mostly old and mildewed with time.

They visit our consciousness uninvited and unexpected, often whispers that nestle silently in our sleep dreams.

Some of the memories are cherished—a brother’s embrace after taking on a bully in the school yard; a sister’s laugher at a brother’s constant hair grooming; a mother’s affectionate forehead kiss calming an unnecessary fear in a daughter; or a father’s rubbing a son’s forehead to let him know everything is going to be alright.

But other memories are bad—they speak of regret at having done something mean or stupid; sorrow at having made the wrong personal or professional choice; or shame at the failure to act when the rightness of the moment demanded action.

We’ve all known heroism and experienced cowardice. We have all questioned our life actions, “why did I do that” or “how could I have done such a thing.”

And, yes, and we have all served humanity in one way or another just as we have all failed humanity in one way or another.

These memories are a reflection of the complications of life—a convoluted process we did not ask for—an unintended consequence, more often than not, of an unbridled rut that produced a messed-up life.

From its very inception, life in any form is never intended to be easy. The most basic instinct, survival, destines every life (man or animal) to be a struggle, from first breath to last.

We fight through the worst possible diseases and the pain they produce just for one more breath of life—and perhaps it is our memories that makes us struggle for that last breath.

I think that is why men survive prison—from gulags to supermax isolation.

Lying on concrete or metal bunks prisoners either relive or endure raw and unfiltered memories. Like their free world counterparts, they will share some memories with others—the ones they have filtered through lens of self-interest.

These memories range from minor embellishments to grandiose fabrications.

Memories, in prison or out, lend meaning to the most rusted penny-looking life.

The question, then, in its most philosophical sense, is this:

Are memories like radio signals that travel through space forever?

Perhaps.

Children sometimes have memories (or accurate dreams) about events in ancient times.

How? Why?

Will a stranger one day relive our memories?

There questions reverberate in cold prison cellblocks around the world and in an old man’s reverie sitting on a front porch.

None of us know the answer to these questions—not the inmates sleeping in those cold cellblocks or the hedge fund managers sleeping in their plush penthouse bedrooms.

My advice is this: let old memories pass unfettered in your consciousness and give them nothing more than a “how are you doing?’ in passing. The present moment is too valuable to waste trying to rearrange old memories.

Billy Sinclair

Prison happened to me at my own doing. I share its memories with you as fact-based as I can.

It is my way of telling you that prisoners are mere human beings living in a world different than yours.

Billy Sinclair spent 40 years in the Louisiana prison system, six of which were on death row. He is a published author, an award-winning journalist (a George Polk Award recipient), and the co-host with his wife Jodie of the criminal justice podcast, “Justice Delayed.”