Grace Before Dying

Tonight I attended a slide show presented by a good friend, where she described a trip she made to Sri Lanka. Her pictures were fine as always, since she's a professional. The narration, however, took me by surprise. It was entirely from the tourist's point of view. After she showed a small herd of buffalo on a beach, and said they were "some sort of cows," I realized that I'd best be polite and offer as little input as possible. Buffalo in South Asia do not look like cows, thank you very much.

After the slide show I went to Books Through Bars and found people packing up a photo exhibit & lecture entitled Grace Before Dying on the prison hospice at Angola, Louisiana. As soon as I walked through the door I badly regretted my choice of events. At the hospice, inmates are put to work in caring for very old and sick inmates who are preparing for death.

The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is one of the best-known prisons in the US. It is a place of extreme punishment and slavery. It holds over 5,000 inmates on an 18,000-acre plantation in a very remote corner of the state. Prisoner advocates here all know the inmate magazine The Angolite, and the public knows the place for its famous inmate rodeo.

This was one of the quilts on display tonight, made by the inmate hospice staff. It shows the horse-drawn hearse carrying a prisoner's body to the nearby cemetery (escorted by butterflies) where those without families go in the end. Quickly reading up on the hospice at home makes me kick myself in the ass for missing the event. I could tell, just by chatting briefly with, and overhearing the photographer Lori Waselchuk as she stowed her gear, that I'd have learned a world of things had I been there two hours earlier. It would have been another extraordinary event in what has already been a very interesting week. I'll have to start planning my weeks more carefully.