Alive After the Death Sentence

           Did you ever have a time in your life where you visited your own grave?  In my case, it’s a serious question.  I’m talking about physically walking into a grave yard and seeing your name on a tombstone in front of you.  I have, and it wasn’t just someone with the same name, it was my tombstone.  It was my grave.  And yet when I approached my own tombstone, I realized I had become more alive than ever in my entire life.  You confused yet?  I guess you’ll have to read my story for it to all make sense.

            My life is characterized be freedom now.  It wasn’t always this way.  In fact, most of my life I sought freedom by breaking every rule I could find and found myself anything but free.  I grew up just me and my father.  He was a good man, but I didn’t believe it at the time.  He always tried to get me to do what was “right” because he “knew what was best for me.”  But I wasn’t buying into that.  Like I said, I was out to break the rules.  No adult, no government, no authority, and certainly no god could tell me how to live a certain way.

            When I made it clear to my father that I thought I could raise myself better than he could raise me, he kicked me out of the house and told me to find my own place to live.  Now that I look back on it, I would’ve kicked me out too, but I was too stubborn to look to him for help when living on my own got hard.  He tried to keep tabs on me.  I’d get a letter from him every once in a while saying he only kicked me out because he loved me and wanted to teach me some discipline.

            He received no response from me, however.  In fact, I grew angry and had an ever increasing amount of hate towards him.  My search for freedom by doing whatever I wanted eventually led me down a path of crime.  I stole because I thought I could get away with it.  I was a criminal and a felon because I thought I could get away with it.  But there came a day where my crimes came to a summation and everything I thought I could get away with was going to cost me everything.  It’s funny how I thought that all my crimes would help me gain all that I wanted to experience in life.  When I broke the rules and the very person I was threatened the order the law set, why would I have not been a wanted man?   The law couldn’t allow me to be on the streets anymore and when they tried to take me in I resisted.  I was so afraid of losing what I thought was my freedom, that I took someone else’s life.  In my resistance I had become a killer and earned myself a death sentence.  This wouldn’t be the last time that my actions took some else’s life.

            Murder, treason, and assault were all words that were attached to my name, but this is where my story gets interesting.  So far, I’ve been telling you about my life without much detail so now I want to slow it down.  I want you to understand what happened to me.  I was a bad man, you get that.  By law, I deserved to die for my crimes, you get that.  However, in this story, the bad guy does not get what he deserves.

            Eventually, I found myself in a cold, dark jail cell.  The next day was my trial and with all of the evidence that was stacked against me, there was no way out.  I was going to have to pay with my life.  I can’t even begin to tell you what all was going through my head.  I wept, lying on the bed in my cell.  Segments of my life kept replaying through my mind and I wondered how they might be different if I had lived how my father told me to live.  That night I realized that I had spent my life seeking a freedom that was only real in my head.  I can’t even begin to describe my emotions.  How do you feel when, in one night, you finally know that your life was a waste and the next day, you’re a dead man?  I didn’t know what to feel, I was at the lowest point in my life.

            My stomach churned within me and my heart pounded like a drum as I sat on my bed with my face against the wall.  Streams of sweat and tears poured from my face as I heard a voice behind me.  It was the prison guard on duty that night and I wasn’t in any mood to chat so I ignored him.  From outside of my cell he asked me this question. “If there was a way for you to get out of this situation, would you take it?”  In my time in prison, that is one question I had never heard.  Still facing away from him I reluctantly mumbled, “Even if I escaped this prison cell I would still be running for my life.”  Then he unlocked the cell door and I could hear him walking up behind me.  I still didn’t look at him, I didn’t want to talk.  But he repeated his question, “If there was a way for you to get out of this situation, would you take it?”  Apparently my first answer wasn’t good enough for him.  I quietly replied, “Of course I would, but hope isn’t necessarily on my side is it?”  He then said with a calm voice, “There is hope.”  I was so confused.  What kind of prison guard talks like this to the prisoners?

            I finally turned around to see who this guy was.  He was a prison guard, but had hung his uniform outside of my cell and put on the clothes they gave the prisoners.  The moonlight shined through the small window of the cell onto his face.  I’d never been so scared. I didn’t believe what I was seeing.  He was dressed like me and his face looked exactly like mine.  It was like staring into a mirror.  He told me to get up and walk outside the cell.  It happened so fast, I didn’t even have time to process what was going on; I just did as he said.  I walked outside of the cell, hearing the door slam and lock behind me.

            I turned around, finally starting to realize what was going on.  He told me to put his uniform on.  As I quickly put it on to avoid being seen outside of my cell, he said:

“This is what is going to happen.  I am going to be you now.  The judge in that courtroom tomorrow will not judge you lightly for what you’ve done.  I know the judge.  He wants justice for crimes and he will get justice.  If you want to be outside of these walls and not be running for your life, someone has to pay for your mistakes.  That’s why I’m taking your place.  You can’t stop me, this is going to happen.”

At that time, stopping him was not in my mind whatsoever.  Being a wanted man for so long, if I saw a way out; I was going to take it.  So I assumed my role as the prison guard, just as this stranger had instructed me.  He looked like me in every way.  He looked dirty like I did.  He even had scars on his arms that I had.  Same tattoos, same everything.  The one difference I noticed was his speech.  He didn’t talk like me.  The way he spoke reminded me exactly of my father.  I asked him what his name was and he even happened to share the same name as him.  I know it sounds crazy, but he seemed like nothing less than my father in my own body.  This man was 100% my father and 100% me at the same time.  If you can’t comprehend that, I’m sorry, but that is the most accurate way that I can describe him.

His words “I am going to be you now,” kept replaying in my head as I observed him.  He lay on the cell bed in the same position I was in previously.  Blood, sweat, and tears now streamed down his face instead of mine.  All of the emotional and physical pain was on him now.

I spent the rest of the night trying to comprehend what was going on.  Why did he want to be me?  Why did he want to die for someone so full of such hate, pride, and selfishness?   When does the hero ever die for the villain of the story?  It just didn’t make sense; this kind of sacrifice did not exist.

Yet it was happening right before my eyes in the most unexpected way possible.  So I asked him this question: “Why are you interested in saving a criminal?  Why are you really doing this?”  Every time I asked him a question, he would turn towards me with tears filling his eyes saying, “Someday, you will know why I did this for you.”

            Morning came and as one of the prison guards I was instructed to escort the prisoner to a place where he would be transported to the courthouse.  So I walked the man down a poorly lit hallway to exit the prison.  I have a hard time finding words to describe it.  He did not speak.  He just looked down at the ground as he walked.  When we reached our destination and I handed him over, he looked up at me, still saying nothing. 

            Honestly, until that moment I had no remorse for this man.  I had only seen him as a means to get out of prison.  But his tired, dry eyes met mine and something happened in me.  In that moment his eyes pierced my cold, hard heart. My heart broke for him.  About 12 hours ago, I’d never thought that I would be watching myself get into the car that would take me to the courthouse.  He may have been taking my place, but he was not me.  He didn’t commit any of the crimes that he was about to pay the price for.  This man was no criminal, but now the weight of all of my crime was on his shoulders. 

            I left the prison that day with a new life ahead of me, but I had to know what happened to the man in my place.  The trial went just as expected.  He had received the death penalty for my crimes.  They buried him in a cemetery not too far from where I lived.  There was no funeral, no celebration of life lived, only a tombstone.  The day after he was killed, I went to visit the grave that had my name on it.  The night I was anticipating my death in the prison and staring at that grave were the only two times I ever recalled crying.  It was like my body just didn’t know what to do.  I should’ve been in that grave.  

            A couple days went by as I sat in my home.  I thought about life, how I had lived it and what I would do with my second chance.  Unfortunately, I was still plagued by my selfishness and didn’t believe that I could be anything but a criminal.  At this point I didn’t think my story could get any more strange.  However, in my mailbox that night was a letter.  It was blank on the outside, but on the inside, this is what it read:

            “Your new life is an undeserved gift.  How will you use it?  It is your choice still, but the old you died and is buried in a cemetery now.  You are free to be a new person.  Nobody is coming after you and you have a lot of life ahead of you.”

            I guess at the time I had assumed that the man somehow put the letter in my mailbox before I had met him at the prison and I just didn’t see it until then.  But the next morning I had a new letter in my mailbox that was not there the night before.  My whole life seemed to flash before my eyes as I read the text.  It read:

            “This was about much more than your body being put to death.  Not only your past crimes, but every crime that you will ever commit; I have paid the price for.  If you believe in me and you believe I took your place, if you believe that it really happened, you will be a new person. When it comes time for your life to end, you will live on.  The old you couldn’t handle death.  That is why I took your place.  Now the grave will not have a hold on you because it has no hold on me.”

            I stormed out of my house and headed for the cemetery.  I made it to the gravesite just as the sun was rising over the morning clouds.  Some might say that this is unbelievable, but it happened to me.  That morning, there was no more tombstone.  I frantically grabbed the shovel out of the back of my truck.  I dug and I dug.  There was no tombstone.  There was no body, just an empty casket with these words engraved inside: “Alive after the death sentence.”

Reviews

[TJ]

I see a lot of symbolism in this tale. A man willing giving his life for the sins of another - giving him another chance at life - and then rising from the grave. I like your re-imagining of the story. good work.