What Prison Hospice Taught Me About Freedom, Dignity, and Dying

Hello and well, how are you? I have such a big smile, but the story’s gonna get a little dark for a minute, so bear with me. All right. When I was 16 years old, I was sentenced to a long time in prison. That sentence felt like the end of every possibility. The sounds of the prison doors closing behind me was the sound of my future gone.

Time in prison is heavy. Still and filled with the silence that will have you question who you are and what is left of you.

I grew up in a cell with a scratch mirror above my toilet, in which I would look in year after here and wonder how to survive.

And the sounds of prison became too loud. I would close my eyes. And imagine the Golden Gate Bridge stretching from Marin San Francisco. The sounds of seagulls, waves, children playing kites, flying in the sky. I would build upon these visions. I would sit cross-legged in my cell. I would face the wall and close my eyes, and I’d be the star of my own TV show.

I loved friends. I wanted to be Joey Trivia. How you doing?

It was a hit across the many prisons that I spent decades in Juvenile hall, Pelican Bay High Desert State Prison, and even a tent in a prison in California medical facility during the pandemic, while the entire world was on fire, I was still getting up every day and doing things that I will share later.

So. I build upon this. I used to challenge myself. I would ask myself, what if the gate opened right now? And I was told, you can go home. So I said, what am I gonna do now? Mind you, I don’t have a release date. I have life in prison. It’s over. I am going to die in prison.

But even with that feeling, I was like, okay, I want to prepare for the unknown. I would start quantifying my cell as a simulator. I would practice freedom in there. I would write in journals. I’d prepare a resume, how delusional, right? I would read books. I would challenge myself to do book reports. I wanted it to be as proficient as possible.

So if the time came and I stepped outside of my cell, it was only in the greater gathering I could be successful. I can reintegrate in a society, walk amongst you and be like everybody else. Hello neighbor. How are you doing?

My cellies, which we would refer to in, in, in carceral setting, you know, our, our cellmates would look at me and say, what is this crazy idiot? Do it like I’m practicing freedom. There’s just a bunch of nonsense. I would take these lessons and applying myself and I would later on in time in my incarceration, living hou in housing units.

This is decades later. I’ll give a little context about what this means. For the first 19 years of my incarceration, I lived in something called Level four Prisons where movement was, was restricted. We had limited access to education. We had limited access to our families. Our identities were replaced with numbers.

Our outfits were replaced with what I referred to as our, my costume of inferiority,

and I would live in housing units as time went on because I remember what it was like to be young and not have a positive male role model to emulate. So after practicing in my simulator for so many years, I wanted to be visible in housing units in my mid thirties. This is, ooh, years and years after my, uh, incarceration where, when it started, where, um, I would, I would live in these housing units and I would go work in the hospice.

I would go to school. I would go to self-help programs, these youngsters that used to look just like me when I was 17, 18, 19 years old. Be shooting dice in the hallway and smoking and be like, og, where you going every day? Why you always got that binder in your hand? I’m like, I’m well, I’m glad you asked.

I’m gonna school. I’m going hospice. Like you never getting outta prison. Why you doing all these things? I said, because I want to be free now, regardless of. Of these gates and these walls that are keeping us inside of here. I wanna make sure that I can ascend so far above it that I can be free. And they’d be like, cool.

This keeps shooting ice.

But those same young people that will continue doing what they were doing would circle back later on and be like, Hey, I want to go where you go. I’d be like, sh, I would always have papers with me so I can sign them up immediately when they said that to come join me. Like, here you go. So I made sure that I, not only was sharing with the young people what I did, but I had the means to bring them myth with me wherever I, I went.

This led me to bring a lot of these young people down to a place that not many folks that lived amongst me in the prison knew existed. It was called the California Medical Facility Hospice, a 17 bed unit where approximately at the time where I worked in there, 135,000 incarcerated. People hoped that we were, they were diagnosed with end of life terminal illness.

Can have access to, this was a space of normalization, a space where incarcerated people. Correctional staff and nurses would work side by side, and the focus being the patient, it was remarkable to see. It’s a place that gave me meaning. It was a place I was so excited to share with other people. When I walked out of the hospice, I would feel super anonymous because nobody in my community knew what I did.

So it felt so good welcoming people down there. When I started working in the hospice, it was a amazing to see everybody working there with a common goal. Folks that I would never have imagined that came before me, that were just so big and muscular, and that wore these, what I refer to as these masks, you know, that weren’t necessarily a reflection of who they were as individuals take them off and where their vulnerabilities became superpower.

Where grief was something that was held to honor folks that were dying of terminal illnesses. It was a place where I had the opportunity to change sheets of a dying person, and that experience broke something open inside of me.

That vulnerability was a sacred language of care. In a controlled base world, surrendering to care was power. Here I had the opportunity to meet some wonderful people in this space. Uh, in 20 of 17, I met a wonderful New York Times author. Her name was Sika gi. She spent two weeks with us and wrote extensively about our work.

She described us some of the work that I did as like, um. Compassionate, but also with a degree of,

well, with the, with degree, degree of like care in which I was okay with expressing my vulnerability through crying. I was like, damn it. Why are you writing that about I’m supposed to be a tough guy for you. So

working with a lot of the correctional officers in this spaces, I, I was mind blown of the fact that they had a mortality age. 58 years old that coincided and was in line with, uh, the folks that were incarcerated that they were, uh, tasked with watching over. Uh, if you guys don’t know the statistic, one in five people in these spaces are 50 and over.

So there’s just like shared level of like debilitating health outcomes, the connectivity amongst everybody that was there. I used to speak to that when I was in there. The sit, what I described earlier about my, um, costume of inferiority where I felt a sit a high degree of like anonymity. It’s what correction officers would feel every day when they left work.

Not many people in the community knew what they actually did. There’s a correlation and experiences that I wanted to speak directly to while we worked in there.

The first time that I witnessed one of the correctional officers that I worked with every day that I used to talk to and spend a lot of time with, and spoke directly to that commonality. I’ll never forget that, wh when we were having this conversation, a call light went up, beep. He walked over to the room and said, how can I help you?

I dropped my cup.

I dropped my cup because something happened that seemed totally innocent. He was able to humanize someone that was incarcerated in that moment. He took the lessons that he was witnessing from us and previously only seen us as people that needed to be punished and locked away and seen someone as human.

I was like, yes, what can I do for you? That patient that he went and answered the call light with, and he ended up becoming good friends with that patient. I watched that same officer cry when the patient passed away. We became friends. Now, this is somebody that when he started the hospice, like I mentioned, it’s like lock ’em up and throw away the key.

But no, I was helping them fingerprint the patient, helping them load him to the body bag, set them on the gurney so they can go down to the basement.

In the carceral setting, there are so many people that live lives. They, they, they grieve the lives that they were unable to live. They grieve the birthdays that they didn’t get to celebrate the children, they didn’t get to raise. I see so many pictures sitting on the hospice walls of what folks used to look like.

About 40% of the people in the hospice were vets. I would see what they would look like straight up and down in their uniforms. Proud. With their flags, what it was like for them. I listened to their stories of what it was like for them when they came back from Vietnam, and that’s when time stopped for them in 1972, and here I was with them, bedside tears coming down my face, listening to what if.

I felt like we were establishing a legacy through presence, remembering, holding those stories. There was so much meaning that was coming from the loss in this space. The folks that worked with me, they were so radical with the bravery that they had to make themselves available to absorb so much.

I just wanted to share that quick story about how I arrived here. I briefly mentioned, uh, what happened with, so Lake gi. Okay. After this, um, article that was, uh, named where peer caregivers and patients are prisoners, I received a call from the governor of California. Uh, I’ll never forget this day. I’ll just briefly walk, bear with me for really quick.

It was the officer that I’ve known for years. We’ll call him Mans. It’s not his name by the way. He went and stopped me out in my tents. Hey, Fernando, I got something for you, man. You got a phone call? I was like. Phone call people incarcerated don’t get phone calls, so he walks me through a maze of hallways in typical prison fashion, keys, rattling people coming and going from their job, and he walked me to a room and said, have a seat.

There was a post-it note on the phone, the post-it note. He picked it up, dialed the number, said he’s here. Are you ready? And I, I was like, what the heck is going on? So I picked up the receiver and there was a voice on the other end that said, hi, do you know who this is? I was like, no, you called me.

They were like, this is the governor’s office. We just wanna let you know that we’re letting you go home.

So I said, can you say that again? They’re like, most people in this moment just cry. I say, you know what? I’ve cried enough. I said, I’ve been practicing freedom in a cell for so long. I’m ready for this moment. It is not good enough for me to just be out. I have to make a difference. By the way, this is my, today, right now is my fifth anniversary of being home.

So I said, when can I go? And they laughed. They were like, we’ll see you soon. So 10 days later on November 20th. 2020. During the height of the pandemic, I was, I did everything normal. Five 30 in the morning. I walked down to the hospice, I looked around, the call lights are on. I’m like, no, why is’ anybody got answering the call lights?

So I’m answering call lights as if I’m still working a regular day in the hospice. And chaplain Keith, who I don’t know if, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say his name. But anyways, I said it already. Who cares? He’s getting ready to retire next month. By the way, he’s been there for 30 years. He’s our director of pastoral care service and like a family member member to me, he’s like, Fernando, they’re ready for you.

What are you doing? I was like, nobody’s answering the call lights. He said, let’s pray on the way to the door. So he grabs my hand and there’s like an entourage of people following me. Correctional officers are shaking my hand, they’re giving me hugs while Chaplain Keith is praying. I heard correction officers say things like, they finally got one.

Right? Man, I’m so excited to see you go home. I was like, where was this When I wanted an extra tray, bro,

I was emotional. I cried a lot. I didn’t cry when I got a phone call from the governor, but I got a, I cried in this moment because I remember every single soul that I took care of. That passed away in my presence.

I knew that they would’ve done anything to be in my shoes in that moment.

I had a different responsibility to live for them. To be able to put myself in positions where I could stand up here and share with you and provide ’em a voice and let you know that they had meaning, they had purpose, and the less in the least, interesting about even E, not every single one of them was the moment that they committed their crime.

I walked outside and I see my family. The first thing I wanted to see was that Golden Gate Bridge.

Since then, I’ve been published in numerous academic medical journals. I’ve worked at one of the most prestigious universities, medical universities in the world at the University of California, San Francisco, and now I’m doing very important work with the Humane Prison Hospice Project, where we’re bringing caregiving to incarcerated people to best care for the medically fragile incarceral settings.

I am here right now because I was determined to be free. I sought freedom in a cell. It was supported by so many people that invested in me, both that were in Carceral setting, and as my friends. So Lake will refer to the greater gather. My life is an offering to those that no longer have a voice. I’m here to share with you that transformation is possible, that care heals, it restores and builds legacy it.

Before I go, I just want you to know that it’s possible in there. It’s possible out here. Give a voice to the voiceless. Be the advocate for the folks that can’t advocate for themselves, and I’ll see you guys later for a drink or something.