Grieving in the Dark

What Happens When Prison Takes Away Your Right to Grieve

It was the eve of Easter Sunday, and I couldn’t sleep.

My family was coming in the morning. I’d been lying in my bed running through everything I needed to do before the visit — wake up early, get to the shower before the line got long, and get myself together. It was late. I knew I needed to stop thinking and just sleep. But that’s the thing about a visit. The anticipation doesn’t care what time it is. You lie there in the dark waiting for morning the way you used to wait for Christmas as a kid, except now the ceiling is concrete and the light never fully goes off.

That’s when I heard it.

A slight shift on one of the plastic mattresses. In here, the mattresses announce everything. It doesn’t matter how carefully you move or how slowly you turn. The plastic gives you away. I lay still for a second and listened. In a place like this, that sound at that hour means something. Your mind goes to medical first.

I got up.

I crossed the dark dorm to the cubicle directly across from mine, one to the left. Ty was lying on his side, tablet held roughly a foot from his face, his earbuds in. The screen was the only light in the room. He was watching a video. I could see from where I stood that he was smiling — but it was the kind of smile that you could tell comes with a cost. Before I could fully take in what I was seeing, he tapped the screen and the video started over.

He was watching it on a loop.

I stood there for maybe ten seconds. Long enough to understand what I was looking at, and to know I had no business standing there any longer. I went back to my bed and sat on the edge of it in the dark. I waited, in case he needed me.

He never knew I was there.

Today is one year since Ty’s sister died. He calls her Sis. That’s what she was to him, and that’s what she’ll be here.

I was there the day he found out.

Our facility was on full lockdown. A few of us were in the day room watching Creed 3 when Ty stepped away to call his mother on his tablet. I wasn’t paying close attention. Then his voice changed, and I was.

Stop playing with me. Tell me you’re joking. Stop. Ma, stop crying. What happened? What happened?

We all looked up. Nobody moved. You could tell something had broken, you just didn’t know what yet. In a place like this you learn to wait for information to reach you rather than reach for it. When he hung up, he threw the tablet into his cubicle, knocked everything off the ledge of a nearby divider with one swipe of his arm, and said it out loud.

My sister. She’s dead.

Then he walked into the bathroom and kicked a row of plastic buckets that lined the wall.

I stood there not knowing what to do. What could you?

Full transparency. I am not good at being there for people who are grieving. Part of it is inexperience. Before I came to prison, I hadn’t lost many people close to me. Most of the people I know who’ve died, I’ve lost while I’ve been in here. Elderly relatives. Friends I grew up with, gone in car accidents, suicides, or overdoses. I was never really there for any of it.

But the other part is harder to explain.

I’ve watched enough men experience loss in here to know that grief doesn’t come in one shape. Some men need you right beside them. Some need you close but quiet. Some need you to stay away, and they’ll make that clear if you don’t pick up on it. And some turn it outward — the grief becomes anger, and it lands on whoever is nearest. Those are the ones you have to read carefully. You want to be present for them, but you also have to protect yourself. Not knowing which kind of grief you’re about to walk into can stop you in the doorway before you ever step through.

So I did what I could. I didn’t try to say the right thing, because I didn’t know what the right thing was. What I did was what some people say I do best — write. Letters to the facility administration, the commissioner, anybody with an ounce of power. Grievances. Anything that might convince someone with authority to let Ty attend his sister’s funeral. I used whatever I have with words and put it to work for him.

It didn’t matter.

They said they didn’t have the manpower. The facility was in a state of crisis. The illegal wildcat strike by corrections officers had the prison locked down and stripped of staff — that was the stated reason. But the indifference was already there before the strike. The strike just made it harder to look away from.

What Ty was offered instead was a virtual visit. An hour on a screen. Except the officers assigned to manage the video equipment couldn’t get it working. The setup process took over thirty minutes, and by the time a connection was made, Ty had fifteen minutes before he was walked back to his housing unit.

Fifteen minutes. To say goodbye to his sister. To sit with his grieving mother. And then prison life resumed, as it always does in here.

He told me later that he was grateful for those fifteen minutes. At least he could see his mother’s face. At least he could say something. But he also said this:

The fact that I was never able to hold my baby’s hand and say goodbye — that’s something I’ll carry for the rest of my life. Something that will hurt my heart forever.

His baby. That’s what he called her.

There’s something people on the outside don’t always know about grief in here. It goes beyond the absence of support. The thing is — showing grief visibly can get you punished.

A woman incarcerated in Georgia wrote about the day she found out her grandmother had died. She was crying when an officer saw her. He didn’t call the chaplain. He called mental health. She was handcuffed, escorted to the infirmary, told to remove all of her clothing. The room was fifty-two degrees. They handed her a paper gown and told her to stop crying. They kept her there for four days.

Years later, she received another call. Her sister had died by suicide. This time she knew better than to let anyone see it. She gave herself three minutes alone on the floor of her cell — three minutes to feel everything she had — and then she got up, wiped her face, and went to watch a Valentine’s Day dance-off in the common area. It happened to be going on in the unit that day. She couldn’t lie down. She couldn’t show anything. So she went. Four people knew about her loss for weeks.

She wasn’t being cold. She had learned what the institution did when grief made itself visible.

That’s the environment Ty has been navigating for 365 days. Eight-by-six feet, four-foot dividers. If you sit up in your bed you can see your neighbors on both sides, and the officer at his elevated desk can see all of you. When you lose someone in here, the therapeutic response is a checklist. Do you have thoughts of harming yourself or others? Mark the box. Move on.

That’s it. That’s the support.

The grief doesn’t go anywhere. It just gets smaller. It finds whatever container is left to it — a bunk, a dark room, a tablet screen on a loop at midnight.

He talks about her every day. Not always by name or even directly. But she’s there, in the way he talks about wanting to get home, wanting to be there for his mother who is getting older. Sis lives in the edges of almost every conversation he has.

He didn’t know I was there that night. We haven’t talked about it. I don’t know that we will.

If you love someone who is incarcerated and you’ve read this far, I want to talk to you for a second.

You probably already know things are hard in here. What you may not know is what it actually looks like when someone loses a person they love and the institution’s response is a checklist, a fifteen-minute video call, and an expectation that they return to the yard and the mess hall and the work assignments like nothing happened. No counselor assigned. No grief group. No memorial. The system acknowledges the loss, covers its liability, and moves on.

What you can do is not move on.

Write a letter that has nothing to do with the case or commissary or court dates. Write one that just says: I know what today is. I’m thinking about you. Tell me about her. Ask to hear a story about the person who died. Ask what made them laugh. Ask what your person misses most. Give the grief somewhere to go that isn’t the floor of a cell at three in the morning.

Send a card on the anniversary. The dates the outside world forgets are the ones that hit hardest in here — because every day looks the same, and the ones that should feel different never do, unless someone from the outside makes them different.

You can’t fix what the institution refuses to do. But you can refuse to replicate its indifference. That matters more than you know.

Today, Ty made a celebration out of it.

He’s been playing reggaeton all day, loud enough that the whole dorm can hear it. He cooked a big meal with some of the men. He moved through the day like someone who decided — on his own, without anyone telling him to — that today was going to be a celebration of life. Not a vigil. Not a breakdown. A celebration, built entirely out of what the institution left him with after it took everything else.

I watched him move through the dorm today and thought about what that takes. To get up on the one-year anniversary of your sister’s death, in a place that gave you fifteen minutes and a checklist and called it support, and turn the day into something that honors her anyway.

He built the only memorial he was allowed to have.

Sis died one year ago today on a road in the Hudson Valley, in the early hours of a Saturday morning in April. She was thirty-four years old.

Her brother has been grieving her alone — inside one of the hardest environments a human being can occupy — without a single program-taught tool for any of it. No coping strategies offered. No framework given. No sanctioned space to feel what he feels. Every morning he gets up and moves through his day because this place requires it, and because he simply doesn’t have a choice.

Endurance is not the same thing as healing. I need people to understand that. A man smiling at a screen in the dark at midnight, watching the same video of his sister on a loop, is not a man who has found peace. He is a man who has found the only container the system left him.

His name is Ty. Her name was Sis.

I want them both to be remembered.