Where am I?
I’m not breathing … but somehow feel a forced inhalation and then exhalation. Constant. Repeating. I’m not in pain.
I’m still alive! Someone help me!!
I can’t move. My arms and hands and legs must still be strapped down. Like I can run away.
I can’t open my eyes. All I see is darkness. No bright light. Not yet. If ever.
I’m alone. No, I think I’m in a hospital. I feel my back on a thin mattress, maybe a gurney. I hear beeps from equipment. I hear people stirring around me, sometimes touching me. A medical team checks my signs … any sign of life.
I’M ALIVE!!!! Can’t you see? Please help!!
Hey … what’s that I feel? Something on my face. Wet. Small. A trickle. A tear! Maybe someone will see it and bring me back to life. Or death.
Death on holiday
I’m supposed to be dead! I know I’m supposed to be dead! But I’m not! What happened?
Why am I still here? I want to be sedated! Knock me out, someone please!!
I’m so alone. But the prison kept me in solitary confinement for years until told not to.
The death penalty for me was either electrocution or lethal injection. I even asked them to hang me. They wouldn’t do it.
I spent enough time in prison, most of my life. I’m 50. My entire life has been a prison.
I was messed with as a kid, before I could fight. Quickly I changed into the tough kid. The tough girl. Sent off to juvie hall. I was severely mentally ill, but no one knew. Or cared.
I got mixed up in silly satanic rituals. I was a demon child. It was empowering. Praying to God sure didn’t stop men from messing with me.
Then at a youth work camp, all the evil that was inside me took the life of another girl. She wasn’t like me—a girl no one wanted. I was jealous. I got a couple of friends to lure her into the woods. And that’s when my dark side was unleashed, a killer instinct I didn’t know I had. It came in a rage and then left. By the time I realized what had happened, I’d killed that girl, stabbing her so many times I can’t count. I don’t know why I cut off a piece of her skull to keep. Something to hold on to, I guess, from that good girl I killed.
I was like 19 back then, but inside I was maybe like a 10-year-old. Kids can be horribly cruel, don’t realize the consequences of their actions. I knew something was wrong with me.
When the court verdict came down and I was condemned to die for murder, I figured that was that. But millions of people around the world were fighting to get me off death row. Can you believe it? Because I was female. Being female taught me I am nothing. But to other people, mostly people I do not know, the death penalty, even for the horrible and senseless murder I committed, was not right. They said I deserved life in prison for the crime due to me being so young, still a teen-ager at the time of the murder, and given my awful upbringing. Guess they think I didn’t know no better. Hey, I knew better and did it anyway.
Time’s on my side
I’m a 50-year-old woman now. I believe in the death penalty, especially for what I’d done.
But … this … This ‘state’ I’m in now. Perhaps a coma? This ain’t right either.
I’d rather be dead.
OK, God. You listening? You hear me? Why did I survive execution for my heinous crime?
Please. God, if you’re real, let me know why I was not put to death—especially dead by now?
No one cares about me continuing to live even the rest of my life in prison.
Lord, I’m waiting for your answer.
Sigh. Figures. God won’t even talk to me.
I wish this were one of those near-death experiences I heard about. Wouldn’t that be wonderful: seeing folks I knew who are now dead, all of them gathering round me? That beautiful eternal light. Soaring outside my body. Looking down at all the others around me in this hospital room. To experience that unknown sense of total freedom as my spirit expands across the sky …
But that’s not what’s happened to me.
Most of the world no longer executes convicted murderers. Life in prison with or without parole is believed to be more humane.
I just bet those chemicals used to kill me weren’t up to snuff. I read that chemicals used for lethal injection are banned around the world. Not sure how the U.S. still gets them.
And I guess what’s happened here is exactly why the world turned against lethal injection. At least with the electric chair or gas chamber or firing squad or noose, I’d be dead already.
Lethal injection is supposed to gently send the condemned to death, like passing out or anesthesia before undergoing surgery.
I can’t believe I was rushed to a hospital to bring me back to life. I should’ve been left alone. Surely I would have died at some point, maybe a day or two.
Huh. I wonder. I wonder if maybe this is a new type of execution. Maybe the condemned are now placed in a coma and their organs are taken for transplants until the body cannot sustain life.
I’d be willing to allow my organs to help someone who needs ’em. Let them go on with their lives healthy instead of sick, in pain, and dying.
Instead, I’m left here … in limbo. Waiting for death, which I deserve. But death won’t come.