A Weekend in Iowa

Fortunately, the decision has been made to keep him at IMCC where they are better staffed to care for his medical needs and he is closer to the University hospital. Jason has wanted to back there for many years - as that is the only prison facility in Iowa that is somewhat set up to provide for the intellectually and mentally disabled. He should have been there all along, but instead he's spent the last 33 years being shuffled between Anamosa and Clarinda.

It was a bit of a learning experience, but since I was flying in from out of state, the prison arranged for me to visit him on both Saturday and Sunday. It was both wonderful and heart-wrenching to be there with him and listen to his frustration at having his things taken away constantly and all that goes with daily life in a prison. The last time I'd been in a prison was almost 30 years before when he was in Anamosa- just a 19 year old boy with no idea that this was all there would ever be for him. Back then I knew how unfair what had happened to him was, but I had no clue of the actual details and our own mother's involvement in it. In all honesty, I should have known - she had done the same to me. But I got away, and she got meaner. We all suffered from being raised by a psychopath - but Jason paid the ultimate price. Sitting there with him I began to fully understand that he had no comprehension of all that she had done to put him there, and it even seemed he'd forgotten the hell that had been his life before these walls became the only thing he knows. He knows he got screwed over by the state of Iowa - but all the details have become foggy as he's learned to deal with day to day life in the new hell he's in. I listened, because that's what he needed. I held his hand, because that's what I needed. And for the first time in my life I wished I had it to do all over again, just so that I could go back and run away again - and this time take my brothers with me.

The night I got home, my phone rang and when I saw IMCC flash on the screen I was terrified to answer it. Jason had been readmitted to the hospital, as usual the prison couldn't tell me anything so I had to wait for the doctor's call in the morning... His CO2 levels were sky high when he was admitted and the doctor felt pretty certain that it was because Jason wasn't using the BiPAP machine correctly. I remembered his frustration with it when he told me about it, he said it beeped at him when he would just to get some sleep and that he kept getting tangled up in the wires. I wish I'd stressed to him just how important it was that he learn to use it. Because I don't want to lose my little brother, I don't want him to die in there. Yet the selfishness in that realization is more than I can cope with sometimes.

What is life, when it's been taken away? What is life without hope? Most times I find I have more compassion for a murderer than I do for a system that can do this to so many innocent people and simply shrug and say "that's the way it is". People rallied and cried out about injustice when they speak of the death penalty - but how humane is life without any possibility of ever being free again? Overly harsh sentences, innocent people taking pleas and rewarded for admitting to crimes they didn't commit just to be free and lower functioning people like Jason serving the rest of his life because he simply cannot confess to something that he didn't do, let alone ever fully understand what was accused of.. And the kicker in all of it is that the simple truth is that the crime for which he has served his life for didn't even happen. How unjust can that be?

Visiting my brother Jason at the Iowa Medical & Classification Center (IMCC) last weekend was quite wonderful, as he was out of the hospital and talking. They brought him into the visiting room at the prison in a wheel chair, a little detail hadn't mentioned to me in our conversations.

just two months ago I flew out to Iowa where Jason was in the hospital, taken there after he'd been found on the floor at the prison with no pulse. . My youngest brother, Tim, also made arrangements to come and was there at the airport to pick me up. For the first time in almost 30 years, I stood next to him, taking in all the wires and tubes that snaked off in every direction, attatched to bizarre new machines I'd never seen before.. Having not seen either me nor Tim, the youngest, Jason struggled against the tubes going down his throat just to talk. The moment I saw him, I regretted so many years that I'd spent avoiding Iowa and not going to the prison to see him. There he was, still the same little boy he'd always been, only now in a 52 year old body that starting to fail him. At that moment I was so ashamed that it took him being admitted into emergency at the Iowa University Hospital for me to conquer my fear of traveling alone. The entire time he was in the hospital they kept him intubated as his oxygen levels weren't rising to anywhere near normal. Just a week before that he'd been transferred from the Clarinda Correctional Center to IMCC to receive surgery on his eye after a fall. Recovering from that surgery is when they first discovered that while Jason slept, his oxygen levels decreased and the buildup of CO2 in his system became dangerously high. The only diagnoses has been to provide him with this new BiPAP machine that has been a challenge for him. He's been hospitalized twice since, and trying to find out where his is and how he is can be quite daunting within the prison system..

My beautiful little brother - May 6, 2024