My unexpected healing at San Quentin

In 2007, I visited San Quentin to see a transformational program for prisoners that was created by my friend, Jacques Verduin. The program was called Guiding Rage Into Power—known as GRIP. The men who participated had all been violent criminals, some had murdered, many had been gang members. They were “lifers.” And they had all been incarcerated for many years, some for decades.

I was a working journalist; I sat and listened. My reporter’s curiosity and detachment often were replaced by a kind of awe. Listening to and watching the men talk about their crimes, their traumas, and their struggles before and after they had been imprisoned, I was moved by the depth of their honesty and the deep healing that I  was witnessing.

Through long discussions, journaling, and hard work over months, they transformed the rage that had destroyed their lives and the lives of their victims and families into something positive, solace that gave their lives meaning. I found that the circle had a grace, serenity, and honesty that transcended its walls and the crimes the incarcerated men had committed.

I never imagined that I would return not as an observer, but as a member of their “tribe.”

In late September 2019, a month after my 26-year-old son Ben took his life I returned to San Quentin.

I had often thought about my visit there, years before and had come to understand that the group of men there had created a sacred space. A place where a powerful common bond was forged by sharing the details and stories of the pain and the trauma their actions had created for their victims and their families, their own families, and themselves. From that fire of honesty, vulnerability, spirituality, they found comfort—even love.

Jacques came with me that September day when I returned. I was raw from grief and I knew that I had to share my story and Ben’s if I were to heal. Jacques was a friend, and he knew Ben. He knew that my middle son—he had an older brother and younger sister—had struggled in recent years with mental illness.

He knew that on the clear still morning of August 19, Ben had driven to the Golden Gate Bridge and parked his car in a lot. He knew Ben walked to the bridge and stopped at light pole 95 just north of the south tower. He knew Ben spoke with a bridge police officer. He knew that Ben vaulted over the four-foot guard rail and plunged to his death. He knew that the days, even weeks, after his death, were dark and heavy and that I had done all I could to help my children and Ben’s mother and everyone who loved him.

Jacques did not tell me that he believed my presence, my experience, my story, and sharing my pain and grief with the men would not only help me heal but also might help accelerate the journey where these men could become whole.

The men are meeting in a drab classroom in San Quentin. There are guards outside the room. Thirty-two men sit in folding chairs that are arranged in a circle, and everyone is silent. The men have been incarcerated for a total of 864 years and call themselves Tribe 864. They were responsible for a total of 23 homicides. When asked how much time passed between being in control, losing control, and becoming violent—committing acts that resulted in their incarceration—the number was seven minutes and 36 seconds.

I walk in with Jacques. There are about 20 Black men and the other twelve are Asian, Hispanic, and white. Some look at me, this middle-aged, middle-class, white man, with curiosity, some with blank disinterest. Jacques introduces me as his friend, and I sit in the circle. The meeting begins with a meditation.

At some point, early on, someone asks me to speak and introduce myself. I breathe deeply, pause, and collect myself. Then I tell them about Ben’s death.

I am holding back my tears but my chest and body are in pain. For so much of his life after adolescence, I tell them, I lived in fear he would kill himself or hurt others. I try to describe my powerful, loving, and frighteningly painful co-dependent connection to him. I start to cry when I say what a big and handsome man he was and that Ben left with love, grace, and serenity. He left behind so much: letters, essays, poems. He was a writer, my son.  

When I finish there is silence in the circle.  

An older inmate, a Black man raises his hand. He is heavyset and rumpled in his prison blues. He had been in prison for over 45 years for a homicide. He is an elder in this community.  

“I got something,” he says. I take out my notebook—we all have notebooks. I want to remember the fugue I am drifting in and out of.

“Thank you, Robert. My condolences. I thank you for sharing your story and Ben’s story.”

My eyes fill up again. His condolences, words I have heard so often in the last month, touch my heart.

There is a long pause.

“I have never told this to anyone,” he says. “But when I was a boy my favorite uncle, a very successful man I saw as my father, took his life. No one knows why, He was successful and I, and my family, have lived in shame that a man we loved committed suicide. He jumped off the bridge too. I feel I must share this now to honor my uncle and Ben. I thank you Robert and I thank Ben.”

I breathe deeply, several times, and feel wonder at his words. I feel empty, but that emptiness is gradually filling with peace and a feeling I have not felt for weeks. Calm.   

 A younger inmate, a powerful, handsome Black man, maybe 35 raises his hand.

“I got something,” he says. “Thank you, Robert.”

“I have never shared this either. I tried to kill myself, more than once. My mother was an addict, and she died of a drug overdose when I was 13. I had so much rage. I was so angry at her, so shamed and so alone. I honor Ben’s death and his courage.”

I bow my head to him in thanks.

Others speak. My body is glowing with a warmth I do not understand. Is this spirituality?

I feel a joy, a joy of calm and powerful connection with the men around me. Ben’s decision and death touched these men deeply, men, who have lived in a prison for decades, but who can find a kind of freedom even while confined.

Three hours go by in what feels like a moment. When the session ends, we hug and thank each other.

I am drained and grateful when I leave San Quentin that day. I feel a sense of awe.

Ben wrote a long meditation, nearly 1,000 words, he called “Note of Gratitude.” It is a kind of sweeping tone poem—reflections on the beauties of nature and physics, on the Underground Railroad, on the wonders of the universe, the myth of Icarus, and yes, his own life of pain. Throughout, there is the recurring line, “Dare I forget” as if he needs to keep reminding himself of how precious life can be. One of the passages ends with this: “It seems as though a sense of contentment is not meant for me, for it is the opposite of which I have become so accustomed to.”

We found it on Ben’s computer the night he died. I  was stunned when I first read it by its beauty, depth of feeling, and wisdom.

Before I return to San Quentin the next week, I print out copies of Ben’s “Note of Gratitude” so I can give a copy to each man and the trainers, who also are inmates. That week, after I hand out the papers, I sit silently with the other men and listen to their stories of suffering, grief, rage, and trauma. Of the violence of fathers and mothers. Of baffled abandoned children waiting for a parent to return home. Of siblings lost. The common experience is framed by shame and pain.

The next Friday, before the meeting starts, men come to me. They want to talk about the “Note of Gratitude.” 

Some recite passages to me or read them back to me. One member of Tribe 864 says he wept when he read what Ben wrote about the Underground Railroad and tells me he felt a connection with my son and understood his empathy, and compassion, and pain. He tells me that for the first time in decades, he saw and felt the moss growing on trees that Ben wrote about. Then he gives me a pink plastic bracelet with these words on it, “Hope. Faith. Love.” I hug and thank him. I put it on my left wrist. He tells me he had received it during suicide prevention week at the prison.

Another man says he had put Ben’s words in the shrine in his cell and reads sections of it every morning to his cellmate. It has become part of their morning meditation.

I keep coming back. Some weeks the prison was in lockdown for collective punishment or because of security sweeps and the sessions were cancelled. One session is called “Sitting in the Fire.” The workbook describes it as, “Sitting in the fire, burning clean and leaving ashes. The practice of choosing to go in, through, and out of feeling an intense emotion of original pain and making peace with it. Exercising my power to respond skillfully rather than blindly. To tolerate and befriend original pain and learn from it.”

In these sessions, the men write about their origin stories. The first searing pain from which all else seems to have followed. Then, one by one, we sit in the circle and they each describe that moment. For nearly everyone, the original pain was chillingly similar. 

As small boys they witnessed their mother being beaten, sometimes killed in front of them by a man. Sometimes they said that man was their father. And they told of being beaten and battered themselves. Sometimes a man sobs while telling the story, others recount the narrative stoically, and Jacques would urge them to “tell us how you feel, tell us how you feel.”

Some men couldn’t find the words, but most would begin shaking and weeping. “I feel rage, guilty, shame helpless and angry,” they say. Those were the same feelings they had as small boys and had carried their entire lives. When a man wept, Jacques would say,” God’s water over God’s earth. There is no shame in your tears.”

I was feeling and seeing healing in real-time. After we “sit in the fire,” we soon will progress to the sessions on grief. For Jacques, grief is the “master emotion,” because it is universal.

This time, we had homework. Everyone had to write a letter to someone they wanted to express their grief to. Some men say they want to write to their victims. Others say a mother or father who died while they were in prison. Someone else says a son. Another wants to write to his spouse. I tell them I will write to Ben. No one is surprised.  

We have a week to write that letter. I try and try I start and stop. Tear up pieces of paper. Nothing that feels honest or true came. I feel bottled up. I feel that I have failed. 

The Friday morning of the GRIP training I drive to San Quentin and park in the prison parking lot. It is a gray day in mid-November. I am stressed and anxious about not doing my “homework,” feeling those vestigial high school guilty tensions when I went to class unprepared. 

Sitting in the car in the San Quentin parking lot, I have about twenty minutes before class. I have paper and pen and try one last time. In a torrent, I write my grief letter.  I don’t reread it. Then I walk to the gate and along the path into the prison.

A few hours later Tribe 864 breaks into small circles of six. I start to read. My letter is two pages long and I begin, “Dear Ben, I shake my head in wonder and awe of what you have left me.” He had written me a note in the hours before he ended his life and left it on my pillow. It was four handwritten pages and it began: “God Bless you Father for you have blessed me. Keep your head up. Let your outlets blossom. Feel no shame.”

I describe my reactions to his writings, and my confusion at the forces that led him “to a place where you had decided to end your life, this life.” I acknowledged that I had long been afraid this was what was going to happen, and confess to a sense of relief that now we were all free of the “dread of you dying by your own hand or harming others.” Even as I recognize his pain and all our pain, I take the time to express gratitude for all that he was: his wisdom, his love, his smile, his appreciation of my cooking. “But still I miss you.” I wrote, “and now stand on my tiptoes and kiss you. My big strong boy, again.”

 As I read the tears plop on the page. I am sitting with five of them men, we have been broken into small groups. I feel released and I am aware that the men I am sharing with are helping me. I am struck that I have found this kind of empathy with a group of incarcerated men. They say little but they bear witness with total presence.

A few weeks later Jacques calls me on a Thursday night and asks if, at the next day’s GRIP session, I would read my grief letter to Ben and the letter he wrote and left on my pillow to me. I tell Jacques I did not want to be the center of the circle. I did not want to take time away from the men in Tribe 864’s process. He said no, this would be important for their healing….and mine.

The next day I read my letter to Ben and his letter to me. When I finish, there is silence. A hard-looking man stares at me. When Tribe 864 first began meeting, he rarely spoke and when he did, anger and resentment poured out. He raises his hand, is acknowledged, and begins. “Last week I saw my daughter for the first time in 14 years,” he says. “I hugged her and I felt love. I had never felt love before. If I had felt love before I would have never done what I have done to hurt other people, hurt my family, and hurt myself. I have been looking at Robert’s face for weeks and when I look at Robert’s face I see love. I see Robert’s love for Ben and I see Ben’s love for Robert. I thank Ben and I thank Robert.”

Another man raises his hand. After he had killed someone, he says, he felt nothing. No grief. No remorse. Not even when he saw the victim’s mother at his trial sobbing.  Now for the first time, he feels and understands grief. His own and the grief and pain he caused in his victims’ family. He weeps as he speaks.

An Asian man, a convicted killer, says in his culture he has never learned to grieve but he cried listening to me. He worries about his son and now, for the first time, he feels the sorrow and grief for committing the crime that led to his life sentence. He is able to grasp the pain that has emerged from what he has done to his family, and especially his son.

Then Jacques does something he later tells me he had never done in a meeting. He asks me to stand in the middle of the circle. Then he asks the men to stand behind me. As many men as can put their hands on my shoulders. If they cannot reach me they put their hands on the men in front of them.

Jacques asks them to silently pray for their victims, themselves, and me. We are bound together in a moment of shared vulnerability and honesty, with no judgment. I feel an energy of connection and rush of calming peace. Jacques asks me to turn and walk slowly around the group and look into each man’s eyes. In a prison and in the world of the streets in which these men were born and raised, looking into another man’s eyes can lead to violence even death.

I walk slowly. Most of the men have no problem looking into my eyes. For a few, I see and feel the invisible and unimaginable tension they experience as they look into my eyes. They are breaking a taboo, but they do it.

When we say goodby to each other that day, I feel that we are all emotionally spent. I leave San Quentin drained, but light, as if I am moving in a dimension I have never before visited. Is this grace?

Two nights later, I have a dream. I am driving in a car with my brother David, who has Parkinsons. But he is driving and I think wow David is driving and he seems better. We pass empty buildings and the road suddenly narrows. There are huge walls on either side but beautiful trees with red flowers line the road. We approach a big structure, some sort of temple, and the hall is filled with a crowd waving flags and banners and calling, “Rosenthal, is here. Rosenthal is here.”

David is walking well, again I am surprised as I hold his arm.

Huge male figures, alien-looking and god-like approach us, and I think uneasily, they are priests. David approaches one of these towering figures and is embraced by him. Three other enormous priests come to me. They take my hands in their huge hands and look down on me and I feel anxious. Then, with deep voices and in a rhythmic chant, they repeat three times, “We mourn Ben.”

I wake with a start, bewildered by what has come to me in my dreams.

The next Friday I return to “Tribe 864.”

As we settle into the circle. The man who spoke of love for the first time raises his hand.

“The last time I cried was 39 years ago when my mother died. Last week after our session I went back to my cell and I cried,” he says. “I thought, I am buried alive. I am buried alive in this prison. But then I felt something. I saw my hand reach up and for the first time, I reached out and I felt love again and felt alive. And I had hope. I am grateful to Ben and Robert.”

One other man speaks. He is in his late 30’s and has served 15 years of a 25-years-to-life sentence for a moment of rage and anger in which he stabbed a man multiple times, killing him. He was a facilitator for Tribe 864 having gone through GRIP several years earlier.

Several months before in the spring, when I had visited GRIP before Ben had died, he had gone for a parole board hearing. He had become a model prisoner and some prison officials supported his parole. At the hearing, the mother of the man he murdered and over 40 of her relatives attended. They spoke against his parole saying he had taken a life, and his punishment should be that he never leave prison. They raged at him, and he witnessed their tears, trauma, pain, and grief that his own anger, anger lasting less than a minute, had created.

Calmly and serenely, the man described the hearing to the group that day. He understood why the families raged at him, he said, and that they may never forgive him. He accepted that and honored their pain and loss. In the end, all he could do to honor their pain, loss, and trauma was to live the best life he could, in or out of San Quentin. I felt that I was in the presence of a deeply spiritual and wise man.

“You are teaching us, Robert,” he says. “Teaching us through grief and Ben’s love and words how to grieve and in the grief there is healing. You are opening yourself and others with the intimacy of complete vulnerability. I thank you and Ben for helping us heal.”

Sitting in my hard, folding chair in a circle of men clad in their blue prison clothes,  I was overwhelmed by the reality that, Ben’s suicide had placed me on a journey where a new life was birthed in death. And I understood that Ben and these men had become my teachers.

Jacques told me it was reciprocal. My tears, and my words and Ben’s words, Jacques later explained to me, were “medicine for these men.” To be entrusted with someone’s despair is a great privilege and something happens that is very important. You become intimate, vulnerable, worthy of your suffering. It is honest, not hidden and it gives others the opportunity to do the same. To be entrusted models a way of being. But, Jacques tells me, “It is sacred work. It shows itself only to those willing to see it.”

 That afternoon as I leave San Quentin I feel a glow again, a peace, a calm. A state of spiritual reverie. Serenity. I do not understand how this is possible.

But I do know I would have never experienced this, or feel any of what I feel, or learn all that I have learned, if Ben had not done what he did.