There are things you can lose in jail that never appear on an inventory sheet. Your keys. Your freedom to walk outside. The ordinary right to decide when to sleep, when to eat, and when to make a telephone call. Those losses are obvious. The ones that aren’t obvious can take longer to understand. While I was locked up, two men who mattered enormously to me died. One had known me since childhood. The other had helped me learn how to live sober. Neither man got a goodbye from me. I was absent from their final days, and they were suddenly absent from the rest of mine.
This is Captain’s Log number ten, and I’m going to stay with it a little longer than usual. Some people deserve more than a passing mention. Some losses cannot be squeezed into a neat paragraph and filed away under “things that happened.” These two men deserve their due. I won’t publish their names here. The people who loved them know who they were, and I don’t need to borrow their names to tell you what they meant to me.
The first story begins on a jailhouse floor. Not a metaphorical floor, either. A real floor, in a real jail, where a man can become intimately familiar with the architecture of confinement. There is nothing romantic about it. You learn the sounds of doors and footsteps. You learn the difference between waiting five minutes and waiting five hours, though neither is much fun. You learn how quickly the outside world can become something you hear about instead of something you participate in.
I was sleeping when I had a strange dream. A friend from my childhood appeared to me. I hadn’t thought about him in a long time. That is part of what makes the dream so difficult to explain. He wasn’t someone I’d been talking about that day, or someone whose face I’d just seen in a photograph. Yet there he was, as familiar as a memory and as immediate as a visitor.
He told me everything was going to be all right.
I took those words personally. Why wouldn’t I? I was in jail. I was frightened, confused, and trying to make sense of a life that seemed to have been turned upside down. When somebody shows up in your dream and says everything is going to be all right, you tend to assume the message is for the person sleeping on the jailhouse floor. I thought he was reassuring me about my own circumstances.
When I woke up, the dream stayed with me. I went downstairs when I was able to use the telephone and called my friend Billy. During that conversation Billy told me something I did not know: my childhood friend had died four days earlier.
Four days.
I had not heard the news. I had not been carrying around that information in the back of my mind. I had dreamed about a man I had not thought of in a long time, heard him tell me everything would be all right, and then learned he was already gone. I don’t know how to make that sound ordinary, because to me it wasn’t ordinary at all.
I believed it was a sign from God. I still think about it that way. I understand that somebody else might call it coincidence, or the mysterious work of memory, or the mind’s ability to reach into places we don’t consciously visit. I’m not here to prove a supernatural event in a court of law. I’ve spent enough time around courts. I’m telling you what happened as I experienced it, and what I believed it meant.
What stays with me isn’t simply the timing. It’s what he said. Everything was going to be all right. I thought those words were about my jail cell. Now I wonder whether they were also about him. Perhaps the comfort I heard as a prisoner was a comfort I needed as a grieving friend, before I even knew there was something to grieve. I can’t know. Faith isn’t the same thing as having a complete explanation.
He was a great man. I want to say that plainly. He was my friend when we were young, before life had accumulated all the titles and troubles that adulthood hands us. Childhood friends know versions of us that no one else ever gets to meet. They remember the person before the performance, before the résumé, before the mistakes we spend years explaining. They can remind us that we were somebody long before we started trying so hard to be somebody.
As we grow older, people scatter. Jobs, families, cities, and the daily business of surviving pull us into different orbits. We don’t always stay in touch. Sometimes we tell ourselves we’ll make that call when things settle down. The trouble is, life doesn’t send a notice saying the next call is the last available one. I hadn’t thought of him in a long time. That fact hurts to admit. It doesn’t diminish my love for him, but it does remind me how easy it is to mistake distance for permanence.
I wish I could call him now. Not to ask anything grand. Just to hear his voice. To talk about something ridiculous we did when we were kids. To laugh at the way memory edits the past until everybody in it is younger, faster, and considerably more intelligent than they were at the time. I wish I could tell him that his visit in my dream mattered. I wish I could thank him for the words he spoke, whether those words came from heaven, memory, or some place I don’t yet understand.
Then came another message, and another loss.
This one arrived through the jail messaging system. A good friend in the recovery community wrote to tell me that my longtime AA sponsor had died. She knew him, too. She understood, I believe, that this wasn’t merely the death of an acquaintance. It was news about a man who had helped hold a piece of my life together.
A sponsor occupies a peculiar and precious place in the world. The job doesn’t come with a fancy title, a corner office, or a certificate that says “qualified to hear another human being tell the truth.” A sponsor is simply somebody who has walked part of the road and agrees to help another person find his footing. Sometimes that means advice. Sometimes it means a telephone call. Sometimes it means listening patiently while the same fool tells the same story for the nineteenth time and insists that this time the problem is definitely everybody else.
My sponsor had been part of my recovery life for roughly a decade. Ten years is long enough for a man to see more than the polished version of you. He gets the unfinished chapters, the bad decisions, the promises, the progress, and the regressions. He hears things you may not want to say aloud. If he’s doing his job, he doesn’t confuse loving you with agreeing with you.
That kind of friendship is difficult to replace. In recovery we talk a lot about honesty. Rigorous honesty sounds noble until you’re the one who has to practice it. It’s much easier to tell the truth about somebody else’s shortcomings. A sponsor can help you turn the mirror around. Not to humiliate you, but to help you become free of the exhausting work of pretending.
I wish I could say I always listened. I didn’t. I wish I could say I always followed good advice. I didn’t do that, either. If I had, perhaps some chapters of this log would be shorter. But the value of a guide is not measured by the perfection of the person being guided. It is measured by the willingness to keep showing up, and by the possibility that a word spoken today might finally make sense years later.
When I learned he had died, I was still confined. Grief arrived, but the ordinary ways of responding to grief were largely out of reach. I couldn’t simply get in the car and drive somewhere quiet. I couldn’t go sit with the people who loved him. I couldn’t step outside, walk until I was tired, and let the day carry some of the weight. I was receiving news of the living world through the narrow openings that jail permitted.
The two losses were different, and I don’t want to flatten them into one lesson. My childhood friend belonged to the beginning of my story. My sponsor belonged to the hard work of trying to write a better middle. One knew me before I had much to confess. The other knew me when confession had become necessary. One reminded me of where I came from. The other helped me think about where I might still go.
Both were gone while I was gone.
There is a special helplessness in that sentence. When you’re incarcerated, the world doesn’t stop in solidarity. Birthdays happen. Children grow. People fall in love, get sick, recover, move away, and die. The calendar keeps turning even when your own days feel indistinguishable. You can lose time, and you can lose the chance to do something with the time you had.
I have spent plenty of energy thinking about what was done to me, what I did, what was fair, and what wasn’t. Some of those questions matter, and I am not pretending they don’t. But death has a way of rearranging the furniture in a man’s mind. Suddenly the argument you wanted to win seems less urgent than the call you failed to make. The grievance you rehearsed all night competes with the memory of somebody who once sat beside you and asked how you were really doing.
I don’t want to turn either of these men into a prop for my redemption story. They had lives of their own, people who loved them, joys and disappointments I could never fully know. Their deaths were not arranged to teach me a lesson. They were human beings, not illustrations. The lessons are what I must choose to learn in the aftermath.
And one lesson is simple: say the good thing while the person is still here. Tell your friend he’s a great man. Thank the sponsor who answers the phone. Make the call. Don’t wait for a perfect moment, because perfect moments are notoriously unreliable. They tend to arrive wearing ordinary clothes, on an ordinary Tuesday, while you’re busy thinking about something else.
Another lesson is that gratitude and sorrow can occupy the same heart. I am sad that these men are gone. I am grateful that I knew them. I regret the conversations we won’t have. I treasure the ones we did. None of those feelings cancels the others. Love doesn’t become less real because the ending hurts.
The dream remains a mystery to me. I don’t intend to solve it here. I know what I dreamed. I know what Billy told me when I called. I know that the news was four days old and new to me. And I know the comfort I felt in hearing those words: everything was going to be all right.
I think about that promise differently now. It doesn’t mean nothing painful will happen. Painful things already have. It doesn’t mean that every case will end the way I want, that every relationship will be restored, or that I will never make another mistake. I am perfectly capable of making mistakes without assistance from anyone. It means, to me, that despair doesn’t get the last word.
My faith tells me that death is not the end of the story, even when it feels like the end of a conversation. “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” Paul wrote. I have always loved that line. It gives me permission to believe without claiming that I can see the whole picture. Some things remain dark. Some questions remain unanswered. Sometimes the most honest prayer is simply, “Lord, I don’t understand.”
I don’t understand why I dreamed of my friend when I did. I don’t understand why the news of these two deaths reached me in confinement. I do understand that their lives mattered. I understand that I was blessed to know them. And I understand that the best tribute I can offer is not a perfect paragraph about them, but a life that carries something good forward from each friendship.
From my childhood friend, I want to carry warmth, loyalty, and the memory of a man who appeared when I least expected him and spoke words of peace. From my sponsor, I want to carry the courage to be honest, the humility to ask for help, and the willingness to offer that help when somebody else needs it. If I can do those things imperfectly but sincerely, their influence continues in the world.
This is the tenth Captain’s Log, and the last one for a little while. That seems like a good place to stop—not because the story is finished, but because sometimes you need to sit quietly with what has already been said. I’ve written about confinement, fear, faith, absurdity, and the strange education a jailhouse can provide. Today I wanted to write about two men who were more than a chapter in my story.
To the friend who knew me when we were boys: you were a great man. Thank you for the years, the memories, and the words I heard in a dream. To the sponsor who walked beside me through so much of adulthood: thank you for the time, the patience, and the example. I didn’t always get it right. I’m still trying.
If there is a final word for this installment, let it be gratitude. Not the cheerful kind that pretends nothing hurts. The harder kind that looks loss in the face and says, even so, I was fortunate to love these people.
Everything is going to be all right. I don’t know exactly what that means yet. But I am trying to live as though hope is worth trusting.
JC
