Gary and I pushed to break free of our childhood and survived. Running from hell, we looked back and strained to reach for our brothers out-stretched hands and tried to pull them along with us but from the tips of out fingers they slipped away as they stumbled and fell. Gary and I, even with the help of our lifelong mentor, Louise Hagan, couldn’t lift them up again. We watched as Daniel and David tried to rise up and grab onto us only to fall repeatedly because the weight of the memories were too heavy to bear.
Our brother Daniel Alan Long and I, seven months before his body was found in a seedy part of town in Mexicali, Mexico. In this picture, he was fifty eight years old.
Our brother David Martin Long processed into the prison system. He was thirty-three-years old when he was sent to the Texas death row.
“As long as there are parents preparing children for little more than incarceration, we’ll have no trouble keeping our prisons full.”
From: “The Gift of Fear” by Gavin de Becker.
