Death With Dignity: Coping With Loss In Prison With Dr. Danica Hubbard

 

For people behind bars, dying in prison may be the ultimate suffering anyone can experience. We are honored that Dr. Danica Hubbard is sharing her story with us for the first time about her journey and her father’s incarceration. Her bravery and vulnerability are admirable, and anyone who has or had an incarcerated loved one will relate to her story. She describes her father as a successful shapeshifter: a son, old-time radio singer, brother, husband, father, widow, divorcé, coach, corporate executive, boater, barbeque griller, marathon runner, convicted child molester, and an inmate who died alone in prison.

Hubbard shares what she learned and is writing a book based on her experience, too. She will also be co-facilitating support groups for people who lost a loved one in the prison system, as well as a group for families of sex offenders. For more information on support meetings: TheFFIP.org/calendar/.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Death With Dignity: Coping With Loss In Prison With Dr. Danica Hubbard

I’m here with Danica Hubbard, who’s an English professor, a mother, a wife and a daughter. Her father was convicted of a sexual offense when she was pregnant with her second daughter. This is a man she looked up to her whole life. He was her mentor. How could something like this happen? Danica is going to share with us what she went through, what she learned, and things that could have helped her back then that may be able to help some of you. Danica, we know that your father was incarcerated for a sexual offense. However, he was your father, a husband and a softball coach. He was active in the community and he was a city councilman. He was a corporate executive all prior to his incarceration. Can you tell us what your family was like growing up? Could you talk a little bit more about your relationship with your father?

Thank you for having me to the show, Julia, and for everything that you’re doing in Prison: The Hidden Sentence. It means a lot to the community that you’re building. I have to say full disclosure, this is the first time that I have spoken publicly about my father. Certainly, there was press coverage during the time that this all was happening back in the late 1990s. My father is deceased, so I’m starting to find my public voice to talk about his felony offenses and the fact that he was a sex offender.

That’s the hidden sentence because we don’t talk about it. What we’re trying to do here is to be able to talk about it with no stigma and shame.

I appreciate that because exchanging dialogue is critical in the healing process and it is a lifelong healing process. To tell you about our family, we were a small family. I’m an only child and I was born in the late ‘60s and was a child of the ‘70s, so there’s a lot of freedom. We were usually in the neighborhood running around and my father or mother would say, “Come home when the lights come on.” We were riding our bikes and playing ding dong ditch and kick the can, and all the fun things that you do when you’re kids. I had an idyllic childhood.

I wouldn’t go too far as to say it was Norman Rockwell, but it was a pleasant childhood. My mother was a full-time teacher in the Chicago Public School District and gravitated toward areas that needed the most assistance. She usually worked with lower-level literacy students and trying to build up their academic skillset for credentialing, certificates, degrees, but she definitely gravitated toward a population that needed the most assistance, so she was a role model in my life. My father traveled a lot, both domestically and internationally. He was climbing the proverbial corporate ladder.

We moved a lot when I was younger because I was told it was another promotion as he moved up through the ranks of sales and marketing. He was a presenter. I could hear him on Sunday nights when he would go off to his home office practicing his presentations and his sales pitches. I saw all sorts of bar charts and graphs and different proposals scattered all over our kitchen table as he would prepare for a meeting, a sales call, a workshop or a conference. I grew up with that template of organization, goal setting and achieving.

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Part of the extrinsic motivators in our household was always something to build toward. My mother earned her Master’s degree alongside me in high school, so she went back to graduate school. While I was studying Algebra, she was studying Inferential Statistics for graduate school. A big anchor in our home was the value of education and the aspirations to reach for the stars, but maybe grab the moon along the way. In my mind, it was positive childhood and reward-based, “Make sure that you apply here, check out this internship or try out for this team.” That was all much conversation at our kitchen table.

They sound motivating. It sounds like they lead by example. What was the relationship like with your father? You said he was your mentor and somebody that you looked up to growing up.

I was close with my father. I remember talking with him after he would come back from business trips. In particular, he traveled a lot to Taiwan. In those days, of course, it was before cell phones and all the advanced technology we have now. I remember, in particular, he brought me back a waterproof yellow Walkman. I was the talk of my school. He had gotten it on one of his business trips from this mysterious place, and that was all intriguing to me. The adventures of travel, language, and culture, he brought all of that home, which then had a big influence and impact on my desire to travel and to embrace different cultures and different ways of life.

He was comfortable being a chameleon in that arena. Before, there was a Take Your Daughter To Work Day. Officially, he would take me to work. I remember vividly that he was a name-person. What I mean by that is he knew everyone’s name from the president to the janitor and everyone in between. He treated each person with dignity and respect. His greetings and salutations were no different. Depending on who he was talking to, it was always the same type of vivacious greeting to people. I drafted off of that and I took that to heart that when you’re communicating with another human being, you should be looking them in the eye, paying attention, and giving them your full concentration.

I watched him do that over and over again. He was a mentor in that sense, and then physically, he was unstoppable. He started running marathons when I was in junior high school. I haven’t catalogued all of the marathons he’s run, but it was many marathons. One marathon in high school I remember going to, we took the train to Chicago. It was the Chicago Marathon. Of course, if you’ve ever watched a marathon or participated in a marathon, there could be thousands of people participating and spectators. My mother was nervous. This was the first time that she watched him run a marathon with myself included. Of course, you lose track of the marathon runner quickly.

After the start, I remember her pulling a police officer aside and saying, “Have you seen a man in blue shorts?” She was looking for my father. He did that. He would go out and run early, 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning for 2, 3, 4 hours and then come home. Everything was controlled and organized. He would have a banana and an empty bowl to fill up the cereal as soon as he got home. He would lay out his running attire before he left. It was all well-organized. He felt a certain satisfaction in that organization and it gave him a sense of pride. He would have these lists that he would keep on yellow legal pads and he would check off what he accomplished during that day. That was much a part of his daily routine.

 

It seems like he was such a role model. How did he have time to coach the softball team you were on?

That was a park district softball league, and I don’t know how he did it because he was traveling quite a bit with his marketing and sales positions selling office supplies. I remember we would have games sometimes in the park district twice a week. They would be during the week on a Tuesday or Thursday night, and then sometimes, we’d have games on the weekends. I know that he had an assistant coach as well, so that job didn’t fall solely on his shoulders.

He was there for a majority of the practices and the games. When we won a game, which we had some strong players, heavy hitters for home runs, he would take the entire team out to Baskin-Robbins. Of course, when you’re 12, 13, 14 years old, the best part of a softball game is the ice cream at the end. He was that guy and beloved by my teammates and my friends growing up and overall, an every man. He was comfortable in almost any situation. He can walk into a room and start shaking hands and start a conversation.

How did he support you going forward? You became an English professor, so you’ve taken quite a few classes. Through your teenage and your twenties, how did he support you there?

It was more of my mother. She died when she was 49 of cancer. I was 22 years old, so I just graduated from college. I was working in a marketing and sales job that he helped me get because it was the recession and things were tough. I did end up getting the job. It was an entry-level right out of college job, but it got me started. I remember it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I was 22, so I don’t know what my expectations were exactly, but I did not like it. I was embarrassed because my dad helped me to get the job but I wasn’t a good fit. I tried that for about 1.5 years. I remember telling him, “This isn’t something I want to pursue.”

Long story short, the position that my mom held for over 30 years as a teacher was what I felt most comfortable in and gravitated towards. He was proud and said, “You’re following in your mother’s footsteps. This is exactly where you should be.” That extrinsic motivation was there in terms of graduating with my Master’s degree in Creative Writing. He said, “Congratulations. I am so proud of you. When are you going to get your PhD? You reach that height but can you go higher? Is there another mountain to climb? Is there another goal to put on your list?” I responded to that. Not only as an only child but as an ambitious, energetic young person doing more, running harder and doing things mentally, physically, emotionally. He was proud as a father.

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Moving on when you got married and had your first child, he was there with you.

He was. He had gotten remarried and he briefly met my daughter as an infant, but then things quickly fell apart after that in terms of his conviction. She never knew him because she was an infant.

Let’s talk about your dad now as far as his arrest. How did you find out about his arrest?

We lived in two separate states, but we were in the Midwest. It was close together. He had remarried, so we visited one another quite often. He lived in a resort community. We would go up and go boating, hiking, and swimming, and then he would come and visit us. It was like any other weekend where he would come and visit us. It was he and my stepmother, but I remember them getting out of the car after a long drive and something was off with both of them, not just my father. I chalked it up to maybe it was a lot of traffic that day or maybe he wasn’t feeling well, but they were acting strangely. I had a bad feeling about it. Later that evening, I had put the baby to bed and things were calm. He said, “I need to talk with you.” I thought, “Okay.” We’ve been through a lot previous with my mom’s cancer. It was aggressive and she passed within a year of the diagnosis. He had gone through a lot since she passed in terms of moving, getting remarried, and starting his own business. I thought of anything under the sun that he could have said like, “I’m bankrupt. I’m getting a divorce. I have cancer.” All the things were running through my mind.

I wish that at this point, in retrospect, it was any of those things, except for the thing that came out of his mouth, which I had absolutely no idea he was going to confess. If he were anything but a sexual predator, anything but a pedophile, in my mind, it would have been better, which sounds horrible. As a daughter, it was difficult to hear that he was hurting children because that’s not who I thought he was. I had a daughter at that time and all I could think of was him hurting an innocent life, and that is horrifying.

In a way, it’s good that you did hear it from him and not on the news or from somebody else. That was the kind of person that you told us about and you explained that he was. It only seems like he would do that and he would be that kind of person that would come up and tell you himself something horrible that he did. That shows what kind of man he was, even though it’s this thing that’s unthinkable that we can’t even imagine. Especially somebody that we looked up to our whole life, we’re like, “If I was wrong about this person, what else was I wrong about?” It makes you question everything. I do give him credit for taking that step and telling you himself. After he told you about it, did you tell anybody? Were you able to talk about it to anybody or did you keep it to yourself?

 

My husband knew of course. He was there. I locked it away for over twenty years, a long time. That is part of the hidden sentence that you write about. I refer to it as shrapnel. He had this bomb that he set off and now we’re all walking around with the shrapnel, and there’s no way to surgically remove it. It becomes part of your body, but in that shrapnel, it becomes toxic and painful. It can fester, blister and become infected at different times, depending on what’s happening in your life. This is the first time publicly I’ve talked about it. Although it’s therapeutic in a way, it’s also painful.

My friends who know now that he’s deceased because they attended the funeral mass where it came out that he was a pedophile. That’s another story, but they always had the same question, “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you share this pain? I’ve been your friend since childhood. I was at your wedding or I’m your close coworker.” It’s not something that you bring up even in the most intimate friendship. I am talking about it publicly. I don’t know if people whose loved ones are murderers or bank robbers or drug dealers, do they talk about it or is this a niche-specific to sexual offenders?

In 1999, when my father was convicted, there were no support groups for families of sexual offenders. In fact, in 2021, this is the first time that I’m working with you and Prison: The Hidden Sentence that I know, and I’m aware of a group to talk about this particular subject. Through my years of research on sexual offenders, there are certainly victims’ groups, as there should be, to talk about being the victim of a sexual offense, but there are no families of the perpetrator groups. I hope that we can work to facilitate that and make it a safe place to dialogue, talk about, and excavate what the families are going through because the shrapnel is still there for those families. Certainly, it is for the victims. It affects everyone in the orbit of that sexual offender.

I don’t think it matters what a loved one is incarcerated for. For most of the families that I’ve spoken to, there’s always that shame and guilt. Sometimes people talk about it and sometimes they don’t. A lot of people who have their loved ones’ offense on the news don’t have that luxury, so it’s right in their face. People who are in a situation where the loved one is in another state or they don’t have to tell anybody, a lot of us keep it inside. That’s why these conversations are important. We need to be able to talk about it because we’re on the outside and we’re affected.

It’s a different kind of victim because you’re victimized by whatever your loved one is going through or convicted of. Whether they’re guilty or not, they’re still seen as guilty because they’ve been convicted and people look at the family members like they had something to do with it. We don’t have any control over somebody else. We’re in as big a shock as other people a lot of times when we find out. I know that you’ve learned a lot in the years that you’ve been going through this. I want to step back. You said that you didn’t visit your father when he was incarcerated. You spoke to him a lot and wrote letters. How is your communication?

We have two daughters, so we were protective of what they heard or what their friends would hear in the neighborhood or at school, and we were cognizant of their welfare, we made the decision that no phone calls would be made or exchanged back and forth. My father never had a cell phone or a home phone or any information to that effect, but we did visit him usually once a season. I know that sounds terrible, but it was about a 4.5-hour drive one way. We would go up a couple of times for fall because we were trying to make a holiday visit as well, and then winter, spring and a couple of times for summer. It was more than once a season, but it certainly wasn’t weekly or monthly. I worked full-time and my husband works full-time, and we had two active daughters.

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When we did drive, it was my husband and me, we would have to make up a story for my daughters and they would need childcare for at least 10 to 12 hours that day. By the time we got to the facility, there was a three-hour visit and we would stay all three hours because we drove longer than that. After that three-hour visit, we’d get right back into the car and then drive back. It was usually a twelve-hour affair and it wasn’t a twelve-hour entertainment day. It was draining emotionally, physically, psychologically day, just prepping to get there. I’m sure that many of the people who read these or maybe within the groups that I’ll eventually hopefully be talking with are aware of what to wear and what to bring to prison.

I didn’t have any of those things available, which is why your book is so important. There wasn’t a pamphlet or a manual or a podcast to log on to in 1999. I remember when we first drove, I made chocolate chip cookies. I didn’t have a bag of coins for the vending machine. I didn’t know what I was doing, so it’s helpful. This is universal. No one is immune to the feelings that you have when you visit a loved one in prison. It doesn’t matter what your race or ethnicity or religion is. We all have the same feeling of sadness, shame, and anxiety. I don’t know of a person who wouldn’t feel that walking through the gates and the metal detectors and being called out by the corrections officers. It’s jarring, some would say a revolting feeling as if you are also the secondary carrier of the inmate that you’re going to visit.

You explain it well. That’s exactly how I felt, helpless. There’s always hope. How many years did you do that for him?

About thirteen years before he was transferred to the prison hospice and he died in the maximum-security prison hospice. He was only there for a few weeks before he died. My two daughters grew up not knowing that we were doing this and every time we came back, it was some sort of story of where we were and that was another layer of shame as a mother. I’m not going to use the word lie because it doesn’t fit with the reality of the situation, which was I would do anything for our two daughters to know that they were safe and well-cared for. In my opinion, inserting their grandfather, a convicted pedophile, into the mix was not part of the equation.

You’re being protective. Do they know now?

Yes, they know now. I had a PO box where his letters would go, and I went to great lengths so they would not know about their grandfather. I would go and drive about two miles from our home and pick up his letters from the P.O. box, read them in my car, put them in my purse, and then store them in our attic in this enormous bin because it was thirteen years of letters back and forth, and I saved every single one. Something happened and I got distracted. I put his letter down to go up to the attic and my daughter in high school found the letter. He died not too long after that, but that was a conversation that I had been dreading their entire life, both her and my other daughter.

 

How did it go? Whatever you want to share. I know that must have been tough.

It was dramatic and emotional. As a teenager too there’s a lot that I was trying to be consciously aware of in terms of trust. We would always talk about trust with curfew and like, “Don’t drink anything. If you go to a party and there’s a substance that you’re not aware of, you can always call me.” We had an open line of communication and we still do, but that line was shut off. That was an inversion of our relationship. It was upside-down, chaotic and messy, “What are you talking about? This is a man that you’ve never spoken about or I’ve never seen pictures of.” It was a long process of many discussions. Out of those, now that they’re older and they’re starting to read manuscripts of my book that I’m writing, they’re respectful of the decision we made as parents not to involve them in this dark part of our lives.

I want to talk about your book, but I want to go back to when your father did pass because I got a call when my brother passed. I was in touch with the prison. I knew that he was terminal and they did call me, but there are so many people that I’ve spoken to who have lost loved ones that were incarcerated and they didn’t know right away. They didn’t get a call or they found out from another inmate or different ways. How did you find out?

He had suffered several health issues along the way because he was an elderly inmate. That was difficult too because at one point, he was having a splenectomy because he was diagnosed with slower-growing cancer, lymphoma. As you know, there’s a high-risk situation and there’s classified information in terms of movement in and out of having a surgical procedure or recovery. I said, “Is there anything I can sign so you can open the record, so at least I can talk to the nursing staff or a physician?” Finally, he did sign that and it was more of a procedural afterthought. It wasn’t like he was trying not to disclose his medical information.

Sometimes in prison, it’s difficult to navigate the layers of bureaucracy or who can do what and when. It took a long time for him to figure that out. As an outsider, even though I’m educated and I certainly know how to research and do these types of critical analysis and activity, I’m new to the venue and the dialect of prison. I’m learning it and I’m assimilating to the discourse of prison talk and vocabulary, but I wasn’t for a long time. I did end up signing this medical waiver to talk with me, but even then, it wasn’t quite clear. It’s not like it had a phone number or a website or any type of contact information even on the waiver. If you have a question, call.

There was a labyrinth of phone numbers and I would get disconnected, or the person wasn’t available or whatever it was to speak to someone in the HSU, Health Services Unit. It wasn’t consistent either in my experience. It wasn’t like you were talking to the same nurse every single time. They work in shifts, people get sick, and all sorts of things happen. I compare it to when my mother got sick, it was such a completely different atmosphere and support system. We had scaffolding of meals on wheels, prayer circles, hospice care and nurses coming into our home. My mom would have a folder with her chemotherapy appointments.

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In prison, this was magnified in terms of the anxiety of, “He just had surgery. Does he have an ice pack? Is there Tylenol? Can he go to the bathroom? What if he gets diarrhea on the sheets? I’ve seen all this with my mother. Who’s cleaning up his messes? I’ve heard her moan and groan after chemo. I’ve watched clumps of her hair come out. Who’s helping my father? He’s in a cell.” That part for families, especially when someone has preexisting conditions or elder care in prison. We’re in a global pandemic. What are families doing with their loved ones?

To answer your question, the nurse from the minimum-security facility where he had been for thirteen years called me. It was about a three-minute phone call. It was 8:00 in the morning and my cell phone rang. It said something like a toll-free number, so I didn’t even know it was from the prison and how they got my number. I have no idea, maybe I put it on the form. She immediately identified herself and said, “I’m going to hold the phone for your father. He’s weak. He’s going to be moved to the infirmary.” In my father’s letters, we exchanged these 500 letters, he would write constantly, “Do not send me to Dodge.” Dodge is in Wisconsin and that’s the prison hospice program. That’s where inmates go to die. He said, “Please don’t send me to Dodge. I don’t want to go to Dodge.”

I remember our conversation vividly because I’m an English professor and I wrote it down. He said 20 words, and the 20 words were completely nondescript. He’s like, “I love you. Sorry. I don’t know when I’m going to talk to you again. I left you something but it’s not much,” and that was it. The nurse came back on and said, “We have to go.” I had never been to the maximum-security prison, then it all starts over again. No one is sending you information as to, “Here’s the map of where to go. Here are the visiting hours.” They are different than it is in the minimum-security prison.

You have to have different security clearance to get to the maximum-security prison. All of those questions again arose, and I wasn’t prepared for them. I figured it out after several phone calls and back and forth. I was able to talk to the nursing staff but in my particular situation, and this could be anyone, but life gets in the way. You’re out of state and you’re trying to be a lifeline for your dying parent or brother or sister or daughter or whomever it is. I’m a full-time professor and I work on our global education program. At the time, we were hosting two faculty members from Xi’an International University in China. This was the same period that my father was dying.

These two faculty members were living in our house from China. It was my job as part of this program to introduce them to the curriculum and the administration, take them to the Opera House and the Arboretum. They wanted to go to the shopping mall. They had never been to the United States before, but my father was dying. There’s no time that’s a good time to die, but this was a bad time. I was trying to manage the situation. I was still working and still talking to the nursing staff, “How’s he doing today?” This went on day after day. I said, “I’m going to get there. I’m making plans to get there. I just can’t get there right this moment, but I’m going to make plans to get a substitute for my classes so I can stay overnight,” because it was a longer drive to the maximum-security prison.

The nurses assured me that he has time. He stopped eating but he’s still a little lucid. He’s sleeping most of the day. We’re trying to make him comfortable. By the way, I still had to file paperwork to get there. It wasn’t like I could just walk in, so that was another layer of it. I called my cousin who’s a Catholic priest, and we’re Roman Catholics, I said, “My father is dying. He’s in the infirmary. Could you please go and at least administer last rites?” He’s a devout Catholic and I know he would like that. I don’t know anything about their chaplain or what the situation is in terms of being with some religious person.

 

He did drive there with my other cousin and they got lost. I write about it in the book. They both have hip replacements. At the time, they didn’t have their hip replacement card that you would bring to the airport when the metal detector goes off. Here’s my cousin, a priest, and he keeps setting the metal detector off with his hip. He wanted to bring in what they bring in to the last rites, which are the holy water, holy oil and Bible. They said, “You can’t bring this oil in. This is a maximum-security prison.” My cousin dumps the oil out into his hands, and then rubbed it and said, “This is what I’m bringing in anyway.”

They were late, so they initially had turned them away. My cousin said something, “He’s dying. I’m a priest.” They were there the night before he died. I’ve interviewed them since then to get as much accurate information as I could based on their narrative about what transpired during those last hours with my father. They said, “You were there when your mother died. Your father was non-communicative and chained to the bed. You’ve already been through this once.”

It would be difficult to see a loved one in chains and shackles. It’s wonderful that he could have the last rites done.

He was there. Even then when they were describing it, the nurses and the medical staff were compassionate with my father, but there were still corrections officers in the room. You don’t have a sense of privacy. My cousin said, “He is on morphine. It is impossible for him to escape at this point. Can I lay my hands on him? Can I hold his hands?” That was not allowed. The corrections officer, based on protocol, because I am a big advocate of our policemen and women, and they are put in harm’s way constantly. I appreciate and respect the police force. In this situation, it was difficult to have a private moment even when you’re dying. That spoke volumes because it’s such an unforgettable time, a benchmark, a memory. If you’re there when your loved one dies, it’s seared into your heart. There’s nothing like it. I take great comfort and thanks to my cousins, the priest, and then his sister, my other cousin, who were there because they kept repeating, “It’s not a place that you would want in your memory bank.”

You can have better memories of him. One of the things that you said was that you wondered who was taking care of him. In a lot of situations, the inmates help each other. Especially for geriatric inmates and people that go into hospice, there are groups of inmates that do take care of the elderly and people in hospice. I would imagine that he would have had that, too. I wanted to tell anybody that’s reading some things that you had that are important. We tell everybody in every meeting that when your loved ones are incarcerated, you need a power of attorney and you need the HIPAA form. They can get these for you and you need approval for them to share information.

Every facility, every state is different, so you need to know what’s needed for that one. When you do get those forms, have them mail it to you and make copies. Make sure they have a copy and you have a copy. That’s important. The last thing I want to say about that is that everybody has the right to call the prison to get information. You can call the warden or the assistant warden. When my brother was incarcerated, I spoke with the assistant warden and he’s the one that called me to tell me when my brother had passed. I didn’t get to see him. He passed before I got to go back. I’m saying that because in both our cases, maybe it was better that we saw them before that last time.

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I’ve just seen him that summer and he died in October. It was a seasonal thing so we had another visit planned, but he kept saying, “You’re hosting these faculty from China. You’re going to be busy just coordinating that.” I said, “No, I can come there before they come in October.” He said, “No, I’m getting some procedures done.” By the time he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, he had all these other health problems. He was 77 years old. He had a hernia operation in prison. He had his spleen removed in prison. He had MRSA, a bacterial infection in prison. You name it. This had been going on for over a decade and usually, it would be on-site, the Health Services Unit, and then also it would be off-site, the affiliated hospital.

This was a whole new level with acute myeloid leukemia. It was aggressive or maybe there has been a period of time when the first cancer was diagnosed to this cancer. By the time they realized what was happening, I remember the nurse distinctly, before he went to the infirmary which is where he passed, saying, “He can’t be in the general population anymore here at the minimum-security prison because he is at risk of infection. He is immobile. He can’t move around to go to the chow hall and all of these things. He needs 24/7 care.” Those were the identifying factors to then move him to the prison hospice, but in my research, there are few prison hospices in the country. There are only about 75 state prison hospices.

In Wisconsin, they have one of the leading prison hospices in the county. In that facility in Wisconsin, it’s called Prison City because there are about four prisons within that vicinity. They know what they’re doing in terms of taking good, compassionate care of inmates. I will say that there’s something important about dying with dignity. The nuances of a nurse calling me and saying, “Although he hasn’t eaten, he did have chicken broth today. We gave him a Sprite with a bendable straw so it would be easier for him to sip it. He liked it so much, Danica, that he asked for a second Sprite, and it’s okay. We gave him another one.” Those are the things that you want to hear to comfort your loved one because with my mother, I bought peppermint oil and I rubbed her feet. We sang songs. We had songs going constantly. We read Bible verses. That’s not the same when your loved one dies in prison. It’s completely different.

With your father was telling you to take care of the faculty, he was concerned about you until the end. When he said, “Take care of the other faculty that’s staying with you. Take care of what you need to do.” He was looking out for you to the end. People don’t realize that when somebody is incarcerated, in their own way, they’re still looking out for you. You still have the 500 letters and you’re writing a book with that. What made you decide to tell this story?

When you have a period of time, in my case, after your loved one dies, to sit in the pain for a while. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross talks about the five stages of grief. Acceptance of death takes a long time. What brought it on is we’re moving and in moving, of course, you start to purge things and reevaluate what’s important, what you need, and what can fit into this new home. I came across the letters in the attic and it was in the middle of the global pandemic. I thought, “Do I just keep them in the box?” They weren’t sorted and they were chaotic.

My husband said, and he’s an organizer too, “Let’s organize them. We can rubber band them by dates. It will be fun.” Of course, we can’t go anywhere. We took each letter and painstakingly organized them because they were 500 of them, and catalogued them by dates. Once you start to do that, I’m an English teacher, I’ve got to start reading them. You put certain things in your rearview mirror purposely, and then other things are right there at the surface. It was this collision of all those things when I started to read the letters because I truly had forgotten how many medical issues he suffered with.

 

I write an annual Christmas letter. Since the girls were born, I’ve archived all of those so they can see the snapshots of their lives. In one Christmas letter in particular, it was every Christmas, but this one, he spotlighted, he wrote in one of his letters, “I loved your Christmas letter. I enjoyed all the girls’ activities. You’re going on vacation. It sounds like you’re leading a wonderful life, but you didn’t mention me in your Christmas letter.” At this point, he had already been in prison for at least seven years, if not more. Those moments, those peaks and valleys in his letters, I started to content-analyze and look at patterns of his letters.

It’s fascinating the arc and what happens, and being in his mind of what’s going on in his life where he’s standing. As these chapters have evolved and developed, I tried to organize these 500 letters into the chapters of what’s it like when you’re a character? You write a character reference. What’s it like when you visit the prison for the first time? From his perspective, what does the food taste like? What was constant was freedom. The idea of maybe someday, hopefully, being free, and that was in a lot of his letters. That to me was so poignant because intellectually, he knew he was in for 30 years for breaking parole that he wouldn’t get out until he was 97.

Intellectually, logically, you would realize, “I’m going to die behind bars,” but emotionally, psychologically, there has to be hope. There has to be some form of positivity, and that was the hope of walking out again. He was a runner and he still was a runner in prison. They used to call him Old-style because he was the oldest man there. He would inspire others to start running because they would see him running around the track at 77 years old. He became a tutor for the first time in prison. He was helping students to read and exposing them to literature and vocabulary. There are good things that happen while people are incarcerated, but make no mistake, it is hell and awful.

It’s what you do with it because a lot of people are going to come home. Your dad didn’t and my brother didn’t, but a lot of people are. They can spend that time sitting around, not doing anything, causing trouble, complaining, or they can read and they can look at self-betterment and what they want to do when they get out. We say that the day that somebody goes in, they need to start planning for their release for when they come out. Even though he probably wasn’t because of his age, he still had that hope. When you have hope, that keeps you going, and that motivated him to help other people. That was the kind of person he was. No matter what somebody does, they’re still a person and he still wanted to do things.

He was doing things, so all the things that he was able to accomplish while he was in there are good, even though it is not a nice place. You said that you wish you had information. My book, Prison: The Hidden Sentence, does provide a lot of information to people so that they can get that information. I know that you’re still looking at the perfect title for your book. I did get to read a little bit of it. Danica is an awesome writer of course because she’s an English professor. It drew me in right away. As soon as that book is published, we will put it on the website. You shared so much. The way I like to close the show is, is there anything that you learned that you could share with people out here that could help them? Anything that you wish you knew back then?

Relationships are so important. Looking back, I have no regrets about visiting my father and writing him letters. Although at times, it was scary because of our daughters and the situation that I wanted to protect them. For example, during one October when he was particularly low in his spirits, I sent him 31 Halloween cards and he talked about that for a long time. If your loved one unfortunately is incarcerated, I would move mountains to try to communicate with them because it does elevate their spirit and purpose of living. It gives them something to think about and talk about if you’re comfortable.

I sent him pictures of mountains, nature and sunsets, not to make him feel sad, but to try to have a mini-vacation in his mind, an escape from the sights, sounds, and smells of prison. Every inmate has a life before prison. They are human beings and they did have a childhood of some sort, so they do have these memories. What I would say too is if you find your loved one struggling, and this is probably from an English professor standpoint, but I gave my dad an assignment to write about his life. He did that over the course of one summer and that will be in my book, the installments of his life. He found that activity peaceful, writing about that and journaling almost about that.

I would say to not only communicate with your loved one but also check in with yourself. If journaling is something that offers you peace of mind or even if you journal and you don’t keep it, you can crumple it up and recycle it or burn it or give it to someone else. Getting that communication out in some way, shape, or form is healthy because the families of inmates suffer as much as the inmates themselves. If you can exercise or talk about it or light a candle or listen to some music, don’t feel guilty if you do those things and you practice extra self-care. I did not and I would beat myself up about the number of visits and the number of letters. Even my father would say, “You’ve written me three letters this week.” It was always, “Are you okay?” That worry, that sense of, “It’s okay. You’re doing enough. You are enough. Your loved one appreciates that communication and that extra that you’re doing for them and your family.”

That’s wonderful advice and that’s true for anybody no matter what their loved one is incarcerated for, whether it’s in a jail or a prison or wherever they are. Find a support group meeting because there are people out there who understand what it’s like, whatever it is that you’re going through with your experience. Danica, I want to thank you for sharing and for being so vulnerable because I know it’s not something that you’ve spoken a lot about publicly. This is going to help many people, so thank you for taking the time to do this.

Thank you for having me and also, for reaching out to many people who need it. This is like a healing salve for them. Your voice matters tremendously. Thank you for your book and hopefully, I will join you on the shelf soon.

You will. We’re doing it one story at a time raising awareness and removing the stigma and shame so everybody can talk about it, so thank you.

Thank you.

Important Links:

• Danica Hubbard – LinkedIn
• Prison: The Hidden Sentence
• https://TheFFIP.org/calendar/

About Dr. Danica Hubbard