Anne
As far as I remember, I have always had empathy fo those who suffer.
As a child, I wanted to become a nurse.
Little by little, we discovered each other's pasts and we realised both of us went through traumatizing experiences.
We have opened our hearts to each other and he is my truest friend, my confident
and my guardian angel.
I grew up in an environment where my life did not matter to anyone, including my family. Not because I was a troubled child but because I am the son of a rapist.
When I shared my past, Anne's reply made me cry throughout her whole letter. The compassion and understanding she conveyed made me cry like a baby. Somebody finally understood!
Ker'y
Ker'y
A man raped my mother and two children were born, me and my twin sister. What I did learn as an adult was that the man my mother was married to, told her to keep my sister but put me up for adoption. When she refused, they fought constantly and they finally divorced. My mother told me once that the only reason why she refused to put me up for adoption is because she never wanted to be haunted walking down the street and a little boy shout "Mamma!" and she'dturn wondering if it was ME.
Can you imagine how my heart felt to hear that the woman who carried me nine months made me understand she only kept me to keep her conscience from being haunted? So, from my birth, I have lived under the umbrella of unlove - rejection - and simply my life mattering to anyone. And this spilled over into failed relationships and one failed marriage. I valued relationships with females because of the fact hat I grew up unloved and rejected and I did not want anyone who was in my life to feel that pain but yet these relationships end up with females who did not believe in us or me.
At an early age, I came to know Christ as the true Messiah and accepted his sacrifices on the cross for the sins of all humanity. I was even told that when I was about three years old and barely able to talk, I used to come home from church every Sunday and say "When I get big, I'm gonna tell the people about God".
When I become older, I traveled throughout the United States doing what at age of three I said - "telling people about God".
I had overcome traumatic abuses from the time I was six years old into adulthood. Homelessness, sexual molestations at home and outside the home, physical and mental abuse from my mother, a gang rape and several suicide attemtps the death of my only child and the loss of my only best friend.
Only a God created me in "his image" could understand my life and help me survive all this and my heart showed me the glory of his power and how to stand to these powers attacking my life.
Well, in 2000 the unthinkable happened. My life had some kind of normality to it. I had a long career in the ministry and I started pastoring. I began the Life Of Love In Action (L.O.L.A) for spiritual and humanitarian empowerment while pastoring. But, on the same year, while in Houston, Texas pastoring, I found myself in trouble with the law that resulted to me be wrongfully convicted.
On 2011, I remember sitting up on my bunk crying and told the Lord, when he will let me meet somebody my life would matter to. That very night, I received several letters and each were new writers. Well, I picked up on a letter and went to tear it up. But before I could tear it up I heard the gentleness of the Lord's voice say "Do not throw it away". So I hid it under my mattress where it stayed for a month. One day I was looking for something I lost and saw that letter that I had forgotten. I opened and read it from some lady named Anne from France.
What matters to me, I matter to her. For years my birthday has never been celebrated. And now, Anne won't forget July 21st. I'm not on a death row inmate she is on a mission to save. God, for some reason, put a love in Anne's heart for me that still overwhelms me. She has suffered health issues and yet she makes me a priority. No matter where they travel Anne and her husband tell people about me.
I could never tell in words the closeness they are in my heart. I cry because my life has mattered to like this.And I came to death row and God puts this tiny French woman in my life to show me, it's okay, no matter what happens, I am not alone, nor will I be abandoned or forsaken. I matter to them and that's nothing but the truth.
Anne
When people ask me why I have been writing a death row inmate for some years now, my answer is: Because I HAD to.
I was a teacher all my working life and told my students about Human Rights and death row inmates. But my words, although they moved my students, were almost empty.
I have been a Human Rights activist since 1980 but I felt my commitment was too superficial. I could feel I needed to experience something different and, considering my age - I was 63 when I wrote Ker'y for the first time - there was no time to lose.
Don't ask me why I "chose" Ker'y among so many other death row inmates looking for pen pals. He did not "chose" me, he could not from where he was sitting! We now know it was the Lord who united our destinies.
It wasn't long before I told him I did not care whether he was guilty or innocent, religious or not, straight or gay. All this did not matter to me and still does not. What MATTERS is the human being, the person he really is and I know he is NOT the monster the State painted him as.
Little by little, we discovered each other's pasts and we realised both of us went through traumatizing experiences.
I told him once - and it made him smiled - that as a little girl, I asked Father Christmas to bring me a black baby doll and I got it!
Years later, my mother told me how difficult it had been to find a black baby doll, just some years after WWII, even in Paris!
I would not say Ker'y is my "black baby doll"! but he is my little Onyx brother.
We are worlds apart: he is a man, I am a woman; he is black, I am white; he is spiritual, I was not; we don't have the same culture, don't live in the same country, but we are so close to each other and what affects him, affects me even more deeply. We have opened our hearts to each other and he is my truest friend, my confident and my guardian angel.
When he feels lonely, depressed and on the verge to drop his appeals, I try to lift his spirit up. I believe in him, I believe in his innocence, I believe that, one day, I will be waiting for him outside the gates of a jail which he will leave as a FREE man.
Ker'y, my dear brother and truest friend, finds his resources and strength to survive, to keep fighting fro his life in his deep and pure faith in the Lord, but also because he knows we will never let him down as his famaily and supposedly friends did. We will always be by his side. We try to visit with him at least once a year and, let me tell you something which can sound like a minor detail but which is symbolicalof the brother-sister bond we share: the day before I go and see him, I ask my husband to do me a favor: "drive along the Unit to "feel" Kery's presence and I say, or rather shout:
"Ker'y we'll be together tomorroww morning at last!". The most touching moment is on the fourth and last day of our visits because we both know it will be the lastfour hours till our next journey to texas and when ker'y puts his hand on one side of the glass and I put mine on his hand on the other side, he starts praying and even singing soflty, we live the most moving and heart-breaking moment of these four days.
In a word, we want Ker'y TO LIVE and not to die, and he will always be the little borther I dreamt of as a child and I am both honored and grateful to him to be in his life.
THAT IS NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH.
