I'm listening to an old Studs Terkel interview on Speaking of Faith and they read from his book on death called Will the Circle Be Unbroken? This excerpt is from Delbert Tibbs, a former death row inmate that was released after two years due to lack of evidence.
When I meet people now,
if they try to make a big deal about me having been on death row, I
sometimes gently remind them that we're all on death row. The
difference is that here the state's going to do it, and at some point
you're going to know the date and the hour, but that's the only
difference.
I believe life is endless. We can't talk about life
without talking about death. We can't talk about death without talking
about life. I was listening to the Dalai Lama. I read his
autobiography, and he says that Buddhists often meditate on death.
That's total anathema to the Western mind, right? I think it has
something to do with Greek culture, with its bifurcation of existence —
this is life and this is death. I learned to meditate before I went to
death row. That's one of the things that helped me get through, but it
was very difficult.
What I've discovered is all of the holy books are
marvelous, absolutely so, including the Bible. The Bible has the most
beautiful language of any book I've ever read, not to mention the fact
that there's something there. God is there. But I really do believe
he's hidden. I believe the Jewish mystics who went into the kabbalah
know that. The Bhagavad Gita is the Bible to 300 million
Indians and others who are not Indians. Thoreau and Emerson read it.
Krishna says there never was a time when you and I did not exist, and
there will never be a time when we cease to be. He said, "This body
wears out, like garments, and when a garment wears out, you take it off
and you lay it down and you pick up another one and put it on."
One of the terrible things about executions is to jump
people off into the universe like that. I think for a soul to be
wrenched from the body is for the soul to be in anger and in pain and
in hatred. I believe it impacts negatively on our world, that probably
a lot of the calamities that happen are a result of that sort of thing.
I mourn for the whole world because it's such a horrible place so often.