Grace Before Dying: Interview with Photographer Lori Waselchuk

The cover of Ms. Waselchuck's upcoming book, Grace Before Dying

A life sentence in Louisiana means life. More than 85% of the 5,100 inmates imprisoned at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola are expected to die there. Until the hospice program was created in 1998, prisoners died mostly alone in the prison hospital. Their bodies were buried in shoddy boxes in numbered graves at the prison cemetery. But the nationally recognized program, run by one staff nurse and a team of inmate volunteers, has changed that. 

Now, when a terminally ill inmate is too sick to live among the general prison population, he is transferred to the hospice ward. Here, inmate volunteers work closely with hospital and security staff to care for the patient. The volunteers, most of whom are serving life sentences themselves, try to keep him as comfortable as possible. Then, during the last days of the patient's life, the hospice staff begins a 24-hour vigil. The volunteers go to great lengths to ensure that their fellow inmate does not die alone.

 The hospice volunteers' efforts to create a tone of reverence for the dying and the dead have touched the entire prison population. Prison officials say that the program has helped to transform one of the most violent prisons in the South into one of the least violent maximum-security institutions in the United States. The hospice volunteers must go through a difficult process to bury their own regrets and fears, and unearth their capacity to love. Grace Before Dying looks at how, through hospice, inmates assert and affirm their humanity in an environment designed to isolate and punish. Lori Waselchuk is a documentary photographer whose photographs have appeared in magazines and newspapers worldwide including Newsweek, LIFE, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times. She has produced photographs for several international aid organizations including CARE, the UN World Food Program, Médecins Sans Frontières, and The Vaccine Fund. -Grace Before Dying

Patrick McNally:  Ms. Waselchuk, thank you so much for sharing your moving work and your thoughts on The Daily Undertaker.  Your photos tell the story of the transformative effect that the hospice program at Angola Prison has had on dying prisoners and those involved in caring for them.  It’s difficult for me to think of a situation that on its face is more depressing, or one that is ultimately more uplifting, inspiring and life affirming.  Certainly we all have much to learn from this story about humanity and what we stand to gain by serving others.  What parts of this story were you most inspired and compelled to share with your photographs?

   

Lori Waselchuk: I am inspired by the journey these men have made. Most of the incarcerated hospice volunteers have lived very painful lives and have inflicted great pain on others. Their story shows me that we need not define ourselves by our worst acts. Their work in hospice isn’t about fixing the past, it is about the recognition that they can help others, even in an environment constructed to isolate and punish. I continue to be inspired by their ability to wrestle with their regrets as well as their fears in order to show great love and compassion for others.

PM: What kinds of challenges did you face in gaining access and building the trust necessary to create this project?   

LW: I was initially given access because I was commissioned to do a story about the hospice for Imagine Louisiana, a small magazine dedicated to covering philanthropy in Louisiana. Once published, I knew I wanted more time to tell a deeper story about the program. I asked for permission to continue photographing the hospice program.

The challenge was access, not trust. Access to work as a photographer in a prison depends on cooperation from security personnel and leadership. It also requires extra resources and time from those departments, so I am very grateful for each visit that the prison staff organized for me.

Trust is the most essential tool a journalist or documentary photographer can have. I am also grateful for the openness and generosity shown me from the volunteers and prison staff.

PM: We all die.  This can be something that unites us and offers us an opportunity to show compassion, providing an act of love that cannot be returned by the recipient, but that hopefully can be ‘paid forward’ so that we in turn are shown compassion in our last hours.  If involvement in this kind of care provides the prisoners with an opportunity to renew or regain a part of their humanity, can it also be said that those of us on the ‘outside’ for whom the care of the dead has been delegated to medical and quasi medical professionals, that for us there has been a loss of a part of our humanity?

LW:  In watching the Angola prison hospice volunteers sit with and care for their patients, I learned that their compassion not only benefits the patients, but also resonates throughout the prison. The Angola prison hospice volunteers work four-hour shifts to stay with a patient. I spent a lot of time just sitting with the dedicated volunteers. I became conscious of the beauty of simply sitting with another person, whether in conversation or silence. I felt awakened by that simple act – how it demonstrates love; and how that love comforts not just the dying man and his family, but the prison community at large. It was enormously powerful to witness. We truly need each other. Death connects all of us. And sometimes it can help us recognize our shared humanity.

PM: I imagine that the loss of ‘humanity’ that is experienced by prisoners has as much to do with the humiliations and degradations that are part of their punishment, and a mechanism to survive in a hostile and dangerous environment as it has to do with the antisocial nature of their crimes.  While I don’t propose that violent criminals should be allowed to roam free, not compelled to face the consequences of their actions, how can anyone benefit from the dehumanization of convicts? 

LW: I am not sure I can answer that question for anyone else but myself because we (as in mankind) are capable of wretched inhumanity towards others. I assume that people who are cruel towards others do so thinking there is some kind of benefit for themselves.

I don’t believe it is possible to benefit from the inhumane treatment of others, prisoners or otherwise. When I use the word ‘benefit’ I guess I mean a spiritual and/or communal benefit.

PM: As an artist who deals with issues of death and dying, what are your thoughts on the contribution that arts and ritual can make to the dying and to those of us left behind?

LW: I think the role of the artist is to observe, respond and communicate. We are storytellers and interpreters and can add critical feedback in social conversations. But most art seems  more difficult to access than advertising or religion. Artists will, nevertheless, always create. I will continue to look towards art to challenge my thinking and enrich my life. 

Travelling Exhibition with Quilts

For more information about Grace Before Dying, and Photographer, Lori Waselchuck, please visit

http://gracebeforedying.org/index.html

To Purchase Ms. Waselchuck's forhtcoming book, please visit 
http://www.umbragegallery.com/blog/currently-available/grace-before-dying

Memorial Quilts: Comforters of the Grieving

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/01/30/us/20070131_QUILT_SLIDESHOW_4.html

The AIDS quilt covers the Mall in Washington DC in 1996

In addition to their beauty, quilts are a tactile and emotional source of comfort. They have been used to commemorate life events such as marriages and friendships, and they are also used in death. In the 1990's they even took a turn at political protest, when the lovingly crafted quilts representing our friends and relatives who died from AIDS were assembled to demonstrate how much was being lost to the disease, and to wake the nation out of it's willful ignorance.

The quilters from Gee's Bend, Alabama helped us to see quilts in terms of fine arts, as these products of African and American craft traditions and personal innovation made the rounds of major modern art museums to wide acclaim. The Gee's Bend Quilts even showed up on US postage, and I wish now that I hadn't mailed all of mine.

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/artwork/the-quilts-of-gees-bend-014046

Quilt from the Gee's Bend Cooperative in Gee's Bend, Alabama

One of the signature signs of the Hospice movement that has spread across the United States (itself a part of the Palliative Care movement across the world) in the last decade has been the use of a quilt. After death, a hospice client is lovingly draped in a quilt (much like a pall), and are taken, with dignity and reverence, out the front door of the hospice facility in procession. This runs counter to my experience in most all other hospitals and nursing homes where the dead are shuffled out the back door so no one is reminded of the fact of death, or of the deceased person. In the case of Hospice, the quilt, (which often does not cover the face of the deceased), is a symbol of warmth and love for the deceased, and a reminder of the importance of the occasion.

http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/artwork/the-quilts-of-gees-bend-014046

Another beautiful Gee's Bend Quilt

Some of the nursing homes I visit have special quilts that the nurses and other caregivers sign like a cast or a friendship quilt. Often the deceased is tucked in with the quilt on their way to the funeral home, and the family receives it later.

http://www.shineonbrightly.com./index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=28

Memorial Quilt by Norma Bradley

Something new for me in the world of quilts and death, is the memorial quilt. This is a quilt made in the memory of the deceased, for the comfort of their survivors, and as a reminder of the life that was lived. The quilts shown in these last two photos are the work of textile artist Norma Bradley who makes these quilts to order for families in memory of their departed. The quilts may be ordered through Adrienne Crowther's Online Gallery, ShineOnBrightly.com along with other memorial items such as paintings, jewelry, glass and urns at http://www.shineonbrightly.com/..

http://www.shineonbrightly.com./index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19&Itemid=28

Another Bradley Memorial Quilt

For those of us who enjoy working with our hands, and are going through the grieving process- or have a friend who is going through it, this would make a fine project. I imagine it would be therapeutic, and a lasting comfort.

And at the End, All the Comforts of the Carlyle

10/27/2008
Even those of us who aren't socialites can learn a lot from this story from the New York Times. Spending your last days in a place where you feel alive and comfortable makes an enormous difference for the person dying and for their family. As a funeral director, I have heard many many times what a difference it made for a person to die in peace and dignity either at home or in an inpatient hospice facility. While $17,000.00 for a month at the Carlyle may seem expensive, spending your last days in a hospital would be more expensive and a lot less meaningful.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/nyregion/22carlyle.html?_r=2&scp=5&sq=memorial&st=cse&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

October 22, 2008
And at the End, All the Comforts of the Carlyle
By COREY KILGANNON
Marie-Dennett McDill loved the Carlyle Hotel. She stayed there whenever she was in New York, and adored the regular entertainers like Bobby Short and Eartha Kitt at the Café Carlyle, and the pianist Loston Harris in the lively Bemelmans Bar. She loved the uniformed elevator men and bellmen and the family of longtime staff. She loved that Central Park was only a short block away.
So when Mrs. McDill, who grew up in society in Washington and was enjoying an outdoors life in South Woodstock, Vt., learned she had terminal cancer this summer, her family immediately booked her a suite on the eighth floor for an open-ended stay, but one they sadly knew would not be open-ended enough.
“The family came to me and said, ‘We want to check her in till the very end,’ ” said Alexandra E. Tscherne, director of residences at the Carlyle. “It was a unique request, one I’ve never had previously. They wanted her set up in one of her favorite places, and they didn’t know how long it would last.”
It lasted 10 weeks. Mrs. McDill died in her sleep in the Carlyle last Wednesday.
Mrs. McDill was youthful and full of energy at 71 and spent her days outdoors gardening and painting, so it was shocking to her three children when she learned at the beginning of August that she had a fast-spreading cancer.
“It wasn’t a fight for life anymore, but a matter of time,” said her son Thomas Gardner.
The family hired 24-hour hospice care, but Mrs. McDill, at least until the very end, was in sufficient mental and physical shape to enjoy her final stay at the Carlyle. The hotel, at Madison Avenue and 76th Street, is one of New York’s most luxurious, with a long list of celebrities, presidents and royalty who have stayed or lived there.
Even as she was dying, she would take walks in Central Park in the daytime, and in the evening sit in a back booth in Bemelmans Bar, looking at the whimsical illustrations of New York City on the wall by the artist Ludwig Bemelmans, best known for the Madeline children’s books, and listening to Mr. Harris play. She loved Cole Porter, and she would pass requests to the waiter.
The family hired Mr. Harris to play Mrs. McDill’s favorite songs at her memorial service at St. Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue on Saturday. It was a sophisticated, poignant and kick-up-your-heels affair, almost like something out of a Cole Porter song. Mr. Harris played “Just One of Those Things” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
Month-to-month suites at the Carlyle are always expensive, but less so during the summer months, when they cost about $17,000 a month.
The family hired two attendants from Brooklyn to care for Mrs. McDill: Rose Marie Moore and her sister Shirley Innis. In the evenings, Ms. Moore would sing spirituals for Mrs. McDill.
“She would put her head back and close her eyes and ask me to sing ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.’ She’d say, ‘Give me the long version, Rose,’ ” said Ms. Moore, who took the subway from East New York to stay in the Carlyle with Mrs. McDill.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/nyregion/22carlyle.html?_r=2&scp=5&sq=memorial&st=cse&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Ms. Moore sang “Swing Low” again at the memorial service on Saturday, and family members recalled Mrs. McDill as hardly the demure society type, but more like a Katharine Hepburn character.
After the memorial service, some of her friends said they were rethinking their own send-offs.
“People came up to me and said, ‘We’re changing our plans for our funeral — we want it to be fun,” Thomas Gardner said. “The only sad thing was that Mom wanted to keep living.”
-from the New York times. for the full article, visit http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/22/nyregion/22carlyle.html?_r=2&scp=5&sq=memorial&st=cse&oref=slogin&oref=slogin