A friend works to have a dying painter remembered beyond his crime

What happened

The Marshall Project has published a first-person essay, “Preserving the Legacy of a Dying Friend Beyond His Crime”, about a man named Donald “Jack” Reitano. According to The Marshall Project’s summary of the essay, Reitano is dying of liver cancer. The writer calls him a friend and has taken on the work of keeping his memory alive as a painter and a peacemaker.

The Marshall Project’s headline says that memory should reach “beyond his crime,” and the outlet’s web address files the piece as a prison obituary. The summary published by The Marshall Project does not describe the crime, and this brief does not either.

We could not open the full essay before this brief went out. So anything else The Marshall Project may report, such as the facility, his sentence, his medical care or whether anyone has asked for his release, is left out here. The writer’s full account is at The Marshall Project.

Our reflection

A man is dying of liver cancer, and his friend is racing the clock with words. That is grief before the funeral. If you have sat with a dying friend, you know this ache. You start gathering the stories while the person can still correct you.

There is a second ache inside this one. Most men in prison are remembered for one sentence they never wrote. The headline asks us to see “beyond his crime,” and that phrase holds two truths we should not pull apart. There was a crime. Someone may still carry what it cost them, and any true remembering has to make room for that. There is also a painter, a man his friend calls a peacemaker. Both are real.

Luke tells the scene without softening it. One of the men crucified beside Jesus admits he is getting what his deeds deserve. He does not argue his case. He asks to be remembered. And Jesus, bleeding and close to death himself, answers with a promise about today and paradise. Jesus does not pretend the crime away. He remembers the man by where he is going.

That should search us. Most of us keep files on people. A coworker, an ex, a brother, a man on the news: we reduce them to the worst thing we know and shut the drawer, because that feels safer than hoping. Often what sits under it is fear that someone keeps a drawer like that on us. The cross takes away our right to keep those files, and the empty tomb takes away our need to. A Christ who walked out of a grave can make a painter and a peacemaker inside prison walls. He can also raise the numb, file-keeping part of us.

Dying behind bars raises practical questions that lawmakers and prison systems have to answer: whether a person near death can go home to family or to hospice, and, if not, what care and what company that person is allowed inside. Those are policy questions, and they are church questions too. Jesus said that visiting the sick and the imprisoned was visiting him (Matthew 25:36). A congregation can learn how its own state handles release for dying people, and its members can work through prison chaplains to show up on visiting days for people whose friends on the outside have stopped coming.

At We The Revolt we work at the other end of the same road: with young people inside juvenile detention and with young people coming home. Underneath it all is the same worry, that nobody will ever remember them for anything except a charge. We have seen young men answer that worry by coming home and leading. A friend who writes down who someone became is doing holy work.

This week, pray for Jack Reitano and the friend carrying his story. Then take one of the steps below and put your hands near someone the system has already written off.

And he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And he said to him, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise."

Luke 23:42-43

Source: The Marshall Project, “Preserving the Legacy of a Dying Friend Beyond His Crime”