Silent Solidarity: Mourning Our Losses remembers lives lost to COVID-19

On a Friday afternoon, an event dubbed Mourning Our Losses was held on San Quentin’s Lower Yard. It brought together about 200 people to pay tribute to the many lives lost during the COVID-19 outbreak.

The Nov. 5 event was supported by Mourning Our Losses co-founder https://twitter.com/kmpickeringKirsten Pickering and hosted by San Quentin resident Arthur Jackson. According to the organization’s website, Mourning Our Losses is a Texas-based nonprofit created to track and highlight the moral cost of mass incarceration nationwide, and honor all those who have died while living or working behind bars.

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The event began with incarcerated people, along with volunteers and staff members, walking “a lap of silence,” on the Lower Yard in solidarity and in remembrance. The walkers held up photographs and sketches of 25 of the people lost to the coronavirus at San Quentin.

Bands performed, and speakers addressed attendees, to encourage and inspire survivors and to reminiscence about the trials endured by San Quentin survivors of the outbreak. Some residents read poems in honor of fallen friends and to relate their personal experiences during the coronavirus outbreak.

“Darryl loved the Lord. He was always putting others before himself,” said SQ resident Warren Corley, reading a poem he wrote about his dear friend, Darrell Guatt, Sr., who was one of those being mourned. “It made his pain go away.” Before falling victim to COVID, Gautt was a 25-year cancer survivor.

Michael Moore shared a composition describing his pandemic experience.

There are 13 bars, three inches apart, that allow for air to circulate into our cells …,” reflected Moore. “People were dying all around me, literally from COVID wafting through the bars and into our lungs. I had to just sit and wait my turn.”

Alarms in the units repeatedly made Tony de Trinidad aware that someone was in pain, or placed on a gurney by emergency responders. He read “Invacuate-19” a poem in honor of his friend Eric Warner, who died from the virus.

“Every time an alarm went off I would wonder who was dying now,” said de Trinidad, “Who else is in pain?”

Hector Frank Heredia, the Native American chaplain, spoke about the dead and how to remember them in our hearts because they are our people.

“To all our relations we come in a good place to pray for those who have passed on,” said Heredia. “Most of those brothers that passed, I knew them on [Death] Row. They are not forgotten; we don’t leave anyone behind.”

Reflecting on how dealing with the deaths of others can be difficult for many, Imam Mohamed, Muslim chaplain, said that the reality of death can weigh us down if we deny it; therefore, it is important to ask God to bring us together as one.

In tribute to the lives lost, “a moment of silence” was accompanied by the sounds of bells rung 27 times from a band member’s electronic keyboard, a number that represents infinity in the Buddhist religion.

Pickering talked about the origin and history of Mourning Our Losses.

“By April 2020, many could see the political leaders were not going to act, or [were] not [acting] quickly enough,” said Pickering. “So a group of us came together — people formerly and currently incarcerated, people who had worked or volunteered inside — to create a way to remember the lives of the people we were losing around the country, and to mourn and celebrate them together.”

Mourning Our Losses was founded by Kelsey Kauffman, founder and emeritus director of the higher education program at the Indiana Women’s Prison and formerly a guard at a women’s prison. Later she advocated for the incarcerated. Perceiving that politicians and officials were not moving fast enough to address prison overcrowding, she worked for decarceration.

“Kauffman has helped out her students who were incarcerated at the women’s prisons and some of her students became Ph.D. graduates,” Pickering said.

Pickering also remembers Darryl Gault, who was a student in her philosophy class.

“I think of him often; he is one of my students who I taught here at San Quentin,” said Pickering. “He had a heart attack while I was tutoring him. He had it in my presence.

A few family members of San Quentin’s COVID victims heard about the Nov. 5 event. They were moved to send in words of love and gratitude directed to the people in blue and all of the other attendees at the event.

The local organizing team were a committee of incarcerated men. This Mourning Our Losses inside team included SQNews staffer Juan Haines and Brian Asey, SQTV producer, Arthur Jackson, Rahsaan Thomas, Philippe “Kels” Kelly, Oola, and Leonard Brown. The outside team members were Tom Lapinski, Raphaele Casale, and Pickering. Haines, Asey and Pickering read messages received from family members of victims. The messages expressed appreciation for the event memorializing their loved ones.

San Quentin medical staff also addressed the crowd, reflecting on the losses being memorialized, and the overall impact and the trauma San Quentin residents endured during the pandemic.

Dr. Alison Pachynski, San Quentin’s chief medical officer, reminded the gathering how important it is to pause and reach out to someone during this time of mourning.

Dr. E. Anderson, Psy.D., San Quentin suicide prevention coordinator, introduced Brothers Keepers, a support group run by prisoners. The group offers counseling to prisoners going through crises due to loss of loved ones, illness, board denials, and other concerns.

Antwan “Banks” Williams, a well-known voice of Ear Hustle before paroling from San Quentin, closed out the event with an inspirational rap song. His moving lyric summed up the event well.

“I never really felt like somebody — until somebody told me I could be somebody — now I’m somebody — who just wants to tell somebody — that you’re somebody — you’re somebody to me,” rapped Williams.

The volunteers serving Mourning Our Losses come from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia. Others come from prisons in Georgia and from the Yale Undergraduate Prison Project.

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