Next door, behind the room with the gurney in it, another type of cooking lesson is happening -- instructions are being given for the precise measuring and mixing of three chemicals into an IV bag: sodium thiopental to sedate the inmate, pancuronium bromide to paralyze his lungs, and potassium chloride to stop his heart. Once these chemicals are prepared, guards will bring Eddie in from the cell next door, tie him down to the gurney, stick a needle into his vein and hook him up to that IV bag filled with poisons.

A few yards away, on the other side of a glass partition, a man waits for the curtain between the witness room and the execution chamber to be lifted. He sits on a gray metal folding chair, grieving for the daughter he lost fifteen years ago, his beautiful ten-year -old child who died because her mother's drug deal went bad. He waits, and he wonders what is going through the mind of the man who will lie on the gurney, the man who killed his little girl.

Also on the other side of that glass partition, a few feet away from the victim's father, but shielded from his view by a plasterboard wall, sits Evelyn, a sixty-something woman who has traveled from Sweden to be here when Eddie dies. She's been writing to him for years, through a prison pen-pal program she learned of at her church. Some members write to dozens of death row inmates. She wrote only to Eddie. He called her his "sun" -- her letters and visits lit up his life. Evelyn flew across an ocean so she could comfort Eddie by her presence and take his ashes to the hillside she described to him in her letters. Her description was so vivid that he feels like he's been there. Evelyn is not a blood relative of Eddie's, but she is the only family he has. She has drawn him into her life at home; he knows the stories of her children, her husband's death, her sister's illness.

Evelyn’s daughter also came to be with Eddie in his final days. She stands wilting in the Texas summer heat, holding a candle in vigil outside the prison walls. She stares at the tower clock sitting high in the center of the red brick wall and watches as its hands inch toward six o'clock, the hour when the warden will nod his head as a sign for the executioners to begin the procedure which will end Eddie's life. I join her vigil, restraining my grief, maintaining a professional composure perfected by too many days like this one.

Inside the execution chamber, the warden gives Eddie a chance to speak his final words. Eddie lifts his head, pulling slightly against the straps of the gurney. He murmurs a few words to the victims' families, and then says goodbye to Evelyn. "I would like to thank you for standing by me and loving me. Goodbye, my sun, I love you." Then he settles back down on the white sheet. The executioner releases the clamp, the poisons begin to flow and with a sharp intake of breath, Eddie is gone.

RITA RADOSTITZ was an attorney representing Texas death row prisoners for more than seven years. She is now a student in the University of Oregon’s literary nonfiction program.