We could smell his last meal being delivered, and Clarence wanted to make sure they’d brought him ketchup for his fries.  He offered to share his fries with me.  But before I could answer, the guard, the same large man with the stroke-like limp, came over and said our time was up.  Clarence and I put our hands up on the mesh of the cell once again.  He kissed his fingers and touched mine through the mesh.  I did the same.  Then I turned quickly to leave.  It was three hours until the execution.

The rain was falling when I walked out of the building.  Collie and I tried to distract ourselves by spending time in a bookstore where I leafed through books, bought books, and tried not to think about what Clarence might be thinking.

When we returned to the Walls Unit, a crowd was gathering.  A good-sized group of anti- death penalty protesters huddled under their umbrellas with signs and candles and a bullhorn. When I got closer, I saw Clarence’s half sister, who had driven in from San Antonio.  She hugged me fiercely and asked how he had been.  I told her the truth:  He was at peace and ready to go. 

Then, at a little after six, the rain stopped, the sun peaked out from behind a cloud, and there were bright rays of light, like in those pictures from the kid’s version of the Bible showing where heaven is.   I knew Clarence was dead, and in that brief moment I felt his peace.

I stood and cried in the coming twilight.  Then I drove over to my motel and slept.  In the morning I got up and returned to death row again.  Another of my clients, Eddie, had just learned of his execution date.  I needed to see him.  But the real reason I was back again was for another execution, Bruce’s.   

I don’t really remember much about those visits with Bruce or Eddie.  I just remember walking out from the Ellis Unit with Bruce’s family and arranging to meet them later.  I remember driving over to the Walls Unit with my co-counsel, Liz, and being told that only one of us would be allowed inside to see Bruce before he was killed.  Liz had represented Bruce for years before I did.  She should be the one to go in.   But the bond Bruce and I had forged over the past three years was one of the most intense I’d ever had with a client.  I had to say goodbye.  Liz understood. 

There were forms to sign, the metal detector again, the old guard with the limp, the steel door.  As we walked through it, the guard warned me that I wasn’t to put my hands up against the mesh to touch my client’s hands as I had done the day before. 

When I got to the visiting cell, and stood in front of the mesh door, I saw that Bruce had been crying.  He didn’t have Clarence’s faith — he lamented that.  He wished that he could believe he was going to a better place, but he just wasn’t sure.  He was scared. Unlike Clarence, he was not ready to go.  He wanted to hug his mother, to comfort her and let her comfort him.  But even if she had not been too sick to make the trip, he couldn’t have hugged her.  No physical contact was allowed.

I tried to tell Bruce how deeply he had affected me, but perhaps because Bruce was so distraught, I found it difficult to find the right words to say goodbye.   I was acutely aware of the guards standing less than ten feet away, seeming to listen to everything we said.  I didn’t want to be misunderstood — by them, or by Bruce.  And yet, I knew I was losing a friend as well as a client, and needed to try to communicate that to him. I knew I would miss him greatly, miss his soothing voice, his gentle manner.  I wanted to let him know that even in this cold, sterile, impersonal place, another human being could see his pain and would feel it too.

When the guard told me the time was up, I actually argued with him, as if I could change anything about what was happening or about to happen.  I knew that Bruce would be dead soon.  And then, more waiting, in that same parking lot outside the execution chamber.  I stood there until I saw all the witnesses file out.  I knew then that Bruce was gone. 

I spent more than six years representing inmates on Texas’ death row.  I lost nine clients during that time.  I came to love each of them.  I believed, I believe, that what my clients did was wrong, was horrible, was despicable.  But I learned to separate the people they had become so many years later from the acts they had committed.  I saw my client’s humanity — and I saw it extinguished.