Stefan then got permission, he told us, to call public libraries to ask them to donate their oldest used books. He stamped and cataloged hundreds of books and organized dozens of library shelves and a big roving book cart.

“But even that didn’t fill up all the time there was,” he said.

Stefan stood up then and squeezed his temples. I had never seen his expression so sad, not even on the day we left him at rehab on the psych floor.

“Dad, you never realize, in real life, how much time there is in the world. In real life, you’re always wondering how can you cram one more thing into this day that is already crammed full of stuff you have to do? But I guess that’s why they call it doing time. Time is all you’re doing. Time is passing. Your life is passing. Time is terrifying if you can’t be useful.”

He did all his college coursework in a couple of hours each day, spreading it out over several days between classes so that it would sustain him. He wrote ten letters every week, at least two pages to us every day—the ones he wrote to my sisters were virtually a diary, but, probably wisely, he didn’t share as much with us. When he could no longer write or type because his hands cramped, he “became a cliché,” doing hundreds of pull-ups and push-ups. He practiced yoga. He broke up Snickers bars to feed a sparrow that lived inside the cell block, thrilled when it hopped onto his palm, believing the little bird was somehow more alive than all the men who snored and sang and screamed all around him. At night, he prayed to die in his sleep. He prayed not to die in his sleep. He was afraid that the prayers, on the way to heaven, would get mixed up. In the mornings, through a kind of meditation, just as he awakened, he could imagine himself a child again, curled in his bed with puppy Molly snuggled against his back, where she now snuggled again each night, although now he had to lift her elderly body up. She had abandoned her spot at the foot of our bed the first night Stefan was home.

Every morning in prison he wished everyone he saw a good day and said not one other thing.

“I had to be strategic. I had to bar myself from the bad guys, the real scary guys. That’s what you call it. They respect that you want to bar yourself from white supremacists and black supremacists and the real nutters, like rapists.”

He made sure to be the last one leaving the block or leaving any room so that no one was behind him. He made sure to stand at the end of the shower and complete his ablutions in two minutes.

“I have to tell you the worst thing I ever did.”