Last Suppers and First Meals

Julie Green, an artist who died in October, painted white ceramic plates with depictions of the last meals of inmates about to be executed. She started her project to call attention to capital punishment. The images are beautiful, blue on white, and poignant. She called the collection “The Last Supper.” 

Her obituary includes some of the stories behind the meals. I suppose all the stories are tragedies: lives lost to violent crimes, lives spent with the trauma and mourning of those losses, lives spent in prison, a waste all round of one of the Creator’s greatest gifts. But one story in particular struck me as almost unbearably sad. “In Georgia in 2009, a mentally disabled inmate asked for half a pecan pie. He didn’t understand the concept of execution, and he intended to save some of the pie to eat afterward.” I don’t know what crime this man committed, what horrible act destroyed his life and the lives of unknown others. But he was not able to comprehend his own death, and I wonder if he knew what he had done, if he could participate in his own defense, if there was a point in his life when someone might have been able to save him – and thus save his victims. I don’t know.

https://greenjulie.com/last-supper/

Ms. Green did not stop with paintings of the last suppers. She also painted some “first meals,” what the newly exonerated chose to eat when they were freed. “Working with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s Pritkzer School of Law, she reached out to recent exonerees like Jason Strong, who had been convicted of murder. His first meal, ordered at the diner near the prison where he had been incarcerated for 15 years, was a cheeseburger with bacon and mushrooms. As he waited for it to appear, he talked about how much he loved oranges, a fruit he had been denied while he was in prison. A waitress overheard him and brought one from the kitchen. He spent 40 minutes just holding it, turning it over and over in his hands.” 

How much I take for granted: safety, intellectual ability, personal protection, freedom, food, life itself. And oranges.