"I live with a woman who is dying. I don't mean in the sense that we are all mortal, a winding down towards the inevitable. Her death is imminent; even though she is scheduled for release shortly she is waiting on a medical clemency because her cancer of the everything is moving faster than time.

She could take painkillers and live isolated in the infirmary but she has chosen to live among us for as long as possible. She would rather be with us and in order to be with us, she suffers. Not just from pain but many of the women and staff have no idea how ill she is and they don't know that they are flip and rude and petty and mean to a woman dying courageously.

The other evening she was sitting in the dayroom with a blanket around her. She was watching TV peacefully. Most people had gone to bed. Suddenly the officer boomed over the main speaker that she was to remove the blanket immediately, that she knew better to sit in the day room with a blanket, that she was lucky not to receive a charge but only a warning for this infraction of rules, regulations, and policy.

Now if that had been me, I would have found this the perfect moment to launch into a bitter and sarcastic diatribe on the chill of death being on my neck. I would have shown off. She did not.

Without any rancor, she removed the blanket from around her shoulders, waved to the officer and mouthed, 'Sorry' I was dumbfounded. Uninvited I snatched up her cause.

'That's so freakin' petty,' I raged.

'Yes,' she said, 'it is.'

'How can you be so calm about it?' Now I am angry at her for not embarrassing the officer.

Her bloodshot eyes fixed on me gently, 'because it's not important.' As I grow older, I find I want my life to count for something more important. Perhaps because I have no children, I see my legacy in the people I encounter. I don't want to impress them, stamp them with my mark. Rather I want my encounters with people to be joint ventures where we weave threads of encouragement and joy and resilience and hope into the fabric of each other's lives.

The other day I had had a horrible day. It was a blue Monday and black Friday mashed into bleak Tuesday. I was angry, prickling with righteous indignation. As I entered the building where I live, deep in my puddle of self-pity, the officer in the control bubble asked me, 'Are you OK? You look so unhappy?'

I looked up and saw a young man whose name I don't know, a young man who had worked a long difficult shift and there, transparently on his face, was awareness and concern for me. Becalmed, I basked in his kindness. My sudden stillness must have perplexed and confused him because the continued earnestly, 'Do you need to talk?'

I smiled a deep smile that cracked open the gloomy husk I had been nurturing, 'No--thanks. You've helped more than you know.'

In the end all that will be left, all that will matter, will be the generosity of spirit we give each other. In the end our lives are as large as the extent of our courage in kindness. In the end, I hope I can learn to grip my own life with lightness and to embrace the lives of others more firmly.

(By the time you read this, the woman in the story will have gone home.)" (Elizabeth Haysom, Fluvanna Review, April 6, 2006).

Elizabeth Haysom is presently incarcerated at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia. This column is one of a series, published under the general heading 'Glimpses from Inside.'