Megan Goodman

I used to think that anyone on death row had to be a monster, including my own Uncle Spencer.  I listened to what people said about him and I looked at what he had done without ever stopping to think that there might be more to the story...more that I didn't know.  

When I was 19, I was living on my own and thinking a lot about my Uncle who was sitting on Death Row.  His crime was not something that was talked about in my family and frankly he was never talked about either.  

I decided that I wanted to know the whole story about what he had done and who exactly he was.  So, without telling anyone in my family, I wrote him a letter telling him that I wanted to talk to him.  

 He wrote back and said that he would love to see me.  I prepared myself to go and visit a monster.  I was sure that that was what he was.  

I remember when I went to see him I was shaking as I walked down the row of cages full of people waiting to die.  I sat down and talked to my Uncle for the first time since I was in third grade.  We talked about his crime, about the rumours going around the family and about things that we used to do together.  

By the end of our two hour visit I had completely changed my opinion of him.  I realized that he wasn't this monster that I needed to be scared of but he was still my Uncle who loved me and I still loved him. 
Over the next year and a half I visited with him on a regular basis and we became very close.  

He was like my older brother more than my Uncle.  At the time of his execution I was closer to him than anyone else in my life. 

There is not a day that goes by that I don't miss him.  He taught me so much about myself and life.  The most important thing that he taught me was to search for my own truth, don't just take one persons point of view as truth, because the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.  

My Uncle did a horrible thing in his life but that doesn't mean that he was horrible. 

I believe that it was Ghandi that said, "If we all took an eye for an eye then the whole world would be blind."  

My Uncle was the most loving person that I have ever known and I was lucky that I got the chance to get to know the man that I did.