This story is part of Cancer in Confinement, a special series from PJP. Click here to read more.
We stood in the shade of the handball wall at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Coal Township, watching some guys play basketball. The sun was hot. When I looked over, Hassain was crying.
“I want more time,” he said. “I’ve got so much more to do.”
At that point, in 2022, Richard Hassain Estes was leaving the prison twice a week for radiation and chemotherapy. When he returned, he was often on the verge of tears. More than once he told me how painful it was to be transferred to and from the hospital, feeling sick and wearing only a thin prison jumpsuit. Sometimes it took a while before he could calm down enough to go back to his cell.
When we first met, Hassain’s colon cancer had been in remission for a year or two. We met in the intake block in 2021. I was working as a certified peer support specialist and he was a new arrival from another prison. The first time I saw Hassain, I thought he looked familiar — he reminded me of guys I had grown up with and known my entire life. He was in shape and well-groomed.
I had known Hassain for less than a year when I noticed something off about him. He seemed extremely upset. He asked me to type a letter for him. In the letter he revealed that an oncologist told him his cancer had returned, and was spreading through his bones. One tumor was protruding inward toward his spine. The doctor had given him six months to live.
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When I realized that this young man of 44 had been given a death sentence, I was overcome with grief. The letter I typed for him highlighted all the treatments and procedures he had been through. It was an appeal for help. He was planning to make copies of it to send out to organizations that could help him get a second opinion.
A proud, defiant man
One way I tried to comfort Hassain was by having him teach me his favorite game, chess. When I first asked him to teach me to play, Hassain wrote out all the rules and names of each piece. I didn’t care much for the game, but Hassain loved to play, so I got good at prolonging his victories over me. We played in a vacant counselor’s office on the block that I used for my peer counseling sessions. The board was old and the pieces were worn, but Hassain had the biggest smile when we were playing.
Hassain was a soft-spoken person with a good sense of humor. He was also very creative and wrote stories and poems. During chess games we would have deep conversations about how chess is a metaphor for maneuvering life: You have to sacrifice minor discomforts (pawns) in order to be successful in life (capture the king).
Hassain was eligible for parole in 2021. He had a clean record. After 20 years in prison, he’d never gotten into trouble. With his diagnosis, we thought surely the board would send him home.
But Hassain was a proud man. At his parole hearing, he told me, the parole board asked if he thought of himself as a violent man. He said no. He went back and forth, arguing with the parole board that the murder he was convicted of was in self-defense. He did not consider himself violent.
I heard that and knew he wasn’t going to make parole. I couldn’t believe he was so principled he would forgo his only chance at freedom. I was both impressed and upset with him, but I didn’t express it. I just supported him the best I could when the board passed on his parole for another year.
After that, he started the process to apply for compassionate release. In general, compassionate release is granted to terminal patients who have stopped taking treatment. This didn’t sit well with me. I didn’t want Hassain to give up.
But the cancer soon took over his body. Hassain exercised regularly, but by late 2022, he was frail and tumors the size of little walnuts protruded from his face and head. His left eye had been eclipsed by a tumor and the left side of his face drooped. Soon he was committed to the prison infirmary.
Life in the infirmary
As his certified peer support specialist, I visited Hassain every morning. His room was large, the size of four prison cells, with images of nature painted on the walls. There was his hospital bed, a black leather couch, a cream-colored leather recliner and a large TV mounted on the wall.
One side effect of his pain medication was loss of appetite. Hassain was so weak, he couldn’t hold a utensil. His food was blended into a smoothie, which I fed him with a spoon to make sure he ate something. Other guys would visit throughout the day and together we all took care of Hassain.
I remember him being heavily sedated. Sometimes, when I came to see him in the morning, he was so out of it that he couldn’t sustain a conversation. I would clean up his room. He loved to hear me recite from his religious books. Hassain was a Muslim. I would sit on that leather couch for an hour just reading page after page. He didn’t want anything else, just for me to keep reading.
The end
One day, Hassain showed me a letter from a judge approving his release to a hospice center. I was so happy. He had this bottle of ginger ale that he hadn’t opened, but I told him to save it: “Don’t open that soda until we get confirmation that you are getting out of here.”
We soon learned that he had to get a second judge to sign off before he could be released. There was no telling how long that would take and Hassain just kept getting sicker and sicker. He slept all day. We both knew the clock was running out.
On the days he was lucid enough to talk, his words were few. I didn’t press him to speak more. I cleaned up his room and read a few pages from a book he liked. One morning, I went to the infirmary and was told that Hassain had been sent to the hospital.
I wondered if he’d been moved to hospice, if the second judge had finally signed off on the paperwork. Later in the day, I found out that Hassain had developed a fever and was moved to an outside hospital for treatment.
The following day, the second judge signed Hassain’s release to a hospice — but it was too late. Hassain died in a hospital bed in a room surrounded by strangers. He left instructions to the prison to give me his radio when he was gone. I still have it.
