Waiting to Die

Is there more to a man than the worst thing he has ever done? In his raw and unflinching memoir, Waiting to Die: One Man’s Journey on Death Row, Feltus Taylor, Jr., a young man from Louisiana, recounts the circumstances shaped by early trauma, instability, and devastating choices that led him to violence and ultimately to Louisiana State Penitentiary’s death row. Abandoned as an infant by a drug-addicted mother in and out of prison, Taylor’s first three years of his life remain mostly unknown, but what is known reveal clear signs of neglect and abuse. He was bow-legged, had a severe developmental disability, and a speech impediment. He lived with major depression, experienced dissociative seizures, and struggled to make sense of a world that often failed to make sense of him. Waiting to Die is not only the story of a convicted murderer; it is a rare and intimate portrait of a life, whom most would dismiss, seen in its entirety. Taylor embarks on a journey of self-discovery and personal growth through writing and spiritual healing. His words, written up to the morning of his death in 2000, reveal the quiet humanity that survives inside confinement and invite readers to sit with the life behind the sentence, challenging us to mourn the man he became just as he mourned the lives he forever harmed, even when redemption comes too late.