The Death Class: A True Story About Life (12 page)

Jonathan loosened his grip and backed away. He watched Josh stumble as he got up from the floor. Then Josh bolted outside toward Jonathan’s truck.

Jonathan wasn’t an idiot. He knew what his brother was looking for in that truck; he kept a pocketknife in the glove compartment.

B
Y NOW
C
AITLIN
had made her way into the living room. Jonathan’s bedroom door had been left ajar, and she had watched the skirmish unfold. She knew Josh was having a psychotic episode and realized there was no way out of the basement apartment besides the front door, which Josh had been blocking. The windows were too small to climb through. Caitlin had waited for the right opportunity to make a move and prayed. She was going to watch her boyfriend die in front of her. Josh was about to do the same to Jonathan as their father had done to their mother. He might even kill her too.

As soon as she saw Josh go outside, Caitlin ran to the door and locked it. “I’m calling the cops,” she said as Josh began banging on the door a few minutes later, shouting for them to let him in.

No cops. Jonathan pushed past Caitlin and unlocked the door. There was no need to overreact. He would calm his little brother down.

Josh barged in, eyes vacant, heading straight for a wooden block that held cutlery ware, which their aunt had given the brothers as a move-in
gift. He apparently had not located the pocketknife, so he grabbed one of the cooking knives instead. Gripping it in one hand, he glared at Jonathan, positioning himself in an attack stance.

Suddenly, as if battling with his own impulses, Josh went back into his room.

Jonathan turned to Caitlin. “Get out of here!” he told her. It was an order.

“Walk me out to my car,” Caitlin said, knowing that it would be the only way to get Jonathan outside. Caitlin had her cell phone in hand and was wearing no shoes. She didn’t want to bring up her schizophrenia theory again, fearing it would set Jonathan off. But she had to get him out of this apartment.

He followed her out for a second and then started to go back. “I’m not leaving my brother.”

C
AITLIN KNEW
J
ONATHAN
might never speak to her again if she called the police on Josh. But he could die in there too. She dialed 911 and sat in her blue Hyundai Tiburon, waiting. She dialed her parents and then Norma. But the professor did not pick up at first, so Caitlin left a frantic message: “Josh is trying to kill Jonathan! He has a knife. Oh, my God!”

Minutes later, she saw Jonathan barreling out of the apartment. He was bleeding but alive.

Jonathan jumped into his truck and drove off, roaring past Caitlin. Police cornered him with their squad car before he made it too far.

She began to drive away too, but the police called and asked her to return to make a statement. She began to worry. What if officers saw the blood on his arm and thought Jonathan was the one she’d called 911 about? The one with the knife? What if they arrested him by mistake? Caitlin raced over to explain the mix-up to the police. It was his brother who had attacked Jonathan, she explained. He was still inside the apartment. Caitlin said she would return only if Josh did not come out.

The cops refused to go inside, unsure of what danger might await them. They asked Jonathan if Josh had a weapon, because if he did they would have to shoot him dead if he tried to attack.

“I’ll
go in,” Jonathan said as Caitlin stayed outside.

His brother was in his bedroom. With Jonathan out of earshot, she told an officer that Josh was “really sick.” His dad had killed his mom, and Caitlin believed he might have been a schizophrenic. Josh might too.

Josh didn’t need to go to jail; he needed to go to a mental hospital.

“J
OSH, THE COPS
are here!” Jonathan yelled once inside the apartment. But his brother still didn’t come out.

“Get your ass out here!” an officer barked.

Finally Josh emerged. The cops frisked and handcuffed him, then sat him on the couch. He smirked, not saying a word in response to the cops’ questions. He seemed as if he was almost snarling at them.

“Is he on drugs?” an officer asked.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan replied. “I bend over backwards for this kid. I’m trying as hard as I can. I honestly don’t know why he’s acting like this.”

The police told Jonathan they would have to take Josh to jail or a hospital.

The cops took Josh in an ambulance to the psychiatric center at Trinitas Regional Medical Center in Elizabeth.

Jonathan got into the passenger seat of Caitlin’s car. “I knew deep down there was something wrong with him,” he said.

Sure, Jonathan realized that Josh had not really been responsible in the last year, dropping out of Wesleyan for no good reason, backpacking around parts of the world, becoming homeless, refusing to work, sometimes refusing to brush his teeth. The most Jonathan had allowed himself to believe about Josh until now was that maybe he was depressed. With two dead parents, Josh had enough of an excuse to feel down every now and then.

As they headed to the hospital, Caitlin finally got hold of Norma. The professor advised them to make a timeline of Josh’s life—from birth to their parents’ deaths to every unusual event that had happened and any odd behavior he might have displayed along the way. It would
help the doctors make a more accurate diagnosis and understand how far along any possible illness had progressed.

Josh didn’t have insurance, so Norma prepped Jonathan on any questions the medical staff might ask and paperwork he might be asked to fill out. She told Jonathan to meet her at Kean University and to bring his older brother, Chris, along with his uncle and aunt. Her last class ended around 9
P.M.
, and she would stay late to give the family a crash course on schizophrenia.

When Jonathan arrived at the hospital, a doctor pulled him aside. “He’s hearing things,” the doctor said. “He’s seeing things.”

Josh, the doctor told him, had paranoid schizophrenia.

Sometimes when patients with his symptoms ask you not to look into their eyes, it is because they think you are trying to control their mind, he explained.

Jonathan barely knew what schizophrenia was, much less how it was dictating his brother’s thoughts or behavior. He just wanted to see his brother.

Doctors let him into the room where Josh was tied to a bed.

“Josh,” he asked, “why’d you attack me?”

His brother simply smiled back at him from the bed and replied, “My brother has a tendency to lie a lot. He lies and everyone believes him.”

“What did I lie about?” Jonathan asked incredulously, feeling himself getting ready to argue.

The doctor pulled Jonathan aside and explained, “He’s having an episode right now.”

“All right,” Jonathan said, still upset. “But I didn’t lie about anything!” he added, storming out of the room.

Doctors asked Jonathan a long list of questions about their family history and especially their father. He handed over the timeline that Norma had advised him to create, documenting the whole tale of his family’s fate.

Suddenly it all clicked, as if Jonathan’s mind was finally allowing him to accept what he had been denying for so long. Caitlin was right. The doctors were right. Norma was right. Josh had schizophrenia—and their father had suffered from it too. Josh had inherited the disease.

It was
a terrifying realization. What did it mean? Had he inherited it too? Had Chris? If they one day had their own children, would they get this mental illness too?

Jonathan contacted his father’s sister. He needed to know if she had realized that their father had been paranoid too. The boys had never noticed, they had been too young, but had his sister?

She had. Sometimes, she told him, their father had locked himself in the bathroom for hours, reading the Bible and crying. Or he would guard the door to his sons’ room and refuse to let her see them. When she’d asked why he was reacting like that, he’d told her that he was afraid she was going to poison his children.

Jonathan didn’t have time to agonize. He had a job to do. He had to fix this problem. Take care of his brother. Get him into the best treatment he could so that he didn’t end up dead, like their mom and dad. Jonathan had pledged long ago never to leave his little brother behind.

That night, as Josh stayed in the hospital, Jonathan rounded up the few family members he had left and told them to meet Norma at Kean. He listened along with them as she went over the biological and environmental aspects of schizophrenia, possible treatments, and the dire prognoses.

When the meeting was over, Jonathan turned to Caitlin. “I know how this is going to end,” he told her. “Josh is going to kill himself.”

He couldn’t let that happen. Not on his watch.

He was determined to do anything in his power to protect his brother from this disease, if that meant going into debt, or babysitting him for the rest of his life.

Josh bounced between mental hospitals for weeks after his diagnosis, and his thoughts only seemed to grow more odd. When Jonathan visited him in the psychiatric ward, Josh would tell him that everyone around them was walking like a lizard, even the pigeons and squirrels outside. He said he thought it was a miracle; God was speaking to him and giving him signs through those lizard-walking creatures. Or he would say, “Maybe I’m just really fucked up in the head.”

“Josh,” his brother would tell him, “you’re not Jesus. You’re just crazy.”

“Yeah,” Josh would reply, “you’re probably right.”

But the next thing Jonathan knew, Josh would be in bed talking about a bright white light—another sign from God. Jonathan would try to reason with him. “If I’m sitting next to you, don’t you think I would see the light?”

“No,” Josh told him, because God intended it only for his eyes.

Weeks went by, and the hospital released Josh. Once at home, he was supposed to take one pill a day, and Jonathan made sure he took it each morning. Josh didn’t want it, but Jonathan lied and told him that the hospital called every day to check up on him, and if he didn’t take the pill he would have to go back. That was the last thing Josh wanted, so he took the pill.

Taking care of his brother was a twenty-four-hour-a-day job for Jonathan, and that left little room for socializing or dating. He had no other choice but to sacrifice his personal needs for his brother’s well-being. But now he was beginning to realize that he could no longer dedicate the kind of time to Caitlin that she deserved. If she remained a part of his life, she might even end up in danger herself. Jonathan was willing to risk his safety and his life for his brother, but not hers. She would be better off without him.

There was no other choice, Jonathan told Caitlin. He had to break up with her.

And just like that, he did.

M
ONTHS PASSED, AND
summer bled into fall. The weather turned from humid to brisk to bitter. Caitlin fought off the urge to throw up. When she cried, the sheer flow of it would give her migraines. Her OCD rituals had intensified, and her chest throbbed with a penetrating ache. If anything could be considered a precursor to mourning death, it must have been this. Caitlin knew she would never be able to handle the death of a loved one; she could barely survive a broken heart.

One night, Norma convinced Caitlin to meet her at Applebee’s. Caitlin sat down and ordered a fishbowl-sized margarita and two shots of tequila. She poured the shot into the fishbowl and gulped the whole
thing down with two straws. Caitlin knew that under normal circumstances Norma might have told her to ease up, but this night she said nothing.

Caitlin had been spending a lot of time with Norma, revisiting the anxiety issues she thought she’d dealt with months before. They had returned in full force. Applebee’s had become Caitlin and Norma’s meeting spot of choice. Norma reminded Caitlin again that it might be wise if she used this time of mourning to refocus on herself, instead of worrying about everyone else and instead of vying for the love of Jonathan or her mother.

The professor’s take on Caitlin’s struggle went back to her lesson on Erik Erikson’s life cycle. Norma had lectured about Erikson’s theories in Caitlin’s mental health and death classes. It seemed as though Caitlin, at twenty-two, was caught in the fifth stage of life—a period filled with confusion that Erikson had called “Identity vs. Role Confusion” and said lasted from ages twelve to eighteen. In that stage a young person asks, “Who am I?”

To Erikson, those who emerged from the previous four stages of childhood with the right amount of love and nurturing would develop a strong sense of identity that would carry them forward through life’s challenges. Norma believed this questioning period extends well into the twenties or thirties, sometimes longer.

“Some people never get out of this stage,” Norma would tell her students. “They’re never able to form their own identity, never able to figure out who they are.”

It didn’t mean they couldn’t, she said, as Erikson believed that life is a constant change and someone with a weak identity can develop a more confident one later in life.

“To a considerable extent adolescent love is an attempt to arrive at a definition of one’s identity by projecting one’s diffused ego image on another and by seeing it thus reflected and gradually clarified,” Erikson wrote. “This is why so much of young love is conversation.”

The next phase of Erikson’s life cycle, the sixth stage, which he called “Intimacy vs. Isolation,” can last into a person’s forties or longer. This is the period when a person is looking for a life partner, true love.
As Norma explained it, adults in this stage learn to value their closest friendships over collecting dozens of peripheral friends, as they might have done in high school. They also look for a person to build a life with.

As Norma summed up this stage: “Until we have an identity separate from our peer group, we cannot have intimacy. We will not know real love until we know who we are.”

“You must,” she told all of her students, “love yourself first.”