The Death Class: A True Story About Life (13 page)

“Unfortunately, many young people marry under such circumstances, hoping to find themselves in another,” Erikson wrote, “but alas the early obligation to act in a defined way, as mates and as parents, disturbs them in the completion of this work on themselves. Obviously, a change of mate is rarely the answer, but rather some wisely guided insight into the fact that the condition of a true twoness is that one must first become oneself.”

Caitlin was caught between two stages. Norma told her she needed to detach and let everyone else sort out their own lives while she seized control of hers.

But the message didn’t quite seem to be sinking in.

O
NE NIGHT AT
home by herself, Caitlin listened to the song “Hurt,” by Christina Aguilera, and her thoughts turned to her mother. She began to think about what would happen if her mother died of a drug overdose. What if she never had a chance to tell her how much she loved her? Caitlin knew she often gave her mother an attitude, but it was only because she couldn’t forgive her for becoming a hostage to those pills.

She began to write her mother a letter, explaining that she didn’t hate her and didn’t harbor anger about her childhood. The next day, she handed over what she had written. When her mother read it, she hugged Caitlin and thanked her but didn’t cry. Her mother rarely shed tears in front of the family anyway.

Caitlin called Norma and told her about the letter. “I’m happy about this,” Caitlin said. “I think it’s going to change our lives.”

But her professor did not sound convinced.

“What are you talking about? This is great,” Caitlin said. “It took me
three years to tell her how I feel.” Norma was the one who had taught her the idea of writing a “good-bye letter.” Caitlin had figured, why wait until her mother was dead to tell her how she felt?

Three days later, her mother swallowed dozens of prescription pills. Caitlin’s sister found her upstairs, unconscious and not breathing. Caitlin got the call and headed to the intensive care unit. When she arrived, her mother was hooked up to breathing tubes. When she finally woke up, she was delirious, but she was able to say one word over and over.

“Caitlin, Caitlin, Caitlin.”

When her mother finally seemed coherent, all Caitlin could say was, “But, Mommy, I wrote you that letter.”

“I know,” she replied, barely able to get the words out. “I love you so much.”

If she loves me so much, Caitlin thought, why does she keep trying to kill herself? Why does she keep putting her family through this nonstop torment?

For Norma’s death class, another assignment had been “Write a letter to your younger self.” Caitlin had written to the little girl who had been afraid to speak up in class, “The things that you are afraid of are either out of your control or not an issue. The only things that you have control over are your actions and how you react to the actions of others. You should try to be enjoying the freedom of being young and not having as much responsibility.”

The older Caitlin needed to listen to herself now.

Caitlin turned again to her professor that night after visiting her mom in the hospital. She felt bad for unloading so much on Norma. She felt bad for calling her at all hours and dragging her out to meet her at Applebee’s long after the professor’s teaching day had ended. But Norma never seemed to mind.

One Sunday morning, Norma drove one of her students named Stephanie to Seaside Heights, a two-hour ride from Kean University, to visit the young woman’s parents. Stephanie’s mother was an alcoholic, and her father had just been released from prison. Both parents had been homeless for most of Stephanie’s teenage years, and she had made it to college on her own, working two jobs to cover the tuition.

Stephanie had come into the death class terrified that her mother would die of alcohol abuse, just as Caitlin feared her mother would overdose on pills. Stephanie hadn’t seen her parents in months. She wore a fitted bright pink, electric green, and gold T-shirt, tight jeans, and gold hoops for the occasion, bringing along a plastic garbage bag filled with donated secondhand clothes to give to them.

As with Caitlin, as with so many of her students, Norma had a special interest in Stephanie, though she didn’t end up growing as close to her over time as to some of the others. While some students stuck around long after graduation, others dropped out of Norma’s life after the class was completed, like passing blips in her electric lifeline. But the professor figured she could be of help to Stephanie by providing her with a ride and being there to support her as she reunited with her family. Stephanie’s mother had been hit by an SUV a year earlier when she was drunk and was still recovering from her injuries. Stephanie worried that her mom was dying of alcoholism and thought the professor could use her nursing skills to check up on the woman’s health.

When Norma’s party bus pulled up to the Offshore Motel just after 11
A.M.
, a
bar across the street was already filled with bikers. The professor parked at a meter, and a front-desk clerk glared, craning her neck as the visitors walked past the office, headed to the second floor. Outside room 30, a frail woman with her front teeth missing, a drained face, and a mop of stringy blond hair pulled back by a clear plastic headband smoked a cigarette with a trembling hand. She stood near a rail, peering over a dry pool covered by a blue tarp. She wore an orange sneaker on her right foot and a cast on her left. A distended belly swelled beneath a white T-shirt, which she wore under a faded denim jacket. It was Stephanie’s mother. She was already drunk.

“I told you to stay out of the tanning booth,” the weary-looking fifty-year-old told her daughter, her morning breath reeking of alcohol.

Room 30 was just big enough to fit two double beds. Pink-and-burgundy blankets covered the mattresses, which matched the sheer pink-and-burgundy blouses that hung over the windows as curtains. Norma stood outside talking to Stephanie’s father first.

Meanwhile, a middle-aged man, who said he was a friend of the parents, stumbled into the room, swiped a beer from the minifridge, popped it open, and took a gulp. He wore a stonewashed jean jacket and had bloodshot eyes and stubble sprouting from his cheeks and chin. He asked about the lady he had run into and chatted with outside. “What is she, a doctor?”

“She has all kinds of degrees,” Stephanie told him. “Like MS, PhD, all these letters.”

“Hey,” he said, “I told her I had hep C.”

In walked Norma, smiling. She wore an old black sweater over a cotton dress and leggings. Peach-colored toenails peeked from her walking sandals.

“You’re the doctor!” the man with hep C said.

“I’m the teacher,” she corrected.

Stephanie’s mom sprung from the bed and began to pace, looking angered by this woman’s intrusion.

Norma approached her to shake hands, but the mom grabbed her hand and yanked it. Hard. “Whoops,” said Norma, jerking forward.

“What do you mean, whoops?” the mom said, lowering her eyes,
tightening her grip. Stephanie explained later that her mom had always been a good fighter, drunk or not, and now she was in attack stance.

“I thought you were pulling me,” Norma said, without flinching, as if to say, It’s okay, go ahead. I’m not scared.

Stephanie’s mom smiled back mischievously. “I’m Margaret.”

“You’re strong, Margaret.”

“Yeah, I’m strong,” she said, not letting go.

The woman gave Norma a look like, who is this nurse-teacher-doctor lady anyway? She leaned in closer, breathing in her face. “So,” she said, “what’d you come here for anyway?”

“Listen, Margaret, the reason I wanted to meet you is because I know it’s been really hard for you,” Norma said, explaining that she thought her daughter was amazing, “. . . and I try to figure out sometimes, even through hardships, how some people—”

“Let me stop you right there,” the mom said, backing off for a moment. “Let me tell you something . . . sometimes I pray, and you know God does listen,” she slurred. “And my daughter is the only one that’s strong. And I thank God that, at least, she got something from me. And I thank God, growing up with an alcoholic parent, that she is still—this kid—with her own apartment, she bought her own car, and she works every day.”

Slumped on the bed, the male visitor with the stubbly face muttered to himself, “They’re good-looking and they’re smart,” he said of all three of Margaret’s daughters, whose pictures adorned a mirror. “Usually you’re smart and you’re ugly.”

“Would you let me take your pulse?” Norma asked Margaret.

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“She’s a nurse,” Stephanie said again.

Norma reached for her wrist, gently. Margaret’s face softened. Her arm wilted between Norma’s fingers. Her pulse was up, Norma noticed. Probably the alcohol, she thought. Dehydration. Margaret forgot about her cigarette, which left a trail in the ashtray like a black snake firework. Next, Norma checked beneath the cast on her leg.

“Margaret!” a voice screeched from outside.

“What!” she shouted back.

It
was the front-desk clerk, agitated about the visitors. She went to the balcony and leaned over. “It’s my daughter!”

“Everybody?” the clerk said, scanning the pack of people who had followed her outside. The dad leaned over too. “That’s my daughter,” her dad said, pointing, “and this is her teacher.”

“You have to understand,” the front-desk clerk said, suddenly sweet, as if realizing that Norma might be working undercover for an inspection agency, “if we don’t know you, you have to go.”

“It’s okay,” Norma said. “Thank you for checking. We’re leaving now.”

As they made their way to the stairs, the mother grabbed Norma’s hand one last time and squeezed. “Listen,” she said, looking the professor in the eye, appearing unsure of whether she wanted to punch her, push her down the steps, or pull her back inside to stay longer. “I’m not a bad person.”

Norma squeezed her hand back, tenderly. “I know you’re not.”

“I’ll see you at graduation,” the professor told her before turning away.

Outside, Norma stopped in the motel courtyard and watched a little girl pick through a McDonald’s bag by a Dumpster. She walked down to the boardwalk and stared at the ocean for a few moments before buying a round of orange custards.

“If I didn’t know you, Dr. Bowe, I would be embarrassed,” Stephanie told her later, as they walked back to the party bus. “I don’t want you to feel sorry for her.”

“I don’t feel sorry for her at all,” Norma said. “Your mom’s not going to die tomorrow. I would even say she’s going to be alive a year from now. But if she continues on this path, you know you’re not going to have her too much longer, right?”

“She’ll stay sober for me,” Stephanie said, “like completely sober around me, and she’ll eat, because I’ll make sure. But it’s, like, a full-time job. I wouldn’t be able to work or go to school.”

Stephanie had to stay in school. “That will be your victory lap,” Norma said.

“I know,” she answered, “but I would feel better if I could give them some money.”

“Don’t even go there,” Norma said. “You give them money, you know exactly what they’re going to do with it.”

The mood inside the party bus dimmed. Stephanie dipped into her custard with a plastic spoon. Norma slowed to pay a thirty-five-cent toll. They drove for a while, before the professor broke the silence.

“Well, we got to see the ocean today,” she said. “It was beautiful.”

I
T SEEMED AS
if Norma had a radar hardwired inside her that could detect whenever somebody within her vicinity might need her assistance—an aspirin, a Kleenex, a letter of recommendation, a spur-of-the-moment therapy session while riding shotgun in the party bus. Students called her purse the Mary Poppins bag. What do you need? Hand sanitizer? A granola bar? A hairbrush? The business card of a good funeral home? She had it covered.

This sixth sense of hers had started as far back as nursing school, but probably even earlier. She could remember feeling it with the first patient who had ever died on her watch, an elderly woman whose body had been shutting down. Norma was still a nurse in training at the time and had been taking care of her for nearly five days.

In the middle of the night, while in her dorm room, Norma jolted awake. The dorms were attached to the hospital, and she lay there feeling frustrated, knowing that she needed to be back on the floor of the intensive care unit to start her shift at 7
A.M.
She needed her rest but couldn’t fall back to sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about the woman on all the meds. She got out of bed, slipped her blue lab coat over her pajamas, and wandered over to the ICU, only to be greeted by the night-shift nurse, who explained that she was glad she’d popped in because the woman Norma had been treating was dying and two other patients had just coded, so no one else was free to stay by her bedside. Norma went into the woman’s room and held her hand, talking to her until she took her last breath.

Norma would witness many more deaths of all varieties, but she never forgot that first one, its serenity, its peacefulness.