The Death Class: A True Story About Life (15 page)

Complications did ensue. Griminger went into respiratory failure and ended up on a ventilator. Doctors intubated him, and for the next four months, with the emotional support of her neighbors, Olga commuted back and forth to the hospital. He seemed to be doing better until mid-February, when he came down with pneumonia. It was a Saturday night when Norma received a phone call from Griminger’s family. They knew she was a nurse who also taught about death. They wanted to know what was going to happen next. She sat down with the family and gave them a lesson on the process of dying, like the one she gave her students. She explained how morphine worked and how to read the signs that would indicate the end was near. Griminger died the next morning.

His funeral had no casket, no cosmetically made-up body on display. Those present seemed almost jovial, as if they were attending a
retirement gathering complete with stately speeches, poetic tributes, antsy children, and a woozy white-haired woman who looked as if she was about to doze off in her seat a few rows away.

“This feels like an out-of-body experience,” said Griminger’s daughter, a curly-haired woman in glasses, standing at the lectern, refusing to cry. “I don’t know if every daughter thinks her father is larger than life. But I do. It seems to me that he knew about everything.”

The funeral ended with psalms read in Hebrew and English, an e.e. cummings poem, and an open invitation to the family’s home for a reception. The mourners rose to leave, lining up to exit out of the back doors and hugging family members.

But the white-haired woman, who had appeared to be nodding off, did not get up. She slumped in the chair like a rag doll in her black-and-white cable-knit sweater with snowflake designs, black polyester pants, and black orthopedic shoes.

“Is there a doctor in here? A medical doctor?”

“Robert?” someone else called out. “Where’s Robert?” He was another neighbor and also a radiation oncologist.

A cluster of onlookers stared on, dumbfounded, unsure of what to do. Someone dialed 911. The doctor had yet to be found.

But there was a nurse.

Norma, in her black frilly shawl and turquoise beaded necklace, lifted the woman, who looked to be around eighty-something, from the chair, gently spreading her limp body across the forest green carpet. She kneeled over her body.

Norma Bowe to the rescue. Again.

The woman’s eyes had rolled back. Her white ankle socks had slipped down onto the balls of her feet, revealing two pasty pale ankles. Plum-colored veins slithered beneath her parchment skin.

Norma grabbed a pile of beige pillows from a sofa nearby and propped them under her feet so blood would flow to her major organs. She grasped the woman’s thin wrist and pressed it between her fingers. That was when she said, “No pulse.”

Someone in the funeral home finally tracked down Robert, who was now kneeling on the floor of the funeral home over the unconscious
woman alongside Norma, who gave a quick pound on her chest, and Robert gave her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Just like that, she woke up.

“Can you squeeze my hand?” Norma asked, looking into her eyes.

The woman could barely speak as she tugged furiously at her sweater, trying to yank it off. Three paramedics showed up and hooked blue and red wires to her ankles, setting up an EEG monitor. “Where do you live?” one asked. “Do you know what day of the week it is?” One of them pricked her finger, and a sliver of blood slid out.

She looked mortified. Perhaps she was embarrassed because several dozen people had been staring at her sprawled on the moss green carpet. Perhaps she realized that amid all of the commotion, she’d wet her pants.

“It looks like she went into cardiac arrest,” Norma told one as she stepped away from the scene. The paramedics began loading the woman onto a stretcher as someone said to Norma, “It’s a good thing you were here.”

Later that evening, Norma arrived at class looking drained and apologizing for being a bit off her game. She’d had quite a day. Students pressed for details, so she obliged with a condensed version of her day. “We need that story in the local paper!” one said.

Another piped in with a possible headline: “Death Teacher Saves Life at Funeral.”

The class burst into laughter.

“Oh, my God,” Norma said, gasping between her own laughs. It was a pretty wacky situation, wasn’t it? She caught her breath. “All right. Anyway, where was I?”

Organ harvesting. Right.

“I
N TIMES OF
strife and crisis, she thrives on it.” That was how Norma’s formerly Mafia-affiliated father once described his daughter one after-noon when we sat down for orange juice and coffee in a New Jersey diner. The seventy-four-year-old was wearing loafers and an orange sherbet–colored rayon shorts suit. He wore gold chains around his neck and a diamond ring on his left sun-spotted finger. In the middle of his
tanned face was a slightly crooked nose; his eyelashes were whitish blond like his hair, which he wore gelled and spiky like a teenage boy’s. His daughter, he went on, for all her virtues, “has to be the one in control.”

“That,” he said, “is an insight into Dr. Death over there.”

He added with all seriousness and cluelessness, “I don’t know if it’s something about the way she was raised in her life.”

L
OVE YOURSELF FIRST.

That’s what Norma repeated to Stephanie and to Caitlin. That was what Norma had tried to do herself, after feeling, as Erikson put it, as if she wanted to “destroy the eyes of the world.”

Norma remembered when she was a teenager visiting a friend’s beach house in Long Island and noticing how loving and happy that family seemed, eating and laughing together. “I was, like, ‘Oh, wow, no one is breaking anything?’ ” That was when she realized how far her home life was from normal.

Many years later, she would find herself grieving over the childhood she’d never really had during a spiritual retreat in upstate New York, when she ended up sobbing to a near stranger. That woman broke down sobbing to Norma too. It turned out that the woman’s parents had adopted a chimpanzee when she was a child, raising it as part of a university-endorsed experiment to see if the chimp could learn human language. The chimp had ended up becoming the darling of the family, and the woman had grown up feeling neglected and unable to compete with the chimp for her mother’s affection.

Norma remembered comforting the distraught woman and thinking it was time to stop feeling sorry for herself: Okay, she’s got me. Nothing I’ve been through in my life can top that. She had broken their cycle of abuse and replaced the missing love with new love from her daughters, her life partner, her students, and even her father, who, for all his irritation and foul-mouthing, was beginning to show hints of tenderness in his old age.

“I have always wondered, what puts somebody on this path and what puts somebody on that path?” Norma once said. “I think for me it was
my grandmother. I just got determined, like I was not going to let this crazy family shake me or define me or make me a bad mother or make me into a person I didn’t want to be. School and my grandmother. That’s what saved me.”

Norma’s grandmother Rosalie had been a true southern belle of the 1950s and ’60s, a dignified high-society woman, as she remembered her. Born in 1910, and proudly Jewish, she wore high heels with her shell neck blouses, pencil skirts, and full-skirt party dresses that cinched at the waist. She got her hair and nails done every week and always seemed to be dripping in diamonds or pearls as she smoked Virginia Slims and played bridge with the local ladies. She lived in a craftsman home off the Chesapeake Bay in Newport News, Virginia. It sat alongside a tree-shaded creek and had a big wooden deck and a master bedroom that opened into a full bathroom with a sunken tub. The house had deep, turquoise-colored couches and a long black slate coffee table with crystal bowls and figurines on it. To Norma, her grandma’s place back then felt like a magic house. A refuge.

Down the block from the house, a series of towering statues of lions had been built on a bridge overlooking a park and the waterfront. Rosalie used to tell Norma that it was
her
bridge and
her
park overlooking the water, because, with her August birthday, Norma’s zodiac sign was the lion. The statues stood tall and splendid, with their chests puffed out. Lions commanded authority, with their strong wills and the courage to do whatever it took to survive. The lion statues, her grandma explained, represented her. Norma Lynn. The Lioness.

Norma’s grandmother had been raised by affluent parents. They had lived on New York’s Central Park West. Rosalie had ended up marrying a jeweler, although they eventually divorced. Many years later, after Norma got out of nursing school, she found out that her grandfather lived in Florida and decided to call him in case he wondered what she’d made of her life.

“Hi, it’s your granddaughter, Norma Lynn,” she could remember saying on the phone.

She would never forget his reply: “Do you want me to buy you a steak or something?”

“And that was that,” Norma remembered. He’d died of cancer not long after.

“She would tell me she loved me all the time, but it was more about how she treated me more than anything else,” Norma remembered of her grandmother. “She adored me. My parents were so abusive, but when I went to her house, I just felt bathed in love.”

Rosalie pampered her granddaughter as she pampered herself, fancying her up in pretty party dresses and putting bows in her hair. Norma remembered that she’d had her own bedroom in her house, which looked out onto the big backyard where her grandma had built a swing set just for her. Her grandma also had a vanity table and mirror, where she would sit and put on lipstick, shimmering powders, and floral-scented perfumes as her granddaughter watched.

Norma knew her mother and grandmother did not get along. Rosalie didn’t approve of Norma’s father, but the mother’s and daughter’s personalities probably would have clashed even without him in the picture. They bickered constantly.

When Norma worked at the University of Virginia, she drove to Newport News on the weekends to spend time with her grandmother. When Rosalie was diagnosed with breast cancer and ended up having a mastectomy, Norma helped her after the surgery, taking her back and forth to chemo and radiation treatments. Her grandmother spent five years in the clear, but then the cancer showed up in her lungs.

By the summer of 1990, Rosalie was about to turn eighty. Norma was working in New Jersey and raising her own family, but she spent three weeks in Virginia, caring for Rosalie as she spent her final weeks in hospice. Her grandma died on August 21, the day before Norma’s birthday, and it was as peaceful a departure as the first death she’d witnessed as a nursing student. And just like that time, she held her grandma’s hand through her final breath.

Norma’s mother didn’t come for the funeral, which the professor arranged the next day, her birthday, all on her own. Rosalie was buried the day after Norma’s birthday next to Norma’s great-grandmother in a cemetery off Chesapeake Bay.

In her will, her grandmother had left Norma enough money to buy a cabin in
New Hampshire. After the house in Newport News was put up for sale, most of her grandmother’s antique furniture ended up finding a new home in that cabin.

Ever since then, around the same three days each year and feeling the weight of her past, Norma had retreated from the rest of the world completely. She didn’t want to feel cherished. She took no phone calls. Answered no emails. Helped no one. She didn’t even let her family near her. Her self-isolation started the day before her birthday, August 22, and ended the day after.

Usually she ventured off to the cabin alone. Sometimes she curled up in bed until the days before and after were over. Her family knew better than to push the subject. They had stopped trying to throw birthday parties or bake cakes long before. There was no happy-birthday song. No unwrapping of gifts. Instead, they left her alone. Once she drove off by herself and didn’t tell a soul where she was going until she got back. They would have worried more had it not been her birthday week.

As an adult, she couldn’t remember her parents ever having thrown her a birthday party when she was young or acknowledging the day at all. Her mother had told her so often that she wished she had never been born that it had become clear that there was no reason to celebrate her life. When her grandmother told her the story of her birth, the girdles, the stillborn brother, she realized how close she had come to never being born in the first place.

“Shame,” as Erikson wrote, “is early expressed in an impulse to bury one’s face, or to sink, right then and there, into the ground. But this, I think, is essentially rage turned against the self.”

As a little girl, Norma had learned how to be nearly invisible. As an adult, she was at her most dynamic when front and center, teaching and helping people.

But every summer, when her birthday came around—two weeks before the fall semester began each school year—she couldn’t help it. She found herself wishing to be invisible again.

Fall Semester 2008

A day before the first day of class that September, a young man showed up in the professor’s office to introduce himself. He was wearing a shirt and tie, with two cell phones strapped to his belt, one for personal matters and the other for work. He stood five feet, six inches and weighed 180 pounds, mostly muscle, only 2 percent body fat, and politely made his plea to be admitted into the death class, despite the waiting list.

His name was Israel, and he rattled off all of his accomplishments, his words colored by a lisp, one he’d spent many days of his youth trying to get rid of. He was working at a boot camp for juveniles and mentoring high-risk youth throughout the community. He’d worked with organizations promoting safe sex and gang prevention. He wanted to learn more about death so he could boost his qualifications on his résumé, maybe end up doing some grief counseling. He flashed a close-mouthed, dimpled smile, careful to hide a gap between his front teeth.