The Death Class: A True Story About Life (2 page)

Sangeeta was the first person I had known and cared about who died violently, and hers was the first death I ever covered as a reporter.

T
HEN IT WAS
Monday, April 16, 2007. Newswires hummed. There had been a shooting at Virginia Tech University. Monitoring from my desk in New York City, where I had been stationed as a national correspondent for the
Los Angeles Times,
I read reports that said the estimated death toll had climbed to twenty, with the final count as yet unknown. I booked a flight to Virginia. There was a windstorm and the small plane rocked like a boat riding torrential waves, but we touched down safely and I rented a car and drove to the campus in Blacksburg, arriving as the sun was beginning to rise.

Not even twenty-four hours had passed since a twenty-three-year-old college senior named Seung-Hui Cho had gone on a shooting rampage, and some families still did not know if their loved ones were alive. That became clear during my first stop at The Inn at Virginia Tech, a hotel and conference center with a gray stone exterior, which had become a gathering center for family and friends. As I arrived, a red-eyed man was beginning to wade with desperation toward the hundreds of media trucks and satellite dishes blanketing the hotel parking lot. When I approached he told me that his daughter, Erin Peterson, an eighteen-year-old freshman in international studies, had not responded to his phone calls. She was a basketball player (his first daughter had died of cancer at 8). She would certainly have found a way to contact her family to let them know she was alive.

“She would have called,” a woman behind him whimpered. “She would have called us by now.”

The family told me they had visited hospitals in the area but could not find her. They had received word that she might be at one hospital and headed there, but the patient turned out to be someone else. Now Erin’s father just wanted information, and he was willing to hurl himself before a gaggle of reporters just in case any one of us could help. He gave me his cell phone number and told me to contact him if I heard anything about his daughter.

There was a candlelight vigil on the Virginia Tech Drillfield that night as the sky turned from blood orange to plum blue and hundreds of people wrapped their bodies in blankets bearing the school’s name and lit candles inside Dixie cups. The field shimmered with fire and murmured with prayers: “Just bring this campus comfort.”

I glanced over at Norris Hall, a stone structure. Inside, thirty-one of the thirty-three students and faculty present had died the previous morning. The highest death toll had occurred in room 211, an intermediate French class, where Cho had killed twelve others and wounded six, before taking his own life. Erin Peterson, I soon learned, had been killed in 211 also. That was the room I decided to write about, focusing on the people who had lived and died in it.

It took a week to track down the few survivors who made it out, and from each interview the same character emerged as the heart of the class, its professor Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, also known as “Madame Couture.” She had been killed trying to protect her students. Madame Couture adored the French language and reveled in teaching it, punctuating her comments on students’ papers with exclamation points and breaking into French songs during class, flailing her arms like a conductor as students followed her lead, botching lyrics and singing out of tune. Sometimes she got so excited about a lesson that she had to interrupt her sentences to take a deep breath.

Her funeral was held at the Peggy Lee Hahn Garden Pavilion eight days after the shooting. I walked across campus to the funeral with some of the students she’d taught who had survived. Madame Couture’s wooden coffin was draped in the Acadian flag. Her husband, Jerzy Nowak,
was head of the horticulture department, and his wife loved flowers and plants as much as he did. Her funeral took place on his birthday.

“Jocelyne, my darling, if Heaven exists, this is your Heaven,” he said in front of the crowd of seven hundred. “You are surrounded by family and friends you cherish, by students you respect and passionately help to succeed.”

One student who spoke at the funeral was supposed to have been in room 211 on the day of the shooting but had awakened late and not gone to class. He had lost his best friend in the rampage and offered these words about his professor on his classmates’ behalf: “Madame, have you touched all of us in a profound way that we will never forget, and will we always love you?”

He paused and continued. “Mais oui, Madame. Mais oui.”

Those were the final words I wrote. The article was published, and I flew back to New York a few days later, spent and sad.

In the dozen years since Sangeeta’s death, I had attended scores of funerals, written hundreds of obituaries, knocked on the doors of victims and survivors of tragedies, and interviewed family members and friends of the dead. I had become a journalist to try to explain and interpret the world and its stories. But death’s mercilessness and meaning, I could not figure out, no matter how many stories I wrote.

Winter had not yet eased its clench on New York City in the days after my return from Virginia. One morning, a Web link popped up on my screen in a condensed search engine feed on New Jersey, which immediately caught my interest. A student from a campus not far from New York had written about a popular teacher. The headline read, “Gaining a Little Life Perspective: Capture each moment of your life in Death in Perspective, an amazing class offered at Kean.”

A professor of death.
Maybe I could write an article about her class? Who knew, maybe I would even learn something in the process.

H
ER NAME WAS
Dr. Norma Bowe, a registered nurse who also held a master’s degree in health administration, a PhD in community health policy, and a tenured professorship at Kean University in Union, New
Jersey, a thirty-minute drive without traffic or two quick train rides away from New York City. A proud mother who had raised two daughters, she had spent two decades working in emergency rooms, intensive care, and psychiatric wards before coming to Kean University, where she taught classes on mental health, nursing, and public health. But Norma was most widely known around campus as the professor who had created the most popular class at Kean University. Rivaled only by Human Sexuality, Death in Perspective had a three-year waiting list.

The professor and I hatched a plan. She agreed to allow me to shadow her class as a journalist documenting the experience for as long as it took. But I would also have to participate in her class as a student.

And so the official odyssey began on the first day of the Spring 2009 semester, although I had been following her around for about six months already. The moment I stepped into her office, Norma made it clear that she was no stranger to her own death dramas. She often found herself cast in the center of them.

She launched into a recap of the winter break, speaking almost without pause: “A student of mine called me on New Year’s Day, hysterically crying. I was home by myself. . . . Her father, because of the financial crisis, had decided to blow up the house with his wife and son in it. He figured, in his crazy thinking, it would be better for the mother and son to go to Heaven.”

When the girl arrived home, the house was filled with gas. Norma knew the man needed a psychiatric evaluation. Norma picked the student up and drove her father to the hospital.

Meanwhile, another student’s mother had tried to commit suicide right after New Year’s Day, and a young man she knew had succeeded in killing himself. Norma had been called upon for crisis relief in each case.

Norma pulled out a pile of photocopied syllabi. A bumper sticker stuck to her filing cabinet read:
WATCH OUT I’M FRESH OUT OF ANTI-DEPRESSANTS
. Taped to the office door was an article: “One Year After Virginia Tech.” Videos and books spilled onto the floor, with titles such as
Killer Disease on Campus: Meningitis; The Autobiography of Dying; Life, Death and Somewhere in Between; Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope
from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder; Remembrances and Celebrations: A Book of Eulogies, Elegies, Letters and Epitaphs; The Realities of Aging; There’s No Place Like Hope: A Guide to Beating Cancer in Mid-sized Bites; Young Shooter; Jesus Camp; Jumping off Bridges.
 . . . On her desk lay a photocopied suicide note that a student had given her—written not by him but by his mother. It had dried blood staining its edge, and the scribbled words on it read, “I know you guys diserved [
sic
] better I’m sorry I was what u got.”

Nearby was a printout of an email titled “Hi I’m in Iraq again.” It had been written to Norma by a former Death in Perspective student who was now assigned to a hospital at Balad Air Base. The staff sergeant described treating a two-year-old boy with burns over 70 percent of his body and a thirty-eight-year-old Iraqi gunshot victim. “I swear she was shot more times than Tupac, Biggie Smalls and 50 Cent,” he wrote, requesting that she share his letters with her classes. Norma tucked the letter into her pile of syllabi, gathered up her keys and books, and click-clacked down the hall toward the classroom in her black high-heeled Mary Janes.

F
OR MUCH OF
the early twentieth century, talking openly and honestly about death was considered poor taste—especially inside classrooms. But by the 1960s, some scholars had come to believe that death education was as important as sex education, if not more important—since not everyone had sex.

Pioneers such as the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross had begun dragging “death out of the darkness,” as a 1969
Time
magazine article put it, and the first college class on death was taught at the University of Minnesota in 1963. Others followed, and the burgeoning field soon came to be referred to as thanatology.

By 1971, more than six hundred death courses were being offered across the United States, and five years later that number had nearly doubled. Now thousands of such classes can be found across disciplines from psychology to philosophy to medical science to sociology. Scholarly research journals focusing on death and dying have emerged, as well as
textbooks and death education conferences. Some colleges offer degree and certificate programs with death, dying, and bereavement concentrations, and increasingly, as at Kean University, undergraduates can take such classes as general electives.

Teachers take their own approach to death classes; some stick to pedagogy, lecturing about academic research and theory, while others put their own spins on it, with students lighting candles and sitting in silence before beginning class.

But Norma had hardly heard of any of those other death classes when she designed her curriculum more than a decade ago.

W
HEN THE DOOR
to room 426, Hennings Hall, swung open that January afternoon, two dozen students greeted the professor. The early ones sat at desks lined up in rows, their faces illuminated by white lights, the kind you might find in a hospital ward. A sunbeam of dust particles fluttered through half-raised window blinds.

“Hi, everybody,” Norma said, dimming the lights. “The first thing we’re going to do is set up in a circle.”

The students began scooting chairs and desks. I took a seat near the door.

“This is a health class,” she continued, “but it’s not like any kind of health class that you’ve ever had before. It’s probably not like any class you’ve had before in any subject.”

She distributed the copies of the syllabus and began to go through each section. She would use a variety of books, she explained, including
Tuesdays with Morrie,
by Mitch Albom, stories about visits to a former teacher on his deathbed, and
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,
by Jean-Dominique Bauby, a memoir he wrote after a stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome, a condition in which his mind and consciousness worked, even though he could not move or talk. He wrote the book by blinking his left eye, Norma told the class, as an assistant read him letters of the alphabet.

She held up the
Death, Society, and Human Experience
textbook, which each student was required to purchase, but if she spent each class
lecturing from it, she said, “You all would be very bored and drooling out of your mouths.” She mimicked a person keeled over atop her book, as a few students chuckled. The class would be more heavily focused on discussions, with some lectures and exams based on readings. “So be on top of your reading.” But the core of the class, she explained, would be the personal assignments and field trips.

“Most of you are here for a reason,” she said. “Maybe someone’s story in this room, or someone’s experience, might press on some scar tissue for you. So that’s okay. We’re sitting in a circle right now because we’re really beginning a bereavement group.”

The students tried not to look at one another. Norma gave out the first assignment. They opened their notebooks and waited for her cue to take notes: “Write a good-bye letter to someone or something that you’ve lost,” she said. “I’d like you to say whatever you need to say to that person, and then I’d like you to sign and date the letter. Whatever popped into your head first when I said those words, that’s where you should go.”

“Any questions?” she concluded. The students shook their heads and began zipping coats and bags. “All right, have a good week.”

A
FEW DAYS
later, on assignment for the newspaper, I met one of the survivors of the US Airways flight that had landed in the Hudson River at a Dunkin’ Donuts near his home in Long Island. At twenty-three, Bill Zuhoski was not much older than most of Norma’s students.

He told me how he had been sitting in the very back of the plane when it started to plummet. The second of five siblings, he had quickly begun to agonize that his family would learn of his death on television. The man sitting to his right did not say a word, but the man to his left squeezed his arm and prayed, all the while asking “Are we over the water? Are we near the airport?” Bill peered out the window, giving updates.