The Death Class: A True Story About Life (22 page)

Jonathan stared at Josh. He looked sad, Jonathan thought, but he looked pretty good for being dead. He touched his skin. It felt cold.

“I love you,” he said. “I promise you will be remembered. Something good will come out of this.”

Then he said, “If you hear me, show me you are okay.”

He sat down and suddenly felt two distinct chills course through his body. Goose bumps broke out all over his flesh.

Jonathan smiled. Okay, he’s all right, he thought. He’s just fine.

Something good
would
come of this. But Jonathan had no idea how he was going to begin to keep that promise.

January 2009

The Tower
, the independent student newspaper, welcomed students back from a three-week winter break with this editorial:

We have just entered our spring semester in the midst of an economic recession, rising prices, impending budget cuts, and the growing realization that jobs and money are scarce. Whether you are a freshman or a senior, you are affected by this economic crisis and many watched the swearing in of Barack Obama as a sign of hope for the future—our future. Seniors who are graduating this semester are realizing that they are walking out of Kean and into a job market that is in trouble. They are competing with experienced older workers who cannot afford to retire and are looking for work too because many have lost their jobs.

Talk of furloughs, layoffs, and 10 to 20 percent tuition hikes had many in the campus community worried. Some of Norma’s students worked two or even three jobs while taking full course loads. Her classes included PE teachers, bartenders, hairdressers, UPS workers, prison guards, bank tellers, day care staff, beer and hot dog vendors, insurance agents, accountants, and even exotic dancers. She taught single parents, middle-aged divorcees, and late starters who hadn’t had jobs or enough money in their twenties to pay for college, so they’d decided to give it a go a decade or two later. Many were barely scraping by.

Some talked of parents whose homes had been foreclosed upon. Others had been laid off from their jobs.

In the first Death in Perspective class that semester, Norma went around the room to mark names off the roster and asked each of the students why they had enrolled in the class. Some students glossed over the question. Others proved again why the death class attracted a certain brand of student: they needed to process a personal experience with death.

A skinny, pointy-eared guy in a brown beret took his turn. “Uh, I lost a few friends, so you know, I have trouble talking about that.”

“You lost a few friends?” Norma asked.

“On my twenty-fifth birthday, I found my friend dead. We were drinking the night before, and he was dead. And that was rough.” He paused and swallowed. “You can see I’m choked up already.” The room fell silent, tense. He cracked a joke. “I’m also here because I owe lots of money, so I’ve got to get a degree to get a better job.”

As the months trudged on, the mood on campus darkened along with the early evenings, shifting away from those upbeat first days back to school around President Obama’s inauguration, when he had stood in his patterned red tie, his right hand raised, and been sworn into office. Clusters of students had crowded around to watch in Kean University’s auditoriums and lounges, clasping their hands together in prayer, raising their fingers high in peace signs and waving them from side to side like lighters, or pumping both fists in the air.

“In the year of America’s birth, in the coldest of months, a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river,” the president said in his speech that day. “The capital was abandoned. The enemy was advancing. The snow was stained with blood. At the moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words to be read to the people: ‘Let it be told to the future world . . . that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive . . . that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.’ ”

By March, some students had reached the breaking point, trying to
juggle midterms, jobs, bills, and stressful home lives. Some gave up on classes altogether. The temperature plummeted; it was too cold for anyone to stay outside long. The bare branches of the trees outside Norma’s classroom windows looked like bony fingers pressed against the sky. Her students needed something to inspire them in the depth of that icy New Jersey winter, when salt crystals had turned the granular snow on campus sidewalks a strange shade of blue.

O
NE AFTERNOON
,
N
ORMA
attended a conference on prison issues, where she met a preacher who ran nondenominational services for homeless and drug-addicted people in Newark; he introduced her to someone working with abused women, who told her about a homeless shelter just eight miles from the Kean campus that housed all teenage girls. Norma couldn’t believe she’d worked so close to it for the last decade and had had no idea it was there.

Norma got ahold of the address and hopped into her party bus to pay the girls a visit. She turned down the street and spotted the two fenced-off homes on a mostly dirt-lawn block in East Orange, in a neighborhood where it seemed that every fourth front porch revealed windows and doors boarded up with plywood.

Red-lettered signs hung on telephone poles down the street with the words
AVOID FORECLOSURE
. A corner bodega sat shuttered at midday. Empty lots had been taken over by weeds and were littered with wrappers, crumpled cans, and loose flyers. Men slept on street corners nearby, and graffiti scrawled on one wall read: “RIP.”

The professor would later learn that murder and aggravated assault rates in the neighborhood were four times the national average, and most of the young residents inside the two structures that made up this homeless shelter, known as Isaiah House, had been abused and thrown away. Some had parents who had died of AIDS. Two of the girls were pregnant.

These particular houses were identical and side by side, three stories high, eggshell-colored with brown trimming and pointy roofs. Walkways connected them to each other. Burly trees shielded them like windbreaks,
as if insulating the nine teenage girls who lived inside from whatever threats might be whirling through the blocks beyond.

The professor climbed the paint-chipped steps of the house, approached the front door, and knocked.

T
HE RESIDENTS OF
Isaiah House didn’t really know what to make of the cheery woman with the high-pitched voice who showed up at their door unannounced one afternoon, suggesting that maybe she could be of assistance. She told them she’d decided to drop by and introduce herself, that she was some kind of doctor or something. “Dr. Bowe.”

The girls had grown accustomed to a revolving door of do-gooders dropping off used clothes or recycled gifts at their doorsteps. Sometimes the bags sat in piles for weeks, unopened.

“You know how people come and donate stuff?” a seventeen-year-old resident, Nicole, asked one day. Nicole was the sixth of nine siblings born to a mother who was a heroin and crack addict, and she had been in and out of the foster care system since fifth grade. “People come in and out of your life, you see them every once in a while, but Dr. Bowe just really, really stayed.”

Norma kept coming back, sometimes just to hang out or talk. She brought nurses to give them checkups and students to tutor them.

During one of those early visits to the Isaiah House, the professor asked each girl if she could redecorate her room, what would it look like? The walls were now mostly bare, drab yellow and gray, with peeling paint. Some rooms had no rugs on the wood floors. Some windows had bars and no curtains. Living here was certainly better than living on the street, the girls said. Counselors and staff cared for them well. But the decor was pretty plain.

One girl said she wanted a giant black rose on her wall. Another requested bright pink walls, and a third said purple. One preferred one pink wall, one green.

Norma rallied some of the same Be the Change students from the previous semester who had redecorated the hospice facility. The group had been attracting fraternities and sororities across campus wanting to get
involved in service projects too. She recruited her Death in Perspective classes, her mental health classes, and her students from past semesters.

With Norma in the party bus leading the caravan, Be the Change went to Isaiah House one weekend in late March in droves—more than a hundred students in all—and unloaded a dozen truckloads of sofas, shelves, desks, and hundreds of buckets of paint donated by Home Depot and Sears. Courtyard by Marriott donated hotel rooms for the girls to stay in while the students set to work.

All weekend, paint-splattered students worked away as hip-hop and reggaeton music blasted from a stereo. Jonathan, three months after Josh’s funeral, pitched in to help deliver donated furniture. Norma had been trying to convince Jonathan to visit her death class and share his experiences with his mother’s, father’s, and brother’s deaths with them when he was ready. He wasn’t yet.

Meanwhile, one tireless young man seemed to have thrown himself into the home makeover project with particular ferocity. He stayed from the early hours of the morning into the night, lifting, hauling, scraping, painting, polishing, and cleaning. He’d driven to faraway donors’ homes to pick up sofas, dining tables, and televisions and returned to unload everything from the truck into the Isaiah House. He’d single-handedly ripped out old carpets and hoisted bookshelves over his head.

It was Israel.

He had learned a few lessons since his induction into the death class, such as how much he still had inside of him to give back to a society to which he used to believe he didn’t owe a thing. And lately, if his professor needed anything—anything at all—Israel was one of the first to drop what he was doing to step in and help, like the day a young woman from Isaiah House had become a student at Kean University. With no parents or friends around, she needed someone to accompany her through her orientation on the first day. Norma, who was scheduled to be in class, called Israel.

He took off work to show the freshman around, stand by her side as a friendly face, as if letting her know without having to say it: I know it’s scary, and it might feel like you don’t fit in here. I used to feel that way too.

The
girls from Isaiah House were greeted after the spring makeover with a chalkboard on a wall and the words
WELCOME HOME
. Some burst into tears upon returning to their bedrooms. The walls now gleamed with shades of yellow, pink, green, purple, and orange and images of flowers, butterflies, and clouds. They walked through a spruced-up, brightly painted telephone center, office area, and dining and recreation rooms. The handprints of the volunteers decorated an olive-colored wall—splotchy turquoise, red, and lavender silhouettes of fingers and palms.

Israel walked over to the wall and pressed his palm and fingers against one of the dried handprints. He nodded in Norma’s direction and grinned.

March 2009

I
SAIAH
H
OUSE FILLED
Norma with a different kind of satisfaction from prison, an unpolluted optimism. Each time she went to the newly beautified shelter in East Orange, Norma met another girl who she believed, with the right dose of attention, could climb her way out of homelessness and into college.

The professor decided it would be her goal to get as many girls from the Isaiah House as possible enrolled as students at Kean University, where she and her Be the Change students could mentor them, and New Jersey would cover tuition since they were wards of the state.

One afternoon a week after the makeover, Norma returned to the Isaiah House with her younger daughter, Becca, a free spirit who resembled her mother, with her long cinnamon hair in loose natural curls, thick eyebrows, and feet that nudged outward when she walked. At sixteen, with two PhD parents who specialized in mental health, Becca seemed to have no doubts about her identity. “Don’t shrink me!” she would say whenever her child psychologist father tried to psychoanalyze her.