The Death Class: A True Story About Life (24 page)

“What is she? Some kind of
goddess
or something?” Isis asked skeptically.

That day when Norma showed up with Becca, Isis flashed back to her childhood, the house in Highland Park, the happy family she envied. She knew this woman everyone seemed to adore.

Norma remembered her too. She stayed late that night talking to Isis on the porch. Isis told her all that had happened since they had known each other when she was a little girl, the motels and the beatings. Norma gave Isis her phone number and explained that her childhood hadn’t been so totally different from hers—only in Norma’s case, the state had never taken her away. She told her to call anytime.

Isis did call. Week after week. “I miss you,” she would say on voice mail messages. Norma always called back. At first Isis really didn’t believe this woman would remain part of her life for the long haul. Calling her was almost like a test, to see if she would really follow through with her word. Was she spending time with her for community service? Or was it real? Did she actually care?

But months passed, and there was Norma, still showing up, still calling back.

Isis met other students from the professor’s Be the Change group at Kean University, including a young man named Israel with a bodybuilder frame who walked around in button-up shirts and slacks, with two cell phones attached to his belt. He visited the shelter one afternoon to share his life story with the girls. He told them about his life running with a gang. He told them about his unconventional road to college. He
was so smart, so motivated, she thought. Isis had never really considered college. But Israel’s story set off a little sparkle inside her.

Norma had become the most stable force in her life, and Isis did not know what she would do if she ever lost the professor.

One day in December 2009, Isis called Norma and didn’t receive an answer. She called again. Left messages. But there was no return call. That wasn’t like her, Isis thought. She asked Nicole if she’d heard from Norma, but Nicole hadn’t either. Isis had a bad feeling, the kind she got when she knew her own life, or her mother’s, was in peril. Something was wrong. Christmas was coming in a few days, along with a snowstorm, and the professor was probably out running errands before both came.

She dialed Norma, but again it went to voice mail. Isis would soon find out that her hunch had been right: Norma had been hurt.

The professor who seemed invincible to Isis and so many others had been crushed inside the party bus by an oncoming truck, her ribs cracked, her brain bleeding, and paramedics on the way.

April 2009

The pledge that Jonathan had made to his brother while standing before his casket felt as if it were still lodged in his throat in the three months since Josh’s suicide. Something good will come of this, he thought. He had not figured out what exactly “good” would be.

Jonathan and Caitlin were not officially back together. Though they had been spending most nights together, they did not refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Yet night after night, Jonathan would bolt awake in a sweat from a nightmare in which he was again trying to rescue Josh or trying to save his mother from being murdered by his dad, and Caitlin would be there to calm him, to cradle him back to sleep.

Caitlin was there for him again one April afternoon, when Jonathan came to Norma’s death class to tell his family’s story for the first time. It was during that time of the year when, according to Norma, many depressed people who tried to hang on through the holidays began to give up. She called spring “the season of suicide.”

Jonathan took a desk in front of the circle, his hair gelled, wearing polished dress shoes and a button-down shirt, looking as if he had come prepared to give a business presentation to clients. Sitting behind Jonathan, Caitlin doodled on a piece of paper, avoiding eye contact.

Jonathan’s story came spilling out of him as Norma’s class sat riveted. That snowy night when he was a boy stumbling into the kitchen and his mother in a pool of blood, the barefoot car ride as his father stared him
in the eye in the rearview mirror, the bridge crash, little Josh trapped under the dashboard with a broken collarbone, their father’s talk of alien abductions, his suicide in prison.

He spoke of Josh’s brilliance and paranoia. The homeless shelter. The knife attack. Shouts of “Don’t look into my eyes!” Uruguay. A suicide note. Josh’s death on the train tracks.

Some of the girls in the class wept. But no one spoke. So Jonathan kept talking. Now he couldn’t stop. As he remembered, the morning after Josh died, he had popped out of bed and called Norma on her cell phone, explaining that he wanted to confront the psychiatrist who had sent Josh home after such a short session. “I was, like, ‘That fucking psychiatrist, I’m gonna kill him,’ ” Jonathan told the class.

Norma had tried to calm him that day, suggesting some legal and medical questions he could ask the man. Jonathan had hung up, grabbed a tape recorder, and headed to the psychiatrist’s office with plans to sue him for malpractice and negligence. With the recorder secretly running, the doctor had not seemed to remember much about the session with Josh. When he had come around to recalling the schizophrenic patient with suicidal thoughts, Jonathan jumped in: “Well, he killed himself, like, an hour after he left this office.”

The doctor, as Jonathan remembered, had put his head in his hands. But Jonathan didn’t think he really cared. “He didn’t even remember my brother’s name.”

Jonathan went on. “ ‘Just take another pill.’ I think that’s how my brother looked at it. ‘They’re just going to dope me up, and I’m never going to get anywhere.’ It’s like he ran out of options.”

Norma’s students remained silent, still riveted.

“What has your life been like since that time?” Norma asked. “Being a suicide survivor twice over now?”

“You can be pissed off,” Jonathan said, “get depressed, push people away, do a million things, but at the end of the day it’s either you’re going to move forward or you’re going to move backward.”

“What are you moving forward toward?”

“I said, ‘For the rest of my life I’m going to be taking care of my brother and I don’t care what it takes, how long it takes, I’m going to take care of him no matter what.’ . . . I had
to put him first. He was a priority to me, just like if you have a kid,” Jonathan replied. “Then he took his life. And I got my life back. Which is kind of weird. So if I did nothing with my life, if I was depressed all the time and didn’t accomplish great things, then him dying is for nothing.”

Caitlin rose, preparing to leave class early. She had folded a piece of paper into a note, which she left with Jonathan before slipping out of the room. On it, she had written, “I am so proud of you.”

A week after Jonathan shared his story with Norma’s class, Caitlin’s mother was admitted to the hospital again after overdosing on prescription pills—her third suicide attempt in six months. Caitlin received the call on her cell phone while at work on campus. Her caller ID said it was her dad.

Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, she thought, taking a deep breath. This is going to be bad.

“Hello?”

“Listen,” her dad said, “I’m calling Mommy. She’s not answering the phone. Something must have happened.”

I could leave right now, Caitlin thought. Her boss was in a seminar somewhere on campus. She could track her down. Tell her it’s a family emergency. I need to go home. She paused. But I don’t want to find my mom dead.

Caitlin hung up and started calling her sisters and friends, anyone else who might be able to check on her mother, get there quicker than she could. Finally she reached a friend who agreed to go to the house. Caitlin stayed on the phone with her as she entered, walking upstairs to her mom’s bedroom. “The door is locked, I can’t open it,” the friend said. She tried picking the lock and eventually made it inside.

Caitlin heard her friend gasp.

“What’s going on?” Caitlin shouted.

“Her wedding picture . . . she drew on it . . . I think she’s . . . I have to call 911.”

With that Caitlin dropped work and rushed home. When she arrived, she discovered that her mother had colored and scribbled all over a giant painting of herself in a wedding gown before overdosing on drugs. Caitlin used to love that image of her mother, forty years younger and beautiful. It was destroyed.

Her mom was admitted to the hospital again. And again she was released. Not even a week later, Caitlin was preparing to take a shower before meeting some friends when she heard her parents screaming and yelling at each other, and she raced downstairs to intervene. All of the years of yelling, threats of divorce, death, foreclosure on their home, couldn’t they just shut up and love each other like normal parents for once? Caitlin picked up a cup off the counter and threw it at the wall. Then she punched in the glass on a framed picture on the wall. Her blood spurted onto the floor.

“Leave!” Caitlin shouted. “Get out of here! Go away! You guys can’t be near each other.”

Her parents grew silent for a second. Then her father ran out of the house into the rain. Caitlin chased him outside in her socks, telling her sister, “Watch Mommy and make sure she’s not killing herself.”

Hours later, after the chaos at home calmed, Caitlin fell asleep and into a nightmare. She woke up and couldn’t breathe. Her nightmares were common. She often awoke with her jaw locked shut. She’d been in a minor car accident in high school, which had banged her up enough to cause temporomandibular joint disorder, or TMJ, which caused her jaw to sometimes slip out of place, especially during nightmares. It always took a while for her to pry her mouth open again.

The next day, Caitlin came to school with her long blond hair looped through the back of a baseball cap, its front emblazoned with a symbol of a hand with its middle and ring finger raised, thumb, index, and pinky curled down; her favorite comedian, Dane Cook, called it a “superfinger.” Caitlin’s own fingers were wrapped in white bandages like a boxer’s wrap.

Day after day, Caitlin found herself walking around campus feeling like a zombie, surviving on minimal sleep, trying to keep up her graduate school grades and job, all the while losing track of what day or month it was.

She turned to Jonathan for solace. He accompanied her to the hospital to visit her mom when she overdosed and to Norma’s office one day to talk to the professor. Caitlin trembled in the hallway and tried to hide her puffy eyes with sunglasses. Jonathan pulled her into a stairwell and hugged her until she stopped shaking.

But she could tell that her distress triggered thoughts of Jonathan’s not-so-distant past. He was trying to put the pain of his family’s deaths behind him, but Caitlin’s family chaos wouldn’t let him.

Summer 2009

Norma Bowe often said she believed there was a wonder in unleashing your story, horrible as it might be, out into the world. She told her students that speaking it aloud releases a different kind of power from writing it down on paper or typing it on a computer screen. Give it voice, and you never know what kind of gift might find its way back in return.

“. . . man
needs
to teach,” Erikson once wrote, “not only for the sake of those who need to be taught, and not only for the fulfillment of his identity, but because facts are kept alive by being told, logic by being demonstrated, truth by being professed. Thus, the teaching passion is not restricted to the teaching profession.”

Jonathan had felt the truth of that lesson in Norma’s classroom that day. He needed to tell his story now, and his story needed a happy ending. So he went in search of one.

Jonathan spent the next several months tagging along with Norma’s students on field trips to places such as Northern State Prison, where he saw the psychiatric unit, with its white-brick painted walls and a restraining chair.

“This chair will break you,” the guard told the students that day. It was black, with shackles attached to the bottom to hold ankles, and to each armrest. Two straps crisscrossed over the chest of an inmate who found himself in the seat. Those who refused to take their meds or had psychotic breakdowns, violent fits, or tantrums were confined to this chair for four-hour intervals, after which time a guard would enter the
room and release one of their hands to allow them to scoop food into their mouth. They were permitted to use the toilet, briefly, before being shackled to the chair again. But if the inmate couldn’t hold it until the next stint, well, “too bad, he’ll just have to shit himself right in this chair and smell it for the next four hours,” the guard said. If the restrained inmate got an itch, got irritated by a fly buzzing around his head, or felt too hot or cold, there was nothing he could do to ease the discomfort. The guard talked of one inmate with “666” tattooed across his forehead; he’d stayed in the chair for four days with no bathroom break. “That guy,” the guard said, “was my hero.”