The Death Class: A True Story About Life (25 page)

No wonder his father had killed himself in prison, Jonathan thought. If that was how the mentally ill were treated, that might have seemed the best option.

He also went with Norma and her class one afternoon when they visited Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. Jonathan’s father had been housed there. So had his brother. It looked much like he remembered from his trips there to see Josh: a constellation of buildings located on a vast rolling green meadowlike space. The brick wards stood four and five stories tall and were mostly vacant. The hospital, as Jonathan learned, now served 440 patients on site—but at one time the wards had had 3,800, as a staff member who had volunteered to be the tour guide explained. The buildings had been deemed no longer livable, due to lead paint and asbestos. The guide pointed out buildings in which insulin shock therapy used to take place. Ivy crawled up the exterior walls, and some of the windows had been boarded up. Jonathan trailed behind the students, who tried to peer through cracks in the boards. Spiny brown spheres fallen from sweet gum trees crunched beneath his feet as the class headed toward a neighborhood of cottages, group living facilities, where residents stared from front porches and lawn chairs.

A bearded, shaggy-haired man walked with his hands clasped behind his back, looking giddy, releasing his hands to wave eagerly to the students. Most others just stared vacantly. One man, irritated that the commotion had disturbed his sleep, stumbled away with a grunt. A young blond woman with two braids in her hair, who looked to be in her mid-twenties, sat on a stoop, looking sad, while another man sat inside a
telephone booth, not talking on the phone, just sitting. Norma’s group passed a gigantic magnolia tree in full bloom. Summer’s fading bursts of whitish-pink blossoms stood out against the dull sky and carpeted the earth below.

The hospital tour guide told the group that most family members did not come to visit very often. Jonathan remembered how he had driven the two hours to Trenton every time he could to visit Josh while he was being treated here. The patients looked lonely, he thought. Some of the faces reminded him of his brother.

Many of New Jersey’s treatment centers for the mentally ill had shut down in the last three decades, the guide told the group, including the largest one run by the state, Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Parsippany. It had been closed down under Governor Christine Todd Whitman after she said in 2000 that the 613-patient home did not meet “the model of modern psychiatric care.” Hundreds of patients across the state had also been reevaluated and deemed to no longer need long-term care. As Jonathan learned from Norma, many of the mentally ill had since ended up on the streets or in prison. The Trenton Psychiatric Hospital guide added, “The system in corrections went up in their population of mentally ill people in prisons and jails. It’s horrendous because they don’t get the treatment, they’re often abused there.”

Jonathan was realizing how few people seemed to care about the mentally ill in America. No one seemed to understand that individuals living with schizophrenia and other mental illnesses had family members and people who loved them. Sometimes family members gave up on the mentally ill too.

When the psychiatric hospital field trip was over, Caitlin joined Jonathan, Norma, and a group of students at Applebee’s. Jonathan and Caitlin sat side by side, holding hands, as he described the field trip to her. At one point, Caitlin leaned her head against Jonathan’s shoulder and rested it there. He ducked toward her face and kissed her. At the end of the table, Norma ordered a mug of Samuel Adams and smiled at them. The weather had heated, and Jonathan and Caitlin’s relationship was warming too. Caitlin seemed to be getting serious now about wanting to leave her family’s drama behind her; she was moving toward her master’s degree
in psychology, realizing there was little she could do to change her parents’ behavior. For so long she had told Jonathan that she thought living in their house would allow her to monitor her parents, make sure they didn’t kill each other or themselves. Now she was talking to him of moving out.

Winter 2009

J
ONATHAN HAD RESUMED
his rigorous pace at his real estate job, setting financial goals, trying to repay debts and replenish the savings he’d spent caring for Josh. He told Caitlin and Norma that he wanted to start a mental illness awareness group. He created a Facebook page for it and attracted more than a thousand members in a matter of weeks. One woman, who said she was a “functioning schizo-affective” living in Oregon, posted a quote on the page about living “in the shadow of the ignorance of the world.” The flood of interest invigorated him. Jonathan decided he would hold a brainstorming meeting for the mental health awareness group in November. Norma reserved an auditorium for him at Kean University.

Jonathan spoke into a microphone at the front of a half-filled lecture hall. On an overhead screen flashed a photo of Josh smiling in the sand, wearing a floppy wide-brimmed hat and giving a thumbs-up, and the words “Brainstorming Session: How to Change the Mental Health System and Build Awareness. In Memory of Joshua Steingraber.”

Caitlin’s father and sister sat at the back of the auditorium behind Jonathan’s surviving brother, Chris, his girlfriend, and the brothers’ aunt and uncle, the same couple who had first taken the boys in when they were orphaned.

“We need your help,” Jonathan told the audience, “and that’s why we are here.”

Caitlin joined him at the lectern. She’d put her graduate research skills to use by pulling together studies and statistics in a PowerPoint presentation. She rattled off dizzying statistics, like how people with schizophrenia have a fifty times higher risk of attempting suicide than the general population and how suicide is the number one cause of
premature death among people with schizophrenia—with an estimated 10 to 13 percent killing themselves and approximately 40 percent attempting suicide at least once. Twenty percent of Americans in prison were seriously mentally ill, far outnumbering the number of mentally ill in hospitals. She cited a 2002 New York study that had found that 70 percent of prisoners who committed suicide had a history of mental illness. She added that approximately 200,000 individuals with schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness were homeless.

In the days that followed the mental health meeting, it was decided that the first order of business would be to organize a clothing and blanket drive for the mentally ill and homeless. Be the Change would team up with Jonathan’s mental health group for the event, which would take place the weekend before Christmas. As Jonathan envisioned it, they would hit up streets, alleys, train stations, parks, beaches—anywhere the homeless were living and sleeping—to provide food, clothes, and blankets.

But the days of planning and trying to coordinate a group of people for a common cause brought on head butting between Norma’s group and Jonathan’s. Norma told Jonathan that she didn’t want her students roaming unprotected through streets in the cold trying to find the homeless—it could be dangerous, and she couldn’t risk jeopardizing them in that way. Visiting shelters and train stations would be enough.

But how else would they find the most needy homeless? Jonathan demanded.

Norma suggested visiting the shelters, but Jonathan figured the people in shelters already had warm blankets and food. What was the point of helping people who already had help? He wanted to find the mentally ill who were sleeping on the streets, whom no one else had reached out to, the ones who were too sick or alone to seek shelter.

If he felt so strongly about it, Norma let Jonathan know, his group could do it his way, but Be the Change would have to do it its way. She warned him not to attach her name to his project if the volunteers were going to go to unsafe spots, since anything that could put young people in danger could also get her into trouble as the professor advising the undertaking.

But it seemed to Jonathan that Norma was trying to run everything according to her rules and under the banner of the Be the Change group, with their matching T-shirts. It wasn’t just the professor who was rubbing him the wrong way lately; some of her Be the Change student leaders seemed to want to boss him around when it came to conducting the project too. This had all started from his idea, his desire to help. It was not about T-shirts or sorority and fraternity community service brownie points. It was in memory of
Josh.
It was for everyone like him. Real, lasting change had to come from it.

What had started as a collaborative community service endeavor eventually ended up splintering into two separate projects.

December 2009

It was a Monday, with Christmas a little over a week away. Norma had much to do before then, as a snowstorm was charging toward New Jersey. Forecasters predicted that the sky could dump twenty inches in some parts. There were still stamps to purchase for Christmas cards and dozens of papers that needed grading. She still had to give her students their final exams. And she had to make a stop at the Marriott Hotel near the airport to pick up two hundred blankets for the homeless drive. She had a list of shelters plotted out for her students on a MapQuest printout on her seat. Her backseat overflowed with donations for the events: fleece blankets, comforters, even a mink coat donated by a student’s mother and stuffed into a garment bag. There were groceries to buy and cookies to bake, not to mention her father’s impending Christmas visit, which only added another layer of stress. She would book him a room at the Holiday Inn again.

The list of tasks revolved in her mind as she waited at the intersection of Wooding Avenue and Highway 1 in Edison, New Jersey, just past the CVS drug store. She had just dropped Becca off at school, and she was tired since they had been up late the night before, visiting a friend who had returned from overseas.

It was morning rush hour as the temperature dragged itself past the 40-degree mark. Her hands rested on the steering wheel, her radio off. If Norma had known that in a few minutes she would be stripped down and put onto a stretcher, she would have at least thought to put
on underwear. Or combed her hair or put on a touch of makeup. But instead she had walked out of the house that frigid morning wearing yoga pants, a T-shirt, and a winter coat but no undergarments. Sitting at a stoplight with the seat belt drooped across her upper body like a sash, she was just glad she had managed to brush her teeth.

A quarter mile down the road, a man driving a white SUV zipped westward along Highway 1. One set of stoplights would soon turn red, sending traffic at the intersection to a halt, and the hurried man in the white SUV would have to stop too. The light ahead of Norma would turn green, and her van was the first vehicle in line to proceed. There was a post office a few blocks away. She would stop there to get stamps for Christmas cards, she thought, sipping her Dunkin’ Donuts iced latte.

Inside the party bus, a stack of essays from women lay in a folder on the backseat. She had other inmates on her mind now. Unbeknown to the men at Northern State, Norma had also started teaching once a week in the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in Clinton, a forty-five-minute drive from Kean University. Some of the women in her new class had murdered too. But already she felt they responded to her discussions more genuinely than the men at Northern State did.

One of the women she had met at the facility was a bespectacled Chinese-American woman whose essay began “I was in the bathroom over my dead baby girl’s body.” At thirty-four, she had drowned her own child. “It began when I was first hospitalized for depression when I was twenty-four,” she had written. “I was struggling with my thesis paper, taking care of my schizophrenic mom, who’s been this way since she was sixteen.” The woman had been hospitalized and tried to jump in front of a subway train. She had drunk nail polish remover. She had even jumped off a bridge.

“I took the time to fill the bathtub with water instead of the baby tub, just high enough with warm water to submerge her,” the woman wrote. “. . . At first she noticed I was distressed and nuzzled me with her face, but seeing that I couldn’t be consoled she decided to play with the dinosaur I put in. Then I said to myself I must do it now or I will never do it . . . when it happened I was relieved. It felt like a great burden pressure or responsibility was taken from me.”

Norma thought maybe she could make more of a difference with those women.

The light turned green. Norma pressed the accelerator and rolled into the intersection. From the corner of her left eye, she noticed a flash of white.

Norma turned in time to see the SUV tearing through the intersection, heading straight for the driver’s side of the party bus. She heard the SUV’s wheels scream. The driver must have been slamming on his brakes, trying to stop. She heard his horn honk, a slow, blaring howl. She had one last clear thought: I am going to die!

She heard the grind of metal on metal, like giant claws dragging across a chalkboard. She didn’t feel the nose of the SUV impaling her door as if trying to skewer her body. She felt only the violent quake and heard the deafening blast. Her iced latte seemed to explode. Her head slammed against the glass.

She lost consciousness.

W
HEN
N
ORMA OPENED
her eyes, her head was throbbing and she could barely breathe. She was trapped inside the party bus. It felt as though the seat belt was crushing her chest. Ice cubes had scattered over her lap, onto the seat, into her hair, onto the floor. Her thoughts moved at rapid speed, but she felt as if she were wading through a murky dream.