The Death Class: A True Story About Life (27 page)

“I never left his side,” Caitlin said one day, sitting in a booth in a New Jersey diner after Jonathan moved to San Diego. “Even when I was still dealing with my own stuff. Never once. He knows that.”

There was something different about Caitlin as she jabbed at her salad, rain falling in fat drops against the windows. Her words had an edge now, a kind of self-assurance mixed with exasperation.

“I begged him not to break up with me. But he wanted to go, and there was nothing I could do about it,” she said. “No matter what I did, it wouldn’t change that. He’s very focused on his career. I’ve always made him first. I love him. That’s what you do when you really do love someone, you start to put them before you every time, and that’s what I started to do. Even in ways I totally shouldn’t have.”

Jonathan had walked away from Caitlin during the hardest time in her life. She had been trying to stay afloat, juggling five graduate school classes and her thesis while trying to earn money working as a nanny and still trying to save her parents from financial ruin and her mother from committing suicide.

But Jonathan had abandoned her before, and this time she was done begging. Maybe one day, they would be back together again. “I don’t want him to ever be hurt in any kind of way. He’s my favorite person in this world. We’ve seen each other through hell.”

For now, she would focus on herself, her needs, her career. She had come to a conclusion about her mother: “If my mom wants to die, she’s going to do it.”

Her mother had been hospitalized for suicide attempts and overdoses twelve times in the last two years. The doctors kept prescribing her pills.

During one of the those attempts, Caitlin had succumbed to her fears when she and her sister had opted to take her mother to the doctor’s office, after deciding that she needed a brain evaluation to see if her destructive behavior might have been due to a neurological problem. Caitlin sat in the passenger seat as her sister drove, and their mom sat sobbing in the backseat. They pulled onto the highway, and her mom asked for Caitlin’s bottle of water. She passed it back and when her mom returned it, Caitlin noticed two pills in the bottom of the bottle.

She looked back at her mother and realized that she had sneakily gulped down as many pills as she could hold in her mouth. She couldn’t even swallow them all, and some were still on her tongue. She toppled over, unconscious and drooling on the seat.

“Should we call the ambulance?” her sister asked.

“Keep driving!” Caitlin shrieked.

They pulled up to the doctor’s office, jumped out, and started yelling at everyone around, “My mom is in the backseat! She needs a doctor!”

Nurses took her into the emergency room and pumped her stomach. She vomited and defecated on herself, and a nurse asked Caitlin to help her clean it up.

“I’m sorry, Caitlin, I can’t do this,” her sister said, walking out of the room. Caitlin cleaned up the mess the best she could.

Again her mother was admitted to the ICU and then the psych unit. But Caitlin had reached a point where she no longer felt the kind of mind-consuming agony that she once had. Her OCD, fears of her mother or father dying, it all seemed to fade away. All of the craziness, she said, “pushed me into not being so anxious about it anymore.”

The family house ended up going into foreclosure, and Caitlin’s mother separated from her father, moving into her own apartment. On a recent night, Caitlin had gone over to visit after her mother stopped answering her phone. She prepared herself to find her mom dead inside. She unlocked the door, but the chain lock had been fastened across it. Caitlin put her foot through the door and tried to pry it open; she slid her body into the slim crack, trying to push the door open with the back
of her shoulder and break the chain. She kept pushing and pushing, and pretty soon she noticed she had slipped right through the crack, into the apartment. The chain was still intact.

“I was, like, how did that happen? I was so confused,” Caitlin said, bursting into laughter as she explained how ridiculous the whole situation was. Who knew being thin could be so handy?

Once inside, she found her mother knocked out, unresponsive. Caitlin called an ambulance. When Caitlin arrived in the ER, she didn’t cry. Instead, she lectured her mother after they pumped her stomach: “You would have died if you didn’t have a daughter that ran to your apartment and broke through the chain.”

Caitlin told her that her three daughters and husband have been by her side through everything, yet she made all of them feel as though their love was not enough to make her want to live. “We’ve been mistreated,” Caitlin continued. “We’ve done nothing wrong. We didn’t create this problem for you. You’re making it our problem.”

“I never thought about it that way,” her mother replied through tears.

Caitlin still loved her mother, as she still loved Jonathan. But she was done trying to make them show her that they loved her back. “I have always felt totally comfortable loving other people with all my heart,” she said. “But I never felt comfortable loving myself. That wasn’t even a thought in my mind.”

Not anymore. Norma’s lessons finally made sense. Caitlin revealed her right hand. This time there were no bandages or bloody cuts. Instead her wrist revealed a newly inked tattoo: a skeleton key. Her dad, who first helped her begin collecting the keys, was finally beginning to recover and let go of his broken marriage. He had accompanied Caitlin when she got the tattoo. Her dad had always told Caitlin never to give up, and now he was following his own advice by trying to move on too. The tattoo symbolized all of the doors Caitlin had open to her now. Only she had the magic key. She was in control of her own destiny.

Caitlin had graduated from the Kean master’s program in psychology two months earlier—and with her stellar recommendations she had already been offered a job. She would begin her new career as a middle school psychologist in the fall, and now she was working toward a PhD.

“I can’t change everybody,” she said.
“I can’t change what happens. I can’t change what decisions they’re going to make. The times I accomplish the most is when I say, ‘I have to do what I have to do.’ ”

J
ONATHAN AND
C
AITLIN’S
love story would not end there.

By 2011, they decided to try to make their relationship work again. It started long distance. Jonathan flew back to New Jersey every couple of weeks. Caitlin made trips to San Diego. But the distance took its toll as both realized how much they did not want to live without each other.

After more than a year apart, Jonathan returned to New Jersey.

By 2012, Jonathan and Caitlin moved into their own place together.

But each of them felt like they were “waiting for things to turn back into the amazing relationship we once had,” Caitlin said. “It never did.”

They broke up again, and Jonathan moved out of their apartment.

Through it all, embracing her own trauma, Caitlin had realized, had only helped her professional life. “I watched Dr. Bowe that way.”

Caitlin and Norma had stopped speaking for months after the car accident but ended up reuniting. Caitlin had not realized how severely Norma had been injured, and their disagreement over a mental health project was not worth losing each other. The professor, as far as Caitlin could tell, never once apologized for who she was.

“Everyone admires her because of that. But that is not an easy thing to do. You have to be brave to do that,” Caitlin said. “And she has shown me how to be brave.”

After the car accident, Norma was forced to rest. People waited on her, catered to her, coddled her. Her bedroom at home was upstairs, and she was too dizzy to maneuver the steps, so Norm helped make a resting place for her on the couch downstairs in the living room next to the fireplace. He brought extra blankets and pillows and slept on a couch next to her, in case she needed him.

But she hated feeling helpless. She felt as though she was wasting precious time restricted to the sofa, thinking of all the things she could be doing with her days, the lessons she was missing out on teaching, the students who needed her back at school, the Be the Change projects that needed guidance. She thought of her own volunteer endeavors, how she had only just begun working with the incarcerated women before the accident, and already she was missing in action. She didn’t want them to feel abandoned.

Her daughters went to classes. Norm went to work. The new school semester began without her. Life went on outside while she was trapped at home. She felt her impatience and urgency bubbling up inside of her. What could she possibly do from the couch? She watched the televised devastation of the January 12 earthquake in Haiti, a magnitude 7.0 with hundreds of aftershocks. The natural disaster killed 230,000 people and injured 300,000.

I am a nurse, she thought, I should be in Haiti helping! She had been involved with a Caribbean medical mission; now she contacted a local nursing organization with links to Haiti and tried to arrange a trip with them.
But the project did not pan out, and Norma begrudgingly realized, at her doctor’s urging, that her health was still too fragile to travel overseas and parachute into a disaster region, no matter how much training and goodwill she had.

That week, she spoke to a filmmaker friend named Preston Randolph, whom she had met through a student she had taken on a field trip to a sweat lodge. Preston had been working on a documentary about the poverty-stricken Native Americans living on a reservation in South Dakota. He told Norma that many of the thousands of residents could not pay their heating bills and had no ability to cook without propane. A January blizzard had hit, and many were at risk of freezing to death in the cold winter weather, particularly the children and elders.

Preston had gathered hundreds of coats, gloves, blankets, and boots on his own and loaded them into a U-Haul trailer for the residents. He wrote a letter about these dire conditions he was trying to get the word out about, urging the same Americans who had reached out to Haitians after the earthquake and to the people of New Orleans after the levees had broken to turn their eyes to Native Americans who were suffering.

Norma called over her neighbor Chris Rodda, a blogger for the
Huffington Post
, who agreed to write a blog about the Native Americans in South Dakota. Her item ran on the
Huffington Post
on January 27. In it, Rodda also posted Preston’s letter, along with the address of the propane company where people could pay directly for a resident’s propane, which ran $120 minimum per delivery. Rodda mentioned that she’d learned of the story from her friend Norma Bowe, who had already paid for three propane deliveries herself.

Another blog, Daily Kos, reposted Rodda’s item on January 29 and continued reporting on it. Producers on
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
on MSNBC read the blog entries and assigned the show’s own reporters to check it out.

On February 8, Olbermann mentioned the tribal situation in a thirty-second segment on his show. He mentioned it again the next night. His show’s website linked to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Storm Relief Emergency Assistance. Within twenty-four hours, people had donated approximately $185,000 to help. By February 12, tribal officials reported
that 95 percent of the power was back on. Olbermann told viewers, “Your contributions to Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Storm Relief Emergency Assistance are now at about a quarter of a million dollars.”

Rodda and the bloggers at
Daily Kos
received a message from Olbermann, thanking them for bringing the Native Americans’ predicament to his attention.

N
ORMA RETURNED TO
teaching in mid-February 2010. It had been two months since her accident. She’d replaced the totaled party bus with a sporty black Hyundai Touring hatchback. She still didn’t feel as though she had fully recovered physically, but that did not deter her. After sitting at home for so long watching parts of the world crumble before her eyes on television, she came back to her students as vigorous as ever, wanting to bring her lessons about life and death to as many people as she could.

She continued monitoring the news. More tragedy followed in the months after the January 12 earthquake in Haiti. There were more deadly earthquakes, in Chile and China. Plane crashes in Libya, India, Russia, and into the Mediterranean Sea, killed 447 people, including the president of Poland. There was the story of a professor who had walked into a biology meeting at the University of Alabama on February 12 and shot six faculty members, killing three of them. Not to forget that by the end of March, 133 soldiers had already been killed that year in Afghanistan.

On April 20, the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine school massacre, the BP oil-drilling rig
Deepwater Horizon
exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing eleven men. At Kean, Norma’s Death in Perspective students discussed the oil worker victims as reports trickled out about the children, wives, and other family members they had left behind. The students talked about the suicide of William Allen Kruse, an Alabama charter-boat captain who had been found dead from an apparent gunshot wound to the head. He had been helping with oil-spill cleanup duties, and family members told the media that he had been deeply troubled by all of the devastation along the Gulf Coast. The class discussed those
deaths and the possible effects of oil pollution as another form of mass death. Weeks passed as thousands more barrels of oil gushed into the sea. Reports of devastated marine, wildlife, fishing, and shrimping habitats dominated newscasts.