The Death Class: A True Story About Life (29 page)

After the funeral was over, after his wife’s ashes had been scattered over Cape Forchu in Nova Scotia, where the two of them had visited a lighthouse on one of their earlier dates, after the media had gone home, Jerzy began to ponder how he would live with her memory. His stepdaughter, Francine Dulong, had suggested creating a peace center, and the idea had stuck with him.

Jerzy could not stand outside Norris Hall and see the memorial to the dead on the drillfield. Thirty-two slabs of limestone, each a foot wide, each bearing the name of each of Cho’s shooting victims, including Jocelyne Couture-Nowak. The stones formed an arch in the grass. He took a leave from the horticulture department to launch the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention, and two years after his wife’s funeral, he moved into his new office in the west wing of the second floor of Norris Hall.

“P
LANTS ARE NOT
solitary organisms,” Jerzy wrote in the
Traumatology
essay that Norma read to students en route to the Gulf Coast after they left Virginia Tech that afternoon. “Their capacity to withstand stress is heavily dependent on their interactions with other organisms in the rhizosphere, the zone that surrounds their roots.”

The bleeding heart, for example, dies in midsummer and stays dormant until the following spring. But its essence lives on underground; the plant’s seeds have been born in pods, where they absorbed water within the earth, flourishing into an intricate underground life system known as the rhizome. Part of this main stem bursts through the surface of earth in warm months, creating leaflets that absorb water and carbon dioxide from sunlight. Those elements transform into sugar that the bleeding heart, like most of life, needs to survive, while releasing a by-product—oxygen, which we need to survive—into the air.

As the plant matures, the heart-shaped petals blossom, ready to spread their seed to the next generation. The bloom will stay visible for a
single season. Meanwhile, underground, the rhizome is storing nutrients for the winter and working for the benefit of the community, sending sugar into the soil that surrounds it, on which microbes like bacteria feast. In return, bacteria help the flower survive, absorbing nitrogen from the soil and turning it into fertilizer to create a stronger, more resilient plant.

“Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome,” the psychologist Carl Jung wrote in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
. “Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

People, as Jerzy saw it, were not really so different from plants. In times of great stress they needed one another, needed the support of their communities, to endure. They became living proof of Erikson’s generativity.

So Jerzy invited Norma and her students to return to Virginia Tech in three months to give a presentation at the Center for Peace Studies and Violence Prevention’s first major event since it had been launched. They would get to meet experts from around the world who were working on nonviolence subjects.

Norma made a mental note of who would join her this time. She invited two girls from Isaiah House, and Isis was one of them. Since it was a conference on nonviolence, Norma knew there was another student she could not leave out. When she got ahold of Israel, he told the professor he would rearrange his work schedule, pitch in with driving duties, whatever she needed. He was definitely in.

I
SRAEL PLOPPED HIMSELF
behind the steering wheel, clipped his commercial driver’s license for trucks and buses to the visor of the van, and
turned up the hip-hop music on the stereo. Isis, wearing a bright pink Kean University T-shirt with an army green jacket over it, sat in the front passenger seat next to him. Leaning back in the driver’s seat with his hand on the wheel, Israel proceeded to zip down the interstate with a van of ten people in tow for the 480-mile trip.

Seven hours later, Israel delivered everyone in the van to Virginia Tech in time for the keynote address. The group stayed up almost all night with Norma, practicing for the next morning’s presentation in the lobby of The Inn at Virginia Tech. With the exception of Israel, most didn’t have public speaking experience, and they were terrified, stuttering through their lines, forgetting the explanations of the psychological concepts they planned to bring up, such as Robert Agnew’s General Strain Theory and Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

“What if I get up there and freeze?” one asked.

“What if I throw up?”

“You guys are going to do great,” Norma assured them.

They didn’t want their presentation to be all about theories and—taking a lesson out of Norma’s practice—some decided to share their personal experiences with violence and discrimination. By seven the next morning, the students had already put on their fluorescent green Kean University T-shirts and gathered in a meeting room to practice more. As the first audience members trickled into the assembly hall, Norma looked at her cell phone’s clock. The presentation would begin in minutes, but the room was mostly empty.

“Where is everyone?” Norma said. “Shouldn’t we wait for more?”

But they couldn’t. It was time to begin. The professors and other experts, the group soon learned, would not be coming. The students had been partitioned off in the basement of the Inn, while the world-renowned academics and scholars were meeting separately in the conference center upstairs.

Jerzy had not intended for the conference to be divided into two when he had begun planning it two years earlier—he’d always envisioned it as student-centered. But six months before, university officials had seized on the opportunity to build on Jerzy’s vision by creating a conference for academics and researchers, inviting their own speakers, including a
Harvard Medical School specialist in children’s exposure to urban violence, a speaker from the U.S. Department of Education, and a renowned researcher of antisocial and violent behavior and neuropsychology.

The Kean students didn’t understand the division, and it all seemed a bit unfair to Jerzy. Why not one conference? Why couldn’t students and professors present together? Wasn’t it important for people with PhDs and international followings to hear about what the students had to say?

The vice president and dean of undergraduate education at Virginia Tech approached the lectern and made a few brief opening comments. When he was done, he left the stage and walked out the door.

A moderator announced, “I invite Kean University and its contingent to come forward, please.” The group gathered in front of the lecture hall, the audience seats filled with about seventeen people. Norma cheered on the students from the second row.

Even with the paltry crowd, one unflaggingly supportive face in the audience made the effort seem worth it. Off to their right, in the front, sat Jerzy. He had the row all to himself.

When Israel’s turn came to speak, he recounted the life of crime that had led to his reformation. He was now training to go into law enforcement. He introduced the teen homeless shelter project, explaining that in the area surrounding Isaiah House, “Just since September, there have been 87 rapes, 105 murders, and over 2,000 robberies.”

When Isis took the microphone, she could not stop crying, explaining how her mother had done drugs, beaten her, and ended up in prison for eleven years. “I didn’t think I was going to make it,” she said. But as of the last marking period, she had received straight As and was now preparing for Kean University, along with two other girls from Isaiah House. An alumna had written her a $10,000 check to cover the tuition after hearing her story at a fund-raiser for Norma’s Be the Change group. Five other college applications had been received from the shelter for Fall 2011.

When their presentation ended, Jerzy rose from his seat. He walked over to Norma and her students, his face pink as a petal. He had tears in his eyes, and a smile took over his face as he went down the line and embraced each one of them.

Of Norma’s students, Jerzy
said that he felt most connected to Israel. The young man reminded Jerzy of the soldiers he had been put in charge of in Poland when he had been working for the army. The men had been criminals before going under Jerzy’s watch, and they were preparing to put down a rebellion in 1968. Jerzy’s task was to try to humanize them. He had managed to transform some of the former criminals and considered it among the biggest successes of his life.

Later, Jerzy could not forget a particular moment at the Virginia Tech conference when the students had acted out scenes led by the drama department. Israel had been paired with a theater professor who had tried simulating holding a gun. Without uttering a word, Israel took that man’s hand and redirected his finger in precisely the way it would be positioned if he were pulling a trigger.

Then Israel took his own hand and gently cupped it around the theater professor’s imaginary gun, as Jerzy and everyone else watched. Israel formed a shield with his fingers to block its make-believe bullets.

U
PON THE STUDENTS’
return from Virginia Tech, Be the Change continued to gain traction, participating in more home makeover projects, including one for a single mom with three kids, two of whom were wheelchair-bound. Their mother ended up enrolling at Kean University. They hosted a discussion on campus with the father of a Virginia Tech shooting victim, as well as trips to the Amnesty International Northeast Regional Conference and the Omega Institute’s Women & Power Conference, to which scholarships were provided to young women from Isaiah House and Kean.

Be the Change students handed out more than a thousand purple ribbons on campus to raise awareness about the issues of bullying following the suicide of eighteen-year-old Tyler Clementi, who had attended nearby Rutgers University. Clementi, who was gay, had jumped off the George Washington Bridge in September 2010 after his roommate had secretly taped him on a webcam having a romantic encounter with a man and then posted the video online.

The group launched “Operation PB&J,” in which students met weekly
to make two hundred to three hundred peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and stuff each into a brown paper bag along with fruit, juice, and other snacks, handing the items out to the homeless sleeping in and around Newark’s Penn Station. The cost to feed the homeless came to $100 each week, which students tried to raise; when they couldn’t, Norma paid it on her own. The student group also gathered clothes and toys for victims of the tornados in Joplin, Missouri, which Norma and Norm delivered in person during the summer break.

A half-dozen girls from Isaiah House enrolled as students at Kean University. By September 2011, Isis, who had become a freshman, was going along on some of the excursions like Operation PB&J. She had relied on such handouts when she was homeless.

In 2011, Be the Change began working toward becoming an official nonprofit. Norma had hopes that students could one day work or intern for the organization to gain experience and travel around the world doing community service projects. The group inspired a Be the Change club at nearby University High School and got permission to paint a “Before I Die” wall on their campus after seeing the concept in New Orleans, where a woman named Candy Chang had turned the side of an abandoned house into a giant chalkboard on which residents wrote their fears, hopes, and dreams.

At University High, Be the Change college and high school students worked together one rainy afternoon to paint black chalkboard paint over redbrick. They took turns finishing the sentence “Before I die I want to ___” in their own words. Several dozen declarations trailed across the wall in white letters:

“Before I die I want to fall in love.”

“Before I die I want to be a wife and mother.”

“Before I die I want to save a life.”

For a long time, I had kept in my possession a Polaroid photo of my high school friend Sangeeta in her coffin. I don’t remember exactly why I had it. Only that someone handed me the photo for safekeeping after the funeral and never asked for it back. I lost track of the person who gave it to me, so I tucked the photo away in an envelope, and then in a box, and tried to forget. Until I did forget.

Many years later, when I went digging through my boxes, I couldn’t find it. The photo was gone, beyond my grasp, a memory.

I had not seen Sangeeta’s mother, Parneeta, in sixteen years, but I still had one final assignment to complete. I always believed she’d packed up and gone back to Fiji. But in fact she had stayed. I discovered she lived only twenty minutes north of where Sangeeta had been killed.

One Sunday morning in 2010, after visiting my mother and grandparents in nearby Lynnwood, Washington, I arrived at a grayish blue home, walked past a colorful Big Wheel in the front yard, and knocked on her door.