The Death Class: A True Story About Life (3 page)

The back of the aircraft slammed into the water first, bashing Bill’s forehead against the seat in front of him and busting up his face. People raved afterward that it was such a smooth landing, but it certainly did
not feel like that in the back. His glasses flew off. Without them he could hardly see his hand in front of him. Frigid water poured into the plane, rapidly rising to his waist. No, he thought, it would not be the crash that killed him; he was going to drown. He stripped down to his underwear, bolting over the top of the seats like a lizard. He slithered so fast that soon there was no water, just the fabric tops of seats. He missed the first emergency exit, which he might have been able to spot had he been wearing his glasses, but found his way to an exit at the front of the plane and onto a slide that led to a floating dinghy.

People saw his shirtless, shivering body in the raft on television screens and in photos around the world. “Hey,” some said to him afterward, “you’re the naked guy!” It seemed that no one else on board had stripped down in a panic as he had, but in the moment all he could think about was becoming as weightless as possible so he could swim, fast. Survive.

In the weeks that followed, people from across the country sent him letters tucked in Bibles and told him, “Congratulations on being alive.” Dozens of reporters like myself kept asking the same questions: What was it like to cheat death? How has this changed your life?

He had a hard time answering. “I don’t really know. I will tell you when it sets in.”

Others wondered whether he’d found God. But Bill never really felt he’d lost God. There had been no immediate revelation, no overnight awakening, no obvious rebirth. It almost seemed to frustrate him that he couldn’t come up with something more profound to say about his world-captivating brush with death, besides “I don’t sweat the small stuff anymore, like traffic.” He offered a half smile, as if he knew how insufficient that sounded.

I bade farewell to Bill and took a seat in a cold, empty station on Long Island. The next train was an hour away. I opened a blank page on my computer screen and sat there for a moment, remembering what Norma had told the class: “Whatever popped into your head first when I said those words.”

Then I began to type: “Dear Sangeeta . . .”

Death’s Secrets

When it came to death, Norma Bowe had the fearlessness of a swift-water rescue team; when everyone else wanted to get away from the force of the current, she went charging straight into it instead. Not many threats in this world seemed to rattle her: not guns, murderers, or the criminally insane, and certainly not death. With cheeks that swelled when she smiled as if she’d stuck a Tootsie Pop beneath each one and a high-pitched reverberating laugh, she made you feel as though, if you could only hold on to her hands long enough, you might just be the one person lucky enough to escape.

There was an air of invincibility surrounding her, a feeling so magnetic that long after class had been dismissed students found themselves wanting to hang out with “Dr. Bowe,” which was what they called her, despite her insistence that they call her Norma. They lingered in her office for hours, even when she wasn’t there. When she actually did get sick or injured, some of them reacted with stunned disbelief, as if they didn’t think a woman like that could be mortal. But she knew there was an art to surviving. That is what she wanted her students to learn.

Norma had a fondness for cemeteries and could spend hours perusing inscriptions on tombstones or kicking back on a freshly mowed patch of grass next to the grave of a stranger. If she had enough free time, which was rare, she might even bring along one of her favorite Jodi Picoult novels to read. When traveling to a new city, Norma did not think it at all odd to pay a visit to the local graveyard, snapping photos as if it were a regular tourist destination. She believed cemeteries held
the stories that history books could not always document; they were the overlooked, underused classrooms beneath our feet, so it made sense to her to teach a lesson inside one every once in a while.

The Rosedale & Rosehill Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey, where her students convened one summer night, was bordered by an auto-stripping business, a school-bus yard, a truck repair shop, a warehouse, and a headstone company, Payless Monuments. As dusk fell, students parked their cars in a line as if part of a funeral procession along a quiet road that meandered through the cemetery. The memorial grounds would have been mostly empty without her class, except for the squirrels, crickets, and crows. Norma planned to give a lecture here on the biology of dying, and she had warned the students beforehand that it would be important to take notes; questions about it could end up on the final exam.

“Hi, everyone,” she said, waving with a wide smile as she pulled up late to the cemetery in her silver Mazda minivan full of students. Norma and her students jokingly referred to it as the “party bus,” because the van spent its days shuttling students on field trips to prisons, funeral homes, hospice care centers, mental hospitals, and morgues. Its bumper sticker read
AMERICA NEEDS A WOMAN PRESIDENT
, and its floors and seats were littered with pink highlighters, an unopened Doritos bag, a dozen stuffed purple bunnies, a Celtic Thunder CD, the sound track of
Hairspray,
and clusters of straws sealed in paper wrapping.

She emerged like a fairy godmother before her students, hopping out of the van and hurrying into the graveyard with all eyes on her, walking with a side-to-side wag, a slight stoop of the shoulders, her feet nudged outward like a pair of wings.

“Nothing like a good cemetery, right?” she asked, rounding everyone up.

She had long brassy hair that she usually wore down, like today, or in a high ponytail when it frizzed in humidity. Her eyes changed colors in the light, like speckled brown jade, and her skin was flushed in the face, more suntanned on the arms and chest with a spattering of freckles. Her underactive thyroid made it easy for her to gain weight and hard to lose it, and she barely ate with her nonstop schedule, subsisting on unsweetened iced Dunkin Donuts’ lattes. She was pear-shaped and pretty, with a sturdy frame that locked her soft edges into place. During non–work
days, she dressed folksy: long, flowing skirts, walker’s sandals, turquoise and silver jewelry, and trinkets the color of bones. At work, she sometimes dressed as if she might be called to attend a funeral at any moment, which happened occasionally: black skirts, black dresses, black stockings, black heels. For color, she’d add a bright scarf.

Today she wore black billowy pants and a black cardigan over a pink blouse, with scarlet lipstick and a green gemstone bracelet. Her heavy key chain jangled as she walked, containing more keys than any one person could possibly need, along with membership cards for places such as Petco Pals, Borders, Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, Vermont, and Curves health club for women.

“Guess what?” she said in her singsong voice, which always seemed as though it were stuck in falsetto. “There’s a crematory across the street.” That was where they burned bodies, she explained to the students, suggesting that maybe they could stop by and check it out later.

The professor led everyone on a tour of the grounds, straightening roses on graves and standing tipped-over fences and flags upright. Dandelions and white clover pushed through the ground as Norma took moments of silence to pay tribute to the bodies beneath.

The cemetery was divided into neighborhoods, mirroring a typical big city: Chinese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Greek.

If the Chinese section had been a real neighborhood, it probably would have boasted the highest property values. Its tall arched pillars bore the name Greater Chinatown Community Assn. Rows of polished pink or shiny gray headstone blocks, some as big as refrigerators, stretched into the horizon. Engraved into the facades were intricate bamboo designs and horizontal Chinese characters, but English lettering could also be found on some, names such as Low, Lam, Lau, Chung, Wong, Kong. Small red rocks balanced atop some headstones, as if placed there as offerings.

Norma parked herself here, sitting cross-legged in front of a thirty-six-ton granite sculpture of a 1982 diesel Mercedes-Benz 2400 with a license plate reading
RAY TSE
. Rising from a low stone slab behind a Roman-style pillared mausoleum, the memorial had been built to look like an entombed car, right down to the headlights, windshield wipers, door handles, and Mercedes logos on the trunk, nose, and rims—except for
a missing hood ornament, left off because it would have been too easy to break off and pocket.

Students rubbed their fingers along the smooth granite. As the story went, fifteen-year-old Raymond Tse, Jr., had wanted his own Mercedes, but he had died in a car accident in 1981 before ever having a chance to earn his driver’s license. His millionaire older brother, the landlord and businessman Raymond David Tse, paid for the tribute, estimated at $250,000.

“When I think about what the body does when we die, it’s not like there’s a point where everything shuts down,” Norma noted. “It doesn’t happen all at once.”

She made clear that she was speaking of natural deaths from disease and physical ailments, not sudden deaths from murders or car accidents. In violent deaths, bodies don’t have time to make those little adjustments for our comfort. “It’s wild how the body works,” she went on. “Our bodies take care of us our entire lifetime, take care of us when we’re sick, when we’re ill. At the very end it does that too.”

“The first thing that happens is, the circulatory system begins to shift the blood supply to all of the major organs,” Norma said. “We’re very hardwired to survive, so the brain gets the message; rather than the heart pumping blood all the way to the tips of the toes and back up again, it really just starts to pool to the major organs, heart, lungs, brain, digestive system, kidneys, liver. So a lot of times people will begin to complain of feeling cold. They will ask for a blanket, even if it’s a hundred degrees in August.”

That meant death is near, she explained, three weeks away, maybe two. The body temperature can drop a degree or more. Hands and feet take on the frigid feel of refrigerated poultry. Arms and legs begin to look pasty, draped over bones like pie dough, sometimes gray or violet, blotchy, like a web of bruises. Nail beds turn blue; the lines around the mouth, blue too. Blood vessels protrude near the surface of the skin, like varicose veins. The blood lacks oxygen and is no longer cherry red, as healthy blood should be. Instead, it turns a deep, black merlot, so dark it appears blue beneath the skin. This, Norma explained, is called “cyanosis.”

Another sign of impending death: fading eyesight. A dying
person might want brighter lighting, the curtains open. While sight is among the first senses to go, she said, hearing is last. You must not assume that a dying person doesn’t know what is going on around him or her, she explained, but carry on as if he or she can hear everything. You can read the newspaper to him or her, leaning close to his or her ears as you speak.

A week or so before death, the blood shifts again, this time away from the digestive system and to the kidneys, heart, lungs, and liver. “That makes it so people stop feeling hungry,” she said. “They don’t want to eat any more.” Favorite meals do not spark the same glimmer of delight. They won’t complain of hunger or thirst, even in the absence of intravenous feeding tubes. The body won’t miss the satisfaction of an overstuffed belly, won’t crave what it no longer needs. If you hold a stethoscope to the abdomen, Norma said, listen for bowel sounds: the contracting movement of muscles pushing food down the digestive tract—or
peristalsis
—has slowed, maybe even stopped. “So what do we do?” she said. We who love them want to feed them anyway. “We tell them, ‘You’ll like it, it’s good,’ ” she said. They might become bloated, nauseous, constipated, or begin vomiting. “We force-feed people,” she said. “It makes
us
feel better, folks, it doesn’t make
them
feel better.”