The Death Class: A True Story About Life (31 page)

Each stage of life is filled with unique challenges, but the ways in which each person learns to survive, according to Erikson, create character.

Sometimes these lessons needed to be examined beyond textbooks, in the lives and life cycles of everyday people. That was what was practiced by Norma, this rare woman who respected death without trepidation. This professor who delighted in cemeteries, the overlooked classrooms beneath our feet. Her intuition led her to damaged people because she had once felt damaged too. She taught her students to understand the value of Erikson’s lessons long before they reached the final stages of life. She helped create character.

The people I had encountered on this journey with Norma—Jonathan, Caitlin, Israel, Carl, Jerzy, and Isis—had learned the value of living for others. But living for others alone was not enough. Caitlin had realized that. Jonathan had realized that. And of everyone, perhaps the one person who had had to work hardest to live by it was Norma.

Norma hunched over the burial plots with her sandals off. Blades of grass tickled her feet. All around her, weeds had pushed through the earth’s skin and become pretty. For a moment, she paid attention to nothing
else—just her emotions and her ancestors beneath the ground. She polished the dull brass headstones with her palms, gently scraping the earth-dusted letters with her fingernails.

Norma had come into this world, fighting to live. Yet for so long she felt shame that she had survived at all.

“For the first time, really ever,” she told me on the way home, “it feels like a long time ago.”

If you look for Norma Bowe and her students today, you might find them planting gardens. They are scooping worm-filled soil into their palms, spreading seeds, waiting for tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, carrots, and roses to grow. They are planting mint and lilies, clearing the way for rhizomes to flourish.

They first sowed a memory garden at Kean University, where Death in Perspective students and the campus community could honor lost loved ones, and since then Be the Change has transformed abandoned lots throughout Newark into community gardens partly inspired by the one at Virginia Tech in memory of Madame Couture.

The Newark garden project began in 2012, when Norma and a student found a vacant lot next to an elderly care facility. It was one of hundreds of such lots in the area exposed to open-air drug dealing. Norma and the student offered to bring Be the Change back to build a community garden on the weed-infested, trash-littered desert of dirt. A resident of the elder care facility contacted the councilman for the Central Ward, Darrin Sharif, who cleared the way for the project. Sharif attended the makeover and was so impressed by the students and their professor that he asked if they might be willing to take on another abandoned lot on South 14th Street, on one of the highest-crime blocks, in memory of a woman who had been known as the “mayor” of her neighborhood, Rica Jenkins. She had passed away the previous year. Norma’s team planted flowers that Rica’s family said she had appreciated.

Sharif noticed that Norma had been reaching into her own pocket to
pay for the garden renovations. With so many vacant lots in Newark, he wanted to support Be the Change if it would be willing to continue its work. Sharif secured a spacious office with hardwood floors, a kitchen, a bathroom, desks, and sofas in downtown Newark for Be the Change to hold its meetings, fund-raisers, and other events. Be the Change would go on to transform vacant lots across the city.

Since 2011, Be the Change students have also handed out more than ten thousand peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and brown-bag meals to the homeless sleeping in and around Newark’s Penn Station, and they have remained active throughout other parts of the country. The students returned to Virginia Tech three times since the first visit to meet with students, educators, and activists. Jerzy Nowak retired from the Center for Peace Studies and Violence in 2011 but remains active with the organization.

The group’s spring break community service trips to the Gulf Coast became annual adventures. The students stopped in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to deliver clothing, food, and other supplies to survivors of the 2011 tornados. Israel remained active in many of the events, including the garden projects and another one to send water, food, and six hundred pounds of toys to children and families who survived the 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri, which killed 158 people and destroyed around eight thousand houses and apartments. In 2013, Be the Change raised more than $2,000 in gift cards for survivors of the Moore, Oklahoma tornado.

Be the Change has continued to regularly team up with the United Saints Recovery Project in Louisiana to help rebuild homes for residents who lost them during Hurricane Katrina. While in the gulf area in 2010, the students befriended a fisherman nicknamed “Red.” At six feet, six inches tall in his overalls, he had crawfish red hair, wore size 13 boots, and was built like the trunk of a live-oak tree. Before the 2010 BP oil spill, he’d worked on a shrimp boat, an oyster boat, and two charter boats. But, like so many of his neighbors, he’d lost his fishing career during the oil disaster.

Just before Christmas 2010, Red called Norma in New Jersey and explained that fishermen in the gulf area were struggling to pay their
bills and buy gifts for their kids. “There was drug abuse, alcohol abuse, domestic violence had shot up,” he said. “They couldn’t fish. They were broke.” Norma and Be the Change gathered donations of toys and raised $5,000 to cover the shipping costs. “We put toys in the hands of every fisherman, shrimper, crabber, and oysterman that needed them,” said Red.

Be the Change sent toys to the fishermen’s families for the holidays again the following year. Then, in late October 2012, the Tri-State Area became a victim of its own major natural disaster. Hurricane Sandy obliterated parts of New York and the New Jersey coastline. Wanting to help and remembering all that his New Jersey friends had done for his neighbors, Red got on his local news station in Mississippi and announced that he planned to travel to New Jersey with his tool set to help rebuild. His phone started ringing, and within days he had received donations and support, including a 53-foot, 18-wheel moving truck, which he packed full of food and supplies. It took two and a half days to drive the truck to New Jersey, and when he arrived he met up with Norma and her students, who had already been hard at work. Be the Change had descended upon a community called Union Beach, just twenty-six miles from Kean. Sandy had destroyed or damaged 1,600 of the town’s 2,100 homes. The students visited daily, some donning hazmat suits and masks to help clean out people’s flooded basements and haul away debris. Others helped cook for and feed people who’d lost their homes and power. Israel pulled nine-hour storm relief shifts. Red dropped off most of his supplies and donations in Union Beach and spent the next month washing dishes and serving meals to survivors.

Norma remains in touch with many of the other young people she has worked with over the years, those who have graduated and moved on with their lives, including Jonathan and Caitlin.

A few months after Jonathan moved out of the apartment that he had shared with Caitlin for a year, he found a new girlfriend. Caitlin wrote him an email, giving his new relationship her blessing.

“Sometimes I can’t believe how different I feel inside,” Caitlin said. “Something I knew would have destroyed me before hasn’t this time.” She is thriving in her new career as a middle school psychologist. Her
personal experiences help her relate to the children she works with, and she has conquered the worst of her OCD, no longer relying on rituals to calm her. She has since crossed nine more items off her bucket list: She has visited Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, Uruguay, San Diego, Chicago, and gone to Disney World with Jonathan. She has parasailed, camped, and sung karaoke, and she will earn her doctorate in psychology in 2015. Jonathan continues to travel the country and share his family’s story with public audiences in the hope of touching others. He has spoken before thousands.

As for Norma’s Death in Perspective class, it continues to fill up quickly each semester, and the professor has added a new field trip to the list: the crematory. She also added more class projects to the syllabus, including the preservation of an abandoned cemetery near some of the gardens in Newark that Be the Change planted. Two classes of Death in Perspective students would meet at the cemetery in the warm-weather months to clear the broken tombstones of the moss and vines that obscure hundred-year-old etchings, pull the weeds, and cut the overgrown grass. In March 2013, Norma was honored with an Outstanding Human Rights Educator Award from Kean’s Human Rights Institute.

T
O SEE SOME
of Be the Change’s projects in action, please check out these videos made by students:

thedeathclass.com/be-the-change/

This is a work of narrative nonfiction. The people in this book are real, their stories true. No events have been fabricated, no quotes made up. Over the course of four years, I spent thousands of hours following around the characters presented here, almost always with a tape recorder in hand. I also took handwritten notes and sometimes photographs as additional documentation. I read nearly a hundred books and articles on the subjects of death, dying, and mental health—from psychology to philosophy to science—and interviewed experts in the field, but most of that scholarly research did not make it into this book. Rather, it informed the writing of each narrative, for this is first and foremost a story about people. Israel’s name was changed, along with the young gang member he mentored—to protect Israel’s identity because he believed his life might have been put in jeopardy if details became public. All other names are real.

I relied heavily on three forms of reporting. The first is called “immersion journalism,” also known as fly-on-the-wall reporting. In many instances, I was the journalist capturing the events going on around me, trying to blend into the background and remain as unobtrusive as possible.

The second is known as “participatory journalism,” in which I participated in some events, including becoming an active member of the class, completing written assignments, and going along on field trips. As a participant, I was able to give myself permission not only to be emotionally affected by the journey, as any other human would, but also to write about my own experiences.

The
third form of reporting is often referred to as “narrative reconstruction.” Some events happened in the past. I could not have been present to record them, so instead I relied on an array of sources: interviews with witnesses, journal entries, class assignments, photo albums, videos, newspapers, police reports, medical records, and court documents, in some cases revisiting sites where events had occurred to capture the surroundings.

I interviewed more than fifty of Norma Bowe’s students and came to know dozens of others as well. I wish I could have included all of their stories here. The main characters in this book were extremely cooperative and open when it came to my exhaustive probing and shadowing. I went back to them numerous times to make sure I had documented each of their journeys, as well as their thoughts and feelings, right. I tried my best as a narrator to capture each person’s language, mannerisms, memories, and emotions, often adopting the way of talking they used in interviews. In some places, I included the exact quotes they used to describe the way they were feeling. I chose to trust their interpretations of particular moments, but I do not discount the fallibility of human memory.

In some instances in this book, where I employed narrative reconstruction, there were no additional documents or additional witnesses available to supplement the reporting of a scene. When that happened, I relied on the recollections of the main person involved and chose to include memories connected to highly emotionally charged experiences, as studies have shown that those are the memories our minds tend to preserve.

I am thankful they allowed me into their lives and minds to do this because I know that without all of our memories, stories would not be stories. The remarkableness of our lives would be lost on us. And the dead would always remain just that. So this is a book of memories and documentation, as close to the truth as I could get, appreciating that within the hard facts, we can also discover metaphor and meaning.

First I want to thank Norma Bowe for agreeing to allow me to tell the story of her life and her students’ lives. When I first met her, she had no idea I would still be following her around four years later, but she hung in there because she recognized the value of bringing experiences from her class to a wider audience. Her life encapsulated the stories I love to tell, about everyday people who live through extraordinary events, as did Caitlin, Jonathan, Israel, Carl, Isis, Stephanie, Parneeta, and Jerzy. Thank you to all of the people who ended up in this book. Your resilience and courage made me work even harder to honor your truths.

To the people who have inspired and guided me the most in my career: Richard E. Meyer, who taught me how to practice narrative journalism; he holds stories to the most rigorous of standards because he believes “God is in the details,” and I try to pass on his generativity to the students I teach every year. To Richard Kipling and Miriam Pawel for giving me opportunities when I was an aspiring journalist out of college, and who have remained mentors and friends ever since. To Barry Siegel, a masterful literary journalist who leads by example and believed that I could write a book. To Leslie Schwartz, who taught me how much nonfiction writers can learn from the techniques of fiction while still adhering to the journalistic foundations of truth, and who gave brutally honest yet encouraging feedback on my raw pages. To Steve Padilla, the kind of writing coach every newsroom needs, who read every page of this book and offered valuable editing and suggestions.

To Jonathan Karp of Simon & Schuster for believing in this idea,
and in me, from the beginning, and for giving the time, support, and editorial guidance to make it happen. To Priscilla Painton for being a kind, patient, and rigorous editor who demands excellence. To Michael Szczerban for his thoughtful and smart suggestions, and also to Sydney Tanigawa.