The Death Class: A True Story About Life (5 page)

Norma went back later and confronted her. “Look, Mary, I saw the cornmeal. What was that about?”

Mary looked at her. “I don’t like the feel of the wetness!” she snapped. “I want it to be dry.”

“Okay, but you can tell me that,” she said. “Cornmeal is going to make it stay like a wound. It’s not going to heal.”

Mary turned quiet, looking embarrassed.

In that moment, Norma realized that Mary did not want the wound to heal. She had no family left, no friends, and no other visitors to speak of. She must have looked forward to the dressings. It was the only time she had face-to-face conversation in days.

Norma called up the local church to tell them about the 110-year-old woman in a trailer, suggesting that maybe they could bring her a pie once in a while. She also continued to visit Mary regularly, even if not summoned.

Still today, on a wall in her office, she kept a black-and-white framed photo of her younger self, kneeling next to Mary. From her patient, Norma had learned that the deepest wounds can never be healed with ointment and gauze. It was a lesson more valuable than anything found in a textbook or dissertation.

She always held on to that tenderness she had for the elderly like Mary, those forgotten and overlooked. It was the same kind she felt for forlorn strangers, her students, and her own children. They needed her. And she didn’t mind being needed.

So when it came to defining her Death in Perspective class, the professor developed the habit of handing out a poem by Khalil Gibran called “On Death” at the end of every semester. Part of it went like this:

Then Almitra spoke, saying, “We would ask now of Death.”

And he said: You would know the secret of death.

But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?

Her home was a haven of fresh-baked cookies, porcelain dolls, and Christmas carols—nothing close to the images of high cerebral pretense or mystical musings that a professor of death might conjure up. Musical compositions of Richard Wagner did not fill her living space, and neither did the essays of Michel de Montaigne. There were no black votive candles, no altars swirling with Nag Champa incense, no household decor inspired by a Día de los Muertos celebration.

Norma lived with her family in a seafoam-colored two-story colonial house with an eggplant purple door on a quiet block across from a school in a Highland Park neighborhood, within walking distance of an earth-friendly mattress shop, a bubble tea café, three synagogues, and a vitamin, herbs, and organic foods store. The area’s newspaper racks offered
The Star-Ledger
and the
Highland Park Mirror,
which featured articles on the local arts festival and an upcoming Zumba Latin dance aerobics demonstration. The professor and her partner of more than two decades, Norman, a child psychologist and also the father of their teenage daughter, had lived in that house for fifteen years. Norma and Norman. Norma’s older daughter from her first and only marriage (she didn’t feel the need to walk down the aisle a second time) was a college student studying law at Rutgers University and had lived there too before she went off to school.

One morning, Norma decided to explain the meaning behind various objects in her home, such as the quilt on the sofa—it was made of swaths of childhood dresses, bedroom curtains, and favorite shirts that had
belonged to her older daughter, Melissa. “I said to her whenever she was sad or upset, she could wrap her childhood around her in the quilt.” The professor continued the tour, pointing out a menorah that had belonged to her grandmother and a statue of a black Jesus given to her by Norman at Christmas.

Norman had been raised Jewish. Norma’s mother and grandmother were also Jewish, and her father was Catholic. She’d grown up going to both synagogue and Catholic Mass and attending a private Catholic school, where the nuns terrified her—tying students’ left hands behind their backs to force them to use the right one, yanking boys by the neck with their ties, slapping students with sticks. The family welcomed both religions into the household these days but didn’t stick firmly to the rules of either, although they did celebrate all the holidays with fervor.

Norma had met Norman when they were both working at a mental health center, and on one of their dates he’d introduced her to an ashram, where everyone wore white and looked like zombies. It was a little too weird for her. Then he introduced her to the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, a retreat of workshops, family activities, and organic food in the woods, which she enjoyed. In the years since, they have visited Omega annually with their daughter, Becca, and Melissa, from Norma’s first marriage.

Norman came downstairs looking tired. A short, spectacled, bearded man thirteen years older than Norma, he’d graduated from high school at sixteen. He had been accepted into Cornell University but had gone to City College of New York instead, earning his PhD at Rutgers University by twenty-six. He was the kind of quietly brilliant man who always seemed to be contemplating the nature of the universe, such as microscopic cell division. Once, Norma remembered, he had been so lost in thought that he’d had no idea he’d put on two neckties.

“Do you have two minutes?” Norma asked him. “Just two minutes to move the clothes from the van?”

A few days ago, she’d taken their daughter and a student along to haul off a mountain of clothes from a widower’s home. The grieving man had found her email address after reading about her students in the newspaper, and Norma had dropped by for about two hours, asking him to
tell her the stories behind many of his wife’s belongings before he let go of them forever. She’d thought that remembering would help him let go—grief therapy delivered right to his front door. But now the tweed jackets, polyester jumpsuits, worn vintage leather suitcases, and embroidered sweatshirts were cluttering up the party bus. “They’re full of dog hair, and I can’t breathe,” she told Norman, “and there’s a suitcase that smells a little funny too.”

He nodded and went about unloading the items into a spare room, to be sifted through and donated another day, as Norma continued her tour. She explained the story behind a vase that a supervisor had given her, a thank-you for her help after his wife died of cancer. She explained the meaning behind a Mother’s Day card given to her by a student who was a marine.

Norma seemed to have an anecdote for every ornament, every occasion, every important memory. She was a practiced storyteller. She knew when to pause for effect, when to wait for the laughter or the jaw drop. She’d figured out how to unspool her lessons inside of stories too. That was why attending one of Norma’s classes often felt like having a front-row seat at a one-woman monologue, interspersed with improv moments drawn from audience participation; she could build an entire lesson out of one student’s personal experience. You never knew what to expect from the show or its spectators. Some days it was laughter; other days, rage or tears.

So it made sense that when it came down to her own life and loved ones, she’d catalogued all of it into a series of entertaining stories too.

One day, Norma said she had a funny story about her Huffington Post–blogging neighbor Chris.

“Chris very often will walk the dog, right? And this dog . . . it has this huge head on a Labrador’s body . . . a pit bull head. It just does nothing but drool. I call it Grizzle goo, it’s like this slobber that just hangs . . . sometimes she’ll walk across the street and stand in front of my house” while walking the dog.

Norma went on to explain that when her oldest daughter, Melissa, had been a senior in high school who also played varsity basketball and sang in the choir, she and a group of friends had ended up double-booked:
a Christmas concert and basketball championship back to back. The stern choir director wanted her students on time. “So I said I would offer up the party bus and I would drive the girls from the game straight to the school to the choir concert.”

But the game went into overtime. When it finally ended, Norma threw the girls into her van and took off for the concert. “In the meantime, there’s a bunch of them in the back of my car. They all start changing their clothes.” The choir director required them to all wear white shirts, black skirts, and black shoes. Norma looked at her daughter and asked, “Where are your clothes?” To which her daughter replied, “They’re at home.” In that case, Norma told her, she might as well forget the concert. Her daughter started to cry. “So I’m flipping out and driving,” Norma said. “All of a sudden, she looks at me and she goes, ‘Mom, you have on a white shirt, a black skirt, and black shoes today.’ I had just come home from work . . . I look down and sure enough, I did.”

So Norma began to strip.

“At every stoplight, I’m taking my clothes off. She puts on my outfit, and I’m down to my bra and underwear. . . . But there was no way in hell I was going to put on her sweaty basketball uniform.”

Norma pulled up to the school, shouting at them to get out of the car before someone spotted her. “And I’m half-naked. In the car. In December. So I’m, like, okay, I’ll just drive down the block, go into the house and put on clothes, and go to the concert. So I pull in, and sure enough there’s freakin’ Chris with that dog. . . . I jump out of my car in my underwear, and I’m fumbling with my keys to get into the house.”

By the next day, practically the whole block had heard the story of the naked professor running around outside her house in the snow, Norma said, chuckling at the image of herself.

Norma did not mind if people thought of her as ironic or eccentric. But fragile or wounded? That was a different story. She carried herself as if following the mantra of a therapist 24/7:
I’ll listen to your issues, but you don’t need to know mine.
Trying to understand her sometimes made you feel like the nosy kid with hands cupped around both eyes, peering through the curtains of a neighbor’s window on a bright day. You had to tiptoe real close if you hoped to stand the slightest chance at seeing what was
on the inside. When asked personal questions by her students, or by me, she sometimes responded with a joke: “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

One day—more than a year into my following Norma around—her curtain parted a little. We were sitting on a bench in Raritan Bay looking toward Staten Island on a warm Saturday afternoon, after a balloon-releasing ceremony that Norma had just conducted at a cemetery with three former students who had been enrolled in her classes at different times: a mother and two daughters all grieving the death of the same man, the daughters’ father.

The professor’s story, as she told it to me that day at Raritan Bay, had started when she was still in her mother’s tummy, a fist-sized fetus that nobody even realized was there, nobody except her seventeen-year-old mother, who seemed to wish she could strangle the weed growing inside right out of her belly with every girdle she layered over the next. The girdles suctioned her mom’s midsection like a tourniquet, strings yanked tightly, creating an illusion of a stomach so flat that her grandmother couldn’t even detect there was a baby under there.

“She never took a prenatal vitamin,” Norma said, recounting what her grandmother, who was now dead, had told her years before. “She never had a doctor’s appointment. It’s, like, a miracle that I have all my fingers and toes.”

Her mother, who had since died too, was named Linda, and the way Norma understood it, the woman back then had places to see, her own life to lead first, before having a child. She’d wanted to become a journalist when she left her hometown of Newport News, Virginia, and enrolled in the University of Miami. In her first semester, she’d met a young man named Norm, who was studying marketing.

Linda’s Jewish parents had come from Austria and Russia, fleeing persecution. Norma’s father was Catholic, from Baltimore, Maryland, but his family had later moved to New Jersey. His parents had come from Italy to Ellis Island, his father on the
Lusitania,
his mother on the
Saturnia.
He had topaz-blue eyes, a shock of blond hair, and a cocky machismo about him. He drove a 1956 Chevy convertible and had grown up poor and sheltered, fishing and hunting blackbirds to eat with polenta and cornmeal, working in a steel mill with his dad. Linda had developed a
circle of wealthy girlfriends at school, but when it came to money her new romantic interest had barely any. It did not seem to matter, since Linda got pregnant soon after they met.

That summer, Norma’s grandmother intercepted a letter from Linda’s lover. It was about the unborn child. She confronted Linda and discovered the girdles. The deception was over. On August 22, the baby was born. They named her Norma Lynn (combining both parents’ names). “My parents got married,” Norma explained. “And that was, like, the worst thing ever.”

Norma’s parents moved to Florida. Her dad found a job at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, earning about $75 a month as a service person. The newlyweds fought violently, and within a year and a half, they divorced, and her father, as Norma later learned, denied paternity.

Still a baby, Norma said, she was sent to live with her grandmother in Virginia, while her mother charged off elsewhere to try to put the pieces of her life back together. She spent her earliest years raised by her grandma and a maid; although Linda lived there too, she wasn’t around much. “My grandmother and mother were at a movie theater. My mother had a stomachache in the movie theater and buckled over in pain,” she said. “My grandmother rushes her to the hospital. I was at a neighbor’s house. At the hospital, they take off her clothing to put on a patient gown and there she is again.” Pregnant, “with five layers of girdles. And they cut off all the girdles, and she was delivering the baby, and that baby was stillborn.”