The Death Class: A True Story About Life (6 page)

Norma looked at me. “So how did I survive? And that baby didn’t?” Her grandmother, who’d split from her grandfather long before much of it happened, told her that she’d buried the dead baby herself.

“You know,” she went on, “years back there was a case in New Jersey, where a girl delivered a baby at the prom and put it in a wastebasket.” The eighteen-year-old south New Jersey student gave birth in a bathroom stall in 1997, according to news reports, and choked the boy before putting him in a trash bag and throwing him away. The girl went back to the dance floor to rejoin her prom date when she was done, even eating a salad and dancing one last dance. After she was caught, her friends and family claimed they’d had no idea she was pregnant. “I
was a psych nurse by then,” Norma said. “I remember everyone saying ‘How could people not know?’ ” She thought to herself: it was not as impossible as it might have seemed.

Her own father had not wanted her in the first place, she believed, and her mother had tried to hide her, perhaps even get rid of her, and then left her to be raised by her grandmother. She was just an unwanted kid; loved by her grandmother, definitely—the dear woman had no other choice. But unwanted all the same.

D
ECADES LATER, THE
professor found herself standing at a whiteboard in front of her students, semester after semester, explaining how life and death are inextricably bound with birth.

Drawing a circle with eight points, she introduced her favorite psychological theorist by writing his name at the top: Erik Erikson. She had stumbled across his work when she was a college student. “He thought we grow, develop, and change throughout our entire life span,” she told her students. “We never stay the same. Each experience molds us and changes us.”

The German-born psychologist never knew his real father and was adopted at age six by his mother’s husband, Theodor Homburger. At home in Germany, Erikson was treated differently from his three half sisters. At school, he was made fun of for being a tall, fair-skinned, blond, blue-eyed Jewish kid who looked Scandinavian, when his peers of the same religion were all shorter, with darker skin, hair, and eyes.

“Before long, then, I acquired the nickname ‘goy’ in my stepfather’s temple; while to my schoolmates, I was a ‘Jew,’ ” Erikson wrote in an essay in
Daedalus.
“Although I had tried desperately to be a good German chauvinist, I became a ‘Dane’ when Denmark remained neutral during the First World War.”

Erikson’s stepfather had insisted that he go to college to become a doctor, but he refused and instead set off to become an artist in Vienna, where he painted portraits of children. “I became intensely alienated from every thing my bourgeois family stood for,” he wrote. “At that point I wanted to be different.”

He began teaching art in an elementary school, where he met a psychoanalyst by the name of Anna Freud, a daughter of Sigmund Freud. Anna was impressed by Erikson’s innate ability to relate to and understand children, and she invited him to learn psychoanalysis at her father’s institute. Erikson took up the offer, while also earning a teaching degree, and Anna took him under her wing. In the years after he finished his training at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1933, Erikson went on to become a professor at Harvard. When he moved to the United States, he changed his last name from that of his adoptive father, Homburger, to Erikson. Some researchers have speculated that it was his own way of defining himself after a lifetime of suffering his own identity crisis and feeling as though he did not belong.

Erik Erikson gained international fame, as Norma explained, for his developmental theory that the human life cycle, from birth to death, is divided into eight stages.

Crisis encompasses each of Erikson’s eight stages, and the evolution of a personality depends on how a human endures, flourishes, founders, or remains stagnant through each, Norma told her students. In each stage, an individual either gains a virtuous personality trait that will help him or her confront the subsequent crises throughout life, or they miss out on gaining that virtue, which makes it that much more difficult to cope with life’s challenges as the next stages approach.

Critics of his theory claimed that it wasn’t grounded in enough scholarly statistical research, that it was more applicable to males than females, and that it focused too heavily on childhood and not enough on adulthood. Others questioned whether his stages of psychosocial development were sequential: Does a person have to graduate successfully from one stage to make it into the next?

As Norma teaches, Erikson thought people were capable of changing up until that last stage of life. Norma believes that people can move between Erikson’s stages out of order, sometimes reverting backward or sometimes getting stuck in one, perhaps for his or her entire life. But to learn to face death with integrity, according to Erikson, one first has to successfully develop all of those specific virtues from the prior seven stages of life. And it all begins with birth.

“What are some basic needs of a newborn?” Norma asked her students.

“Being fed,” one answered.

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Shelter.”

“Being changed.”

“Right. You don’t want to be wet. A wet baby will cry and cry.”

The infant develops a reliance on the adult who consistently comes to take away the child’s pain from hunger or discomfort. Trust establishes hope. It becomes, as Erikson put it, “an actual sense of the reality of ‘good’ powers, outside and within oneself.”

This trust in a mother or a caretaker becomes, as a child grows older, an underlying trust in life, a sense that life and the world are not so bad. So the first virtue an individual picks up is hope.

“Hope,” Erikson wrote, “is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. . . . if life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.”

But Erikson argued that adults who are deprived of these basic needs during infancy can find themselves destined for a life of despair. A distrustful child can grow into an adult with trouble finding a reason to live in a world that is full of disappointment and discontent. Erikson called this first stage of life “Trust vs. Mistrust.”

“What else do newborns need?” Norma asked.

“Attention.”

“Love.”

“Yes, and how do we show that?”

“By holding?”

“Right,” Norma said. “Newborns have to be held.”

If a baby learns that he or she cannot trust his or her mother, father, foster parent, grandparent, nurse, or nanny, if the child feels abandoned or starved not only for nourishment but also attention—such as basic cuddling—it contributes to his or her basic sense of doubt in the world.

That is the first crisis of life.

“It’s really very interesting, guys,” Norma said. “If you’re not held enough as a baby, your brain does not hard wire properly.” If no one steps
in to protect and cradle a child, “those babies can develop something called failure to thrive. They stop eating. They stop sleeping. They just die.”

In the description of his theory, Erikson referred to the research of the psychoanalyst René Spitz, who released a silent black-and-white film,
Grief: A Peril in Infancy,
in 1947, in which he compared two groups of infants: the first raised in a home by nurses responsible for seven infants each and the other in a nursery at a women’s prison in upstate New York, where mothers cared for their babies daily. The babies raised by nurses seemed withdrawn, spaced out, or in a state of terror. He filmed babies who did not make eye contact and did not seem remotely curious or responsive to play. Others had barely enough will to cry. Some had become emaciated and frail. They lagged behind those raised in the prison with their mothers; in Spitz’s footage of the prison, those babies were seen crawling, climbing, and frolicking about.

Gaining virtues in every stage after childhood takes work. Norma knew that because she’d done the work herself. For those who have experienced mistrust, Norma told her students, “We will be battling against it for the rest of our entire time on the planet.”

In the second of Erikson’s stages, “Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt,” a child’s physical growth takes off, going from a state of helplessness to suddenly being able to sit up, crawl, walk, and run. It is a time of exploration, she explained, when a child holds on and lets go, wanders off and returns, pushes away and wants to be held again. This is when a child learns a sense of independence and adequacy, a feeling of self-worth.

By the third stage of life, between ages three to five, “We have a very big cognitive growth spurt,” Norma said. “Our vocabulary increases exponentially and kids begin to mimic what parents and caregivers are saying. If you come from a family that does a lot of cussing, chances are you will hear a three-year-old saying cuss words too or saying ‘Mommy told Daddy to go to hell.’ ”

Erikson called the third stage “Initiative vs. Guilt.” Children learn creative problem-solving skills, how to play, act out, and imagine all the behaviors that help them realize they have a sense of purpose. When parents excessively punish, beat, or verbally abuse a child for exploring the world
and trying to figure it out, he or she can begin to feel shame or guilt for thinking or acting in such a way in the first place.

People who don’t develop autonomy or initiative as children can become dependent on others later, as Norma interpreted Erikson’s theory, or they can doubt themselves in every aspect of their lives. In this stage, shame emerges:
I am not good enough. Nothing I have to say is important. No one will ever love me.

Between six and eleven years old, children reach Erikson’s fourth stage of life, “Industry vs. Inferiority.” This is when they begin to want to master the skills they have been learning, showing off their abilities in reading, gymnastics, writing, violin, painting, or Little League. Children develop a sense of competitiveness with their siblings and peers and want to prove to everyone, including themselves, that they are not worthless. So much of their success in doing so depends on the attentiveness and love of a caregiver.

If, throughout all of these ages, a child’s impulsivity is stifled or his or her flitting mind punished, if he or she is abused or neglected, if he or she never feels real love and encouragement, Erikson said, the youngster might grow up with a wish to “force the world not to look at him, not to notice his exposure.”

“He would like to destroy the eyes of the world,” Erikson wrote. “Instead he must wish for his own invisibility.”

A
S
N
ORMA’S LIFE
story went, when she was five, her mother decided to leave Virginia. She packed up her little girl’s belongings, and told her to say good-bye to her grandmother. Linda carted Norma back with her to live in the Jackson Heights, Queens, neighborhood of New York.

Linda had found a job working for Pepsi-Cola in Midtown on Fifty-ninth Street and Park Avenue. Meanwhile, her father, at twenty-four, had been drafted and spent two years in the military before being transferred to the Fort Dix, New Jersey, military base, where he was close enough to reunite with Linda. He was ready to claim the little girl now too. There was no need for a paternity test to prove he was her father this time. He believed it now. He was ready to raise her and be a family.

Soon after, Norma’s parents married each other—a second time. They were addicted like that: volatile and toxic when together, yet unable to loosen the choke hold they had over each other. They moved in with each other again too. They fought. They made up. They fought some more. Soon they had a son together, and there were no girdles this time around.

As Norma remembers it, Linda forbade her daughter to use the word “Mom” in public. Other times, her mother screamed at her, “You’ve ruined my life! I never wanted you. I would have been a journalist!” More than once, she remembered her mother telling her she wished she had never been born.

Some days, Norma said, she wished the same.

“I was sort of the buffer,” she said. “If my mother took it out on me, she was less likely to get into it with my father. When my father got into it, then we had knives, then we had guns, then we had, like, next-level DEFCON 10.”

W
HEN
N
ORMA WAS
ten, she rode her bike through a patch of poison ivy. She was allergic, and it was the time of year when people burned piles of leaves in their yard. She must have been breathing in the fumes, because remnants of poison ivy got trapped in her respiratory tract. Her eyes swelled shut, her throat began to close. She ended up in the emergency room, where nurses tried to give her a steroid shot to reduce the symptoms. But they could not find a place on her body to inject the needle. Her body was completely covered in bruises.

Adults came into her room with questions: How did you get the bruises? Have your parents ever hit you? Terrified that they would take her away to an orphanage if they learned the truth and even more scared of her mother’s reaction if she told, she came up with a story: “I fell off my bike . . . and then the bike fell on top of me . . . and I hit a bush.” Oh my God, they’re going to find out, she thought as the lies spilled out of her mouth.

When it was over, they did not take her away.

The truth was, sometimes her mother choked her until she nearly
passed out. Sometimes she pulled her hair out of her scalp in chunks. Most days, she whacked her with wooden spoons. The family had an ornate living room that Norma could never remember them sitting in and an elaborate dining room with a big table they never seemed to use. Instead they ate at a smaller round table off the kitchen with four seats. Norma’s seat was in front of her mother’s cabinet. There was no way to move the chair to sit down without hitting the cabinet. Each time Norma bumped the cabinet she would get hit, mostly in the torso or below, but rarely in the face. Anything she did seemed to set her mother off, whether she was too quick to talk back or too slow to speak. Too fast to walk or too slow. She always heard she was too stupid for her own good, no matter how high her grades in school were.