The Death Class: A True Story About Life (7 page)

It wasn’t just her mother who hurt her. Once when Norma was seven, her parents went out at night and left her at home. She was sick and delirious, threw up in her bed, and was too weak to clean up her mess. When they came home, her mother flew into a rage and her father pushed her face into her own vomit. “Please don’t, please don’t!” she remembered crying, tears and vomit soaking her hair.

On some occasions, she thought her parents might kill each other. When she was old enough to drive, she took both of her parents to the hospital over and over again with bloody lips or dislocated hips or jaws. She felt most useful when she was taking care of them, saving each from the other. Norma Lynn. Keeper of their secrets. Scrubber of their messes. The rescuer. And when she came through for them in such a way, she could almost feel their gratefulness, their regard for her, even if they never said it.

Her brother was five years younger, and he had been born with pyloric stenosis, a narrowing of his stomach to his intestines, which caused severe vomiting throughout his first months of life. As a child, he erupted into tantrums so severe that he would stop breathing and turn purple. She grew up taking care of him too. Norma had no idea who among the family members would die first, whether from violence or illness.

Death, it seemed, taunted her like some kind of bedroom monster lurking in the closet. She learned how to be a very
good girl, always tiptoeing around her parents’ tempers, hiding in her bedroom reading Nancy Drew novels, throwing herself into science class at school.

Her sense of self-assurance came about as subtly as physical maturation. For months there were hints, but then all of a sudden there she was, practically full grown. Somewhere along the way she just stopped being afraid—afraid of her parents, afraid of her life, afraid of death. Maybe that sense of courage had existed inside her even before she was born, but all she knew now was that when violence broke out at home, she could dissociate from her body, go into a state of total calm. After all, it couldn’t be that bad, she thought. Death. She had managed to outsmart it for this long.

She decided to try to go to medical school. Her father seemed to be making good money as a business administrator in public education in those days. He stashed wads of cash in their home, and sometimes Norma came across the bills, which were hidden near the guns. They had a drop-down ceiling, the kind that if you pushed the right spot, a block of tile would move, revealing the goods concealed inside. The basement filled up with stacks and stacks of books, reams of paper, pens, and pencils, framed pieces of art, and office furniture—stuff that looked as if it had come straight from a school reception office. Norma didn’t really know why it was there. She knew better than to ask.

Her mother wore chocolate mink coats, smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, and spent nights out playing professional bridge and mahjong, and her daylight hours doting on her poodle, Pierre. Her father had a red convertible Fiat, and later an eggplant-purple Porsche, which he drove around town while holding a glass of red wine. He even had his own bodyguard, as well as a person who chauffeured him around when he didn’t want to drive. Some nights, her dad dragged her along to Italian restaurants in places like Staten Island. She would sit in the corner of the restaurant and watch her father drink and yammer away with all of his friends and business partners, also Italian.

Once Norma stayed in a kitchen as some of her dad’s friends went into another room, and she heard one man, his colleague of some sort, bawling and wailing. It sounded as though he was begging. Begging for what? she wondered. Why would a grown man cry like that? She had yet
to figure it out for herself. All she remembered was that she never saw or heard from that man again. She never asked her father what had happened to him. Something told her she did not want to know.

A
T THAT POINT
in her story that day on the bench in Raritan Bay, Norma shook her head and grew quiet for a moment. “It’s so hard to tell you this,” she continued, taking a breath. As she grew older, she’d come to discover hidden truths about her family. Truths she wished she could undo.

“Um, my father,” she began, “was involved in the Mafia.”

Surely she was joking. Norma sometimes spent her free time attending drumming workshops, Native American sweat lodges, and sessions entitled “The Wisdom of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers.” Nothing about her life said “Mafia.” The punch line had to be coming. But she wasn’t smiling. “He was a business administrator in the public school system, and therefore he could give the Mafia contracts—building contracts, maintenance contracts.” What the Mafia couldn’t hawk or had to store would end up in his family basement.

“Those people would sell anything,” she said. “They would sell you if they could.”

Her dad, now seventy-four, lived in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where he drove a cherry red Mustang with a convertible top. He’d left his days of jet-setting to Atlantic City and the Dominican Republic or attending parties with Playboy girls. But when I met him months later, he was still dropping names such as Paul Castellano and John Gotti, Sr.

A
T FIFTEEN
,
N
ORMA
had an exit plan. She hatched it one day not long after her mother raised a hand to her face for the last time. She would later remember standing up to her that day, grabbing her wrists, looking her straight in the eye, and saying “You are not hitting me today.” To her surprise, her mother backed off.

In three more years she could legally leave without being shuffled into a foster home or a runaway shelter. She posted a countdown calendar
in her room, crossing out the days until she could graduate high school and leave home for good.

She told her mother about her medical school plans. Her mother told her she’d be better off working in a bank. Fine, she decided, she would make it to med school on her own. Pay for it herself.

But Norma quickly realized that medical school would be nearly impossible to finance on her own, so she chose nursing school instead. She got accepted into the Muhlenberg School of Nursing, a program affiliated with Union County College, which she chose because she could receive an associate’s degree and then transfer to earn a bachelor’s degree. She went to work at the University of Virginia, near her grandmother. She would not regret leaving her parents, but she would miss her little brother. She trusted he’d be fine; he was the planned child. Norma left home, believing she’d be better off if she never returned.

Her on-the-job training as a psychiatric nurse at the University of Virginia Medical Center quickly proved to her that this was where she belonged—in a hospital dealing with the mentally and physically ill. Here she was in a psychiatric ward with people even more unhinged than the ones she’d grown up with—and she held the keys. She controlled injections and medications, and she could read people, especially when they were the least bit agitated.

“Oh, my God, crazy people? People screaming and yelling? Pounding on walls? Breaking furniture? This is great!” Norma said. “And I was really good at handling it.”

She could sense a blowup before it started to build. When a patient began punching or bashing his head against a wall or ripping up the sheets in his room, other nurses ran away to find the body restraints. They wanted to strap the patient to a stretcher, shoot him full of Thorazine, an antipsychotic medication, and force him into isolation in a quiet room. But Norma told them, “No, let me talk to him.” She would sit on the patient’s bed and try to calm him. It didn’t always work. Once a patient beat her up pretty badly, walloping on her as if she were a punching bag, but even that did not faze her. She slipped into the same disassociated state she had discovered in childhood.

One morning, she started making rounds on her shift, checking in
on new patients who had been admitted overnight. She walked into a room and noticed a young man sitting on the bed. “Hi,” she said with a smile. “I’m the charge nurse on the day shift.”

He stared at her blankly. She noticed he was holding something on his lap. She walked closer and noticed it was a gun. She didn’t raise her eyebrows or try to moonwalk out of the room.

“I’m really sorry, I know this is your property, but you’re not allowed to have this in the psychiatric unit,” she said without skipping a beat. “You’ll have to give that to me, and I’ll lock it up safely for you, and you can get it when you’re discharged.”

Here was this twenty-two-year-old nurse smiling with her hands outstretched, as if asking him to hand over his belt to ensure it wouldn’t get lost. The man looked flummoxed. Norma had seen plenty of guns in her lifetime, and this one didn’t intimidate her any more than the rest. “I’ll take that for you,” she said sweetly.

He handed it over.

“Thank you very much,” she said, walking calmly over to the nurse’s station with the pistol in her hands, as if balancing a tray of meds. She called security to come lock it up. A guard checked its chamber: the gun was loaded.

“Really?” Norma replied. Well, that was a close one.

L
IKE HER FAVORITE
theorist, when Norma got old enough, she changed her Italian last name. No longer wanting to be connected to her father through it, she decided to keep “Bowe,” which belonged to her first husband, after the marriage ended in her twenties. She never changed it back after they divorced. Sometimes she wondered if she and her father really were biologically related. After all, she didn’t think they looked much alike. He’d lost his power, and his powerful friends, long before. Still, he came around a couple times a year, mostly for holidays or graduations.

On the day Norma earned the right to add “Dr.” to her title, she remembered that her father broke out of the graduation audience and headed for the steps of the stage as the PhD degrees were being bestowed.
Horrified, Norma looked on as Norman tried to stop Norm. (The fact that their names matched seemed fitting for her already unusual life.) But Norm (her father) shook off Norman (her partner) and barged onstage as the doctoral adviser pulled the hood over Norma’s head.

Her father grabbed her arm in front of the crowd. Looking her in the eye, he managed to get one sentence out before being ushered offstage:

“From nuthin’,” he told his daughter, “to somethin’.”

Spring Semester, January 2008

For too long, Caitlin convinced herself that she could ward off death with homemade sacraments. Daily showers in her parents’ house turned into heroic lifesaving missions. If the shampoo and soap bottles did not face in exactly the same direction, if the ends of the bathroom towels touched each other or were not perfectly aligned, Caitlin believed her father would die.

Day after day, the Kean University student methodically straightened the bathroom knickknacks, as if everyone else’s life depended on it, all the while neglecting her own. No one told her this behavior might have been a symptom of a larger psychological challenge, until the fall of 2007, when she enrolled in a mental health class with Dr. Norma Bowe.

The professor immediately identified the behavior that Caitlin described in her papers and class discussions. She called it obsessive-compulsive disorder, a way of existing that made Caitlin reliant on rituals—habits that helped her feel as though she had some control in a world that was skidding all around her. But Caitlin didn’t begin to clue the professor into where her need for control might have started until she enrolled in a second class with Norma, Death in Perspective.

The new semester began at the start of 2008 and would last five months. It was in this class that Caitlin revealed through her assignments how deep-seated her fears of death actually were. She explained to her professor in private how she couldn’t bring herself to move out of her parents’
house and leave them to themselves because she was terrified that something would happen to them. She woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, hurrying to the bedside of her sleeping parents, just to make sure they had not stopped breathing. She couldn’t fathom the thought of losing either of them, but especially her dad. He was her fiercest protector. The one person in her life who made her feel important. Her shampoo bottles, she believed, would prevent catastrophe. And if not, the light switches would do the job; she flicked them on and off and repeated the words “God forbid” three times out loud.

She had not always wrestled with this need to monitor the fate of her family. When she was a little girl, she had found other ways to manage. Her mother could be screaming and thrashing around the house, all because her father had hidden her pills again, and Caitlin would kneel on the floor, lost in her crayons and coloring books, as if tuning out commercials on a television. She retreated into her own world of play.

In elementary school, Caitlin found a rusty copper key in her backyard. It was a skeleton key, believed to open multiple doors. She became a skeleton key collector. Her dad brought her new ones, and she cherished each of them, especially because they came from him. He told her she could accomplish anything she wanted in her life. “Don’t ever give up,” he said. “Don’t be a quitter.”