The Death Class: A True Story About Life (21 page)

The next day, Jonathan and Josh waited in the psychiatrist’s lobby. They were called in together. The man turned to Josh and said, “So you’re having suicidal thoughts?”

Josh said yes, and he was hoping the doctor could lower his medication.

“What kind of thoughts are you having?” the doctor asked.

“I would jump in front of a train or a bus or shoot myself.”

“So what’s stopping you?”

“I’m scared of what happens after death,” Josh replied.

The doctor nodded, scribbled some notes and agreed to change his medication, and said, “I’ll see you in one month.”

The appointment had lasted ten minutes.

The brothers walked out glumly. The doctor wasn’t much help at all, Jonathan thought. He could tell Josh was disappointed too.

“Are you hungry?” Jonathan asked his brother, trying to cheer both of them up. They could eat lunch at the sub shop, and maybe they could go out to dinner later that night at the pizzeria with their older brother, Chris, and his girlfriend.

“Sure.”

At lunch, Josh seemed like he felt a little better. The psychiatrist had altered Josh’s meds
and added an antidepressant. Josh said he would try it, and the two went to the pharmacy together.

Jonathan dropped Josh off at home while he went to run more errands. He told Josh he’d be back in an hour or so.

On the way home, he gave Josh a call to check up.

Jonathan listened to the phone ring. No answer. That was nothing new. Josh always lost his phone or forgot to charge his battery.

By the time Jonathan made it back to the apartment, Josh was not home. He left a note on the stairs: “Josh, I’m trying to call you, you’re not picking up your phone.”

Jonathan called Chris. Had he heard from Josh? Chris said he had not, but he’d go back to the apartment and wait in case Josh showed up.

Jonathan drove around the neighborhood. Maybe Josh took a walk.

A few minutes later, Chris called. He was crying. He had gone into Josh’s room and found a letter tucked into the strings of his guitar, with the light of a lamp pointed to shine directly on it. It was a will.

Jonathan’s mind flashed to the doctor’s question earlier that day:

What kind of thoughts are you having?

I would jump in front of a train . . .

There were tracks by the apartment. Jonathan sped toward Linden station.

T
HE CLOSER
J
ONATHAN
got, the more ambulances and police cars he saw. He stopped his truck and jumped out, asking people what was going on.

Police officers were trying to get a crackhead off the bus, someone replied.

Thank God, Jonathan thought. It wasn’t Josh. But he still needed to find him.

“I have an emergency. I’m looking for a twenty-two-year-old kid. He has brown hair,” he said when he approached an officer. “It’s my brother. He wrote a will. He’s going to kill himself.” He had to get to the train tracks to stop his brother.

The officer wouldn’t let him through. “Stand over there,” he told him.

Desperate, he ignored the command and started to run toward the tracks, but another cop grabbed him. “I have to tell you something,” the officer said.

“You don’t understand,” Jonathan replied. “I have an emergency.”

The officer paused.

Jonathan looked at him. He could read his face. “My brother’s dead, isn’t he?”

“He killed himself an hour ago.”

Witnesses had described a young man smoking a cigarette near a platform. A New York–bound train had stopped at the station. As it had pulled out, Josh had laid his head down on the tracks. The train driver had not had a chance to stop. Josh had been decapitated on impact at 5:47
P.M.

Chris appeared at the train station and saw Jonathan’s tear-streaked face. They fell into each other’s arms. He had Josh’s suicide note: “We spend our entire lives fearing death but know this . . . that from this day to the end of time I will have conquered pain, sorrow, and love. I hope the human race also conquers Death. Good bye my friends I love you forever.”

He’d left his guitar to Jonathan. Into the side of the instrument, he’d etched these words: “Jon brother I love you.”

C
AITLIN’S PHONE RANG
that evening. She looked at the caller ID: it was Chris’s girlfriend. Caitlin got goose bumps; she knew something was wrong.

“Hello?”

“Caitlin?” she was crying. Caitlin panicked. Had Josh killed Jonathan? “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Josh killed himself.”

“Oh, my God!” Caitlin screamed. “Where’s Jon? Where’s Jon?” She had not spoken to him in weeks. She called Norma, hysterical. She couldn’t even speak coherently, she was just sobbing and stuttering.

“Caitlin! Caitlin!”
Norma screamed. “Stop!”

Caitlin stopped.

Norma told her to take a few breaths; she couldn’t understand a word she was saying.

“Josh is dead.”

“What?” Norma screamed, nearly dropping the phone. She told her to meet her at their usual spot, Applebee’s. She put on a pair of ripped boots, threw a coat over her flannel nightgown, and bolted out the door.

The Applebee’s waiter took one look at Norma’s nightgown and Caitlin’s swollen face and seemed to realize they needed some alone time.

Caitlin had to try to calm down, the professor told her. She was shaking and rambling. She was going to have a panic attack.

But Caitlin didn’t know what to do. In her heart she just wanted to make sure Jonathan was okay. How was he going to handle this? She wanted to hold him and shut out the rest of the world. Where was he? Who was he with? Who was there for him?

Caitlin pulled out her phone and started calling everyone Jonathan knew. She found out that Jonathan was with a friend and they were on the way back to the friend’s mother’s house. The mother told her, “Just come here, Caitlin.”

“I don’t know,” Caitlin replied. “I don’t know if he wants that.”

“Men never know what they want,” she replied.

Caitlin turned to Norma. Should she go?

Yes, Norma told her. Go and be there for him.

When Jonathan walked through the door of his friend’s home later that night, Caitlin was waiting. Jonathan was carrying half of a sandwich wrap. His friend had taken him out and tried to get him to eat something, and Jonathan had brought back half the wrap, as he usually did when he went out to eat, to share with his little brother. But he’d forgotten. He didn’t have a little brother anymore.

Jonathan took one look at Caitlin, too exhausted to express surprise at her presence. Instead, he held out the sandwich and asked sheepishly, “Do you want this?”

He didn’t need to say anything more.

Caitlin went with Jonathan back to the apartment where Josh had left his guitar. When they walked in, she saw Jonathan’s note still on the steps. The lamp in Josh’s bedroom was still on. Caitlin switched it off.

They fell asleep together that night side by side. It had been three months since they had been this close to each other.

Caitlin made sure there was space on the bed in between them, so that he didn’t feel like she was trying to force her way back into his life. She just wanted to be near in case he had trouble falling asleep or awoke from a nightmare. She listened to his breath slow and thought about Josh and all that had happened today.

Caitlin had barely dozed off when she felt Jonathan reaching for her. He pulled her into his arms, nuzzled her close to his chest, and hugged her tight.

T
WO DAYS LATER
, Caitlin’s mother overdosed again. It had not even been a full month since the last episode. This time Caitlin received a call from her father while she was on campus. Her mother was still conscious and lucid, and her father had said to her, “Caitlin’s on her way home. She’s not going to let you get away with this.”

Caitlin raced home, but this time she wasn’t scared. She was furious. How could her mother pull a stunt like this now? She knew that Jonathan’s brother had just killed himself.

Caitlin’s parents adored Jonathan, and they had met Josh. He’d been to her parents’ house at least three times, and they’d met at her graduation party. She got on the phone with her mother’s psychiatrist. Why had he prescribed her more pills when he knew she had a drug problem?

“She’s your patient,” Caitlin said. “You need to do something.”

The doctor told Caitlin to bring her mother to his office. Just as when they had been children, her dad refused to call an ambulance. He didn’t want other emergency personnel to find out their family secret.

When Caitlin got home, she tried to drag her mother into the car. But she kept squirming and fighting her off. Caitlin began to cry. “How the hell could you do this right now?” she demanded. “Josh actually did kill himself!”

Caitlin collapsed in her room and began to sob. It was too much, it was all just too much.

Finally, Caitlin and her sisters persuaded her mom to let them take her to the psychiatrist’s office and then to the emergency room to get the drugs flushed out of her system. Caitlin was on her way to the hospital with her sisters when Jonathan called. He wanted to know if she could help him put together a slide show of photos of Josh for the funeral. Caitlin turned to her sisters.

“Go with Jon,” one told her. “He needs you more.”

It was true. Caitlin knew she could not keep giving up everything for her mother. She told him she was on her way.

T
HE SERVICES FOR
Josh were scheduled to be held at McCracken Funeral Home on Morris Avenue, down the road from Kean University, where Norma took her students each semester on field trips. It was a pristine white building with a plush green lawn made of the kind of grass that you find on a golf course, since its founder, Bill McCracken, had been an avid golfer. In the spring, the grounds were covered with several thousand red and yellow tulips, purple hyacinths, and yellow daffodils, such a beautiful sight that high school students often took their prom photos in front of the funeral home garden.

The directors had always been kind and accommodating to Norma, allowing students to glimpse a wake or funeral if it happened to be in progress on their visit. During one field trip, the body of a forty-four-year-old father who had died suddenly at his job was laid out. The director said the man’s wife and twelve-year-old daughter had been staying with the body for hours at a time and had nearly spent the night there because the girl did not believe her father was dead.

On each field trip, the directors let Norma’s students browse through the selection of urns and caskets in the basement. As an assignment, Norma made each student select the style in which he or she wished to be buried or cremated. There were silver and rose, stainless steel and metal caskets, cherry or maple wood. There were personally engraved nameplates, cream or pink satin beddings and pillows, and ornaments
such as baseballs, flags, crosses, and even golf clubs. For urns, there were black enamel, cast bronze, butterfly designs, and nickel-plated brass with silver doves. Norma often pointed out that she had chosen the dove urn for her mother’s ashes.

Once a mortician took the class into the embalming room, which had no dead bodies laid out, and talked everyone through the step-by-step preservation process, for which he always wore an apron and gloves but no mask. Standing near a tray of facial powders, shampoos, and lipsticks, he described his routine of setting the features, closing the eyes by placing caps under the eyelids, and keeping the mouth closed so it didn’t hang open. Sometimes he used a suture string on the mouth. “A needle is passed under the gum and out the nose, under the lip, and around the bottom inside the mouth. That’s one way of doing it.” The other way was with an injector gun, he said, which drove the needle, attached to a piece of wire, into the lower and upper jaws. “It’s like a barb on the end, so it goes into the bone, six snaps from bottom to top, it’s tied shut.”

He went through the embalming chemicals and aspiration process, adding that when those parts were done “I thoroughly cleanse the body, wash the hair, wash the body entirely down, dry it off. . . . I have a lot of respect for the person that lies on this table. . . . I always cover the person’s genitalia during the embalming process. This is a very sacred thing that happens here.”

The funeral directors at McCracken once arranged a complimentary service for the child of one of Norma’s students; her baby had died at birth. The directors had even helped Norma coordinate a service for her own mother two years prior.

After Josh’s death, Norma had told them she needed their help again. Jonathan had spent the last of his money paying Josh’s medical bills and apartment costs and trying to feed and clothe him. He had nothing left in his bank account. But he wanted an open-casket funeral for Josh; he wanted his head to be sewn back on, so he could say good-bye to his brother and remember him the way he’d looked before. Could McCracken help?

The directors agreed to do the favor. They would give Jonathan’s
brother the service he deserved for as little cost as possible and do their best to make Josh look presentable.

It came to $1,200, and Jonathan’s remaining family members split the cost. Josh would be cremated.

In his suicide note, Josh had asked for his ashes to be scattered with his father’s. But the boys had never managed to recover their father’s ashes from the New Jersey prison system. Jonathan told himself he would save Josh’s ashes for the day they could.

O
N THE DAY
of the wake, Jonathan went into the room where Josh’s body lay in his casket. No one else had arrived yet. It was the first time he had seen his brother since he’d died. The embalmers had reattached Josh’s head and artfully covered the marks on his neck with makeup. Jonathan had bought his brother a brown turtleneck that Caitlin had helped him pick out at Macy’s and found a pair of pants that Josh had borrowed from him before—that was how he knew they would fit—along with a pair of Jonathan’s black Aldo dress shoes. His shaggy hair had been trimmed and gelled, and he had a goatee.