The Death Class: A True Story About Life (8 page)

But as she got older, skeleton keys no longer held special powers that she imagined might offer a way out. Tuning out the arguments became impossible. She stopped believing that she could do anything. Only the rituals, such as organizing pennies in a precise order with all heads or tails matching, seemed to ease her anxieties.

Over the last ten years, the professor had developed a stockpile of writing-for-therapy exercises that she pulled out on a whim. She’d probably read more than two thousand good-bye letters. Midway through Caitlin’s term in the death class, Norma asked students to answer the question “If you had a rewind button, what would you go back and change?”

Caitlin went home and wrote as honestly as she could, submitting the assignment in the next class. One afternoon soon after, Norma took her seat in the circle of desks in the classroom and announced to the
students that one assignment had stuck out from the rest and she hoped that person would read it aloud. Caitlin looked around, wondering who among her three dozen peers the professor might be referring to.

“Caitlin,” the professor said, looking in her direction.

Caitlin’s jaw dropped. She couldn’t be serious, she thought. Out of all these students, Norma had picked
her
to share? She felt put on the spot. But she was also surprised that her professor had paid enough attention to her story to even mention it. The other students had shared their good-bye letters in the second class. Some had lost family members and friends to accidents and diseases. Their struggles seemed far more tragic than hers. Who in this classroom, she wondered, would really care to hear about her?

At first Caitlin tried to ask the student next to her to read it for her, but Norma encouraged her to take ownership of the letter, read it herself. Reluctantly, she did.

“It was about two weeks after my fourth birthday when I found my mom unconscious in my backyard with one sock on,” Caitlin began, her voice trembling as she felt all eyes on her. Tears blurred her vision as she blinked to make out the rest of the words on the paper. “She went into a coma. I don’t remember how long because I was so young, but I do remember everyone telling me Mommy was sick. It wasn’t until I was about eight years old that I understood she did it to herself. She is a drug addict and has been since before I was born. You might think I’d want to rewind and change the fact that I ever knew.”

When Caitlin found her mom that day, she had no idea what was wrong with her. Caitlin tried to get her to wake up, but she wouldn’t budge. Was she dead? She hardly even understood what dead meant at that age, but she knew it wasn’t good. Caitlin yelled for her father, a firefighter, who was home that day. He came running, scooping her mom up like a sack of toys. But he didn’t call an ambulance. Instead he decided to drive her to the hospital himself. Caitlin and her sisters crawled into the backseats of the minivan. Their dad deposited their mom’s motionless body across their tiny laps. The girls held on to her arms and legs for the ride.

She had seen the scars on her mom’s wrists since she was little. They ran across like raised veins. But she didn’t learn until she got older
that her mom had slit her wrists and set her bed on fire before Caitlin was born.

As Caitlin got older, she realized that the pills were the problem. Some of the labels had weird words, like Xanax, Vicodin, and Percocet. The pills were
bad.
The pills might
kill
her mother. “She loves the pills more than she loves you,” her father would tell Caitlin, forcing her to look at her mother’s swollen, drooling face.

Whenever her father found out her mother had been using while he was at the firehouse, he flew into a rage, even slapping her around. But her mom barely seemed to feel it. All drugged up, she did not even respond.

There were times Caitlin found her mother on the bathroom floor, unconscious with toothpaste smeared across her face and the sink. Imitating her father’s reaction, Caitlin would yell and slap her and then tear the house apart searching for the sock full of pills. Sometimes her mother begged her not to flush the pills or tell her father. Feeling guilty, Caitlin obeyed.

One day, her mother noticed the rusty skeleton key that Caitlin kept on a chain around her neck and asked if she knew where it had come from. Caitlin always figured the key had magically appeared in her backyard, just for her to find, separate from the ones her father gave her. But her mom explained that someone had given it to her at the hospital when Caitlin was four. That meant her mom had received it shortly after Caitlin had found her facedown in the backyard. She must have lost the key in the yard.

Caitlin couldn’t believe it. She threw the key away. She wanted nothing to do with anything tainted by such a horrible memory. That was when her hobby of collecting skeleton keys ended.

By the time she turned twelve, Caitlin had become withdrawn and despondent in school. She would not even reply when a teacher called on her, wouldn’t open her mouth at all. She just sat there, paralyzed with fear.

Sometimes teachers would get upset with her lack of obedience and scold her in front of the class, which made her feel terrible. She wanted desperately to talk but just couldn’t bring herself to do it. The thought of speaking
mortified her, and she began to hate herself even more for it. When class was over, she would go looking for somewhere away from everyone else to cry.

To try to overcome this fear and shyness, she decided to try out for a school play. But she got so nervous before her audition that she ran to the bathroom and threw up all of the Doritos she had eaten beforehand. Throwing up horrified her. She had never thrown up before, at least not since she was a baby, and she couldn’t remember that far back. She detested sickness in general and would lock herself in a closet with Lysol if ill people were around. She would wipe down the toilet seat in her own house each time she went to the bathroom, and even after it had been wiped down she still did not actually sit on the toilet seat. She rubbed her hands raw with soap and water. She needed neatness. If anything in her bedroom seemed an inch out of place, or if a pencil suddenly went missing, she would notice immediately and get upset. She couldn’t stand the thought of anyone touching her stuff. After the vomiting incident, she got panic attacks in school, worrying that she might throw up again at any moment. Fear of vomiting consumed her now too.

By middle school, Caitlin was a C student, but she had become convinced that she could make life at home better if she excelled in sports. She knew the whole family enjoyed softball, and when Caitlin played in tournaments they all came to the games and acted so happy, like a normal family. Her mom was a huge Yankees fan. And her dad enjoyed playing catch. If Caitlin could become the best softball player, if she could play the game as much as possible, maybe then, she figured, everything would be okay. But it didn’t work out that way.

Years passed, and Caitlin kept looking for new ways to cope, to make her imperfect life feel perfect. She had become obsessed with the idea of being skinny. She consumed 500 calories a day, subsisting on coffee, oatmeal, and fruit, and ran two to three miles or spent forty-five minutes at the gym daily. She was five feet, seven inches tall and had whittled down to 100 pounds in a matter of months. She stopped getting her menstrual cycle.

By college, Caitlin had willed herself to become a straight-A student, who panicked if she received anything less. She was now pretty
and
smart,
or so everyone else thought. But passing herself in the mirror, she didn’t always see the captivating young lady that others commented about on Facebook, using words such as “gorgeous” and “hot,” one even saying she could be Britney Spears’s twin. Caitlin was a long-legged blonde with a sharp chin and a waist narrow enough to hug with one arm. For makeup she used just smoky eyeliner, mascara, and a few strokes of lip gloss, yet it was still enough to make heads turn. But at school she preferred baseball caps and running sneakers. She sometimes stooped when she sat, like a weak stem holding up a heavy flower. When Caitlin looked at herself, she saw someone never quite beautiful or remarkable enough.

One day, while home from her college classes, Caitlin and her sister heard crashing sounds from downstairs, as if someone was chopping down a tree in the basement. Then they heard a blast. Caitlin knew her father owned a few guns. He kept them stashed in the basement in a cabinet, separate from the bullets. The sisters ran downstairs toward the noises. By the time they reached the basement, they realized their mother had locked herself inside with the guns. Their dad grabbed a sledgehammer from the backyard and tried breaking down the door. But before he could get through, Caitlin’s mom pulled the trigger. The bullet lodged in a wall near the staircase her daughters had rushed down.

“You could have shot one of the kids!” Caitlin would remember her dad screaming.

“I’m constantly worrying, even when there is nothing to worry about,” Caitlin told the class that day when Norma called on her to read her rewind button essay. “I stress myself out and overdo everything, like it’s going to fill some void.”

I
N CLASS
,
C
AITLIN
found herself engrossed by the stories her professor shared about her years working as a psychiatric nurse. Norma would launch into a lesson on mental illness sometimes like this: “I had a patient say to me once, ‘If only you would take me to the roof, I could prove to you that I could fly.’ He was absolutely convinced. Sometimes people get these really grandiose ideas when they’re manic.”

Norma recounted her experience with another patient, also manic: “This
kid comes in, and he’s just all over the place. We had to restrain him and take him to the psych unit, but he managed to jump up and run down the hall with the stretcher strapped to him. . . . The psychiatric unit was on one side and the geriatric unit was on the other, and these old people would walk by and he would be plastered to the wall because they just caught him buck-naked full frontal. This went on for about two weeks. One day, I went in and it was quiet, and this nurse says, ‘You won’t believe it. Go in and look.’ And sure enough, I went into the room and he had his hands crossed over his chest with his eyes closed, and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And he said, ‘Can’t you see I’m dead?’ He had gone from really high to really low.”

Norma also told her classes about an extremely bright Rutgers University student she had treated when she worked as a psychiatric nurse in an outpatient clinic. His family had come to the United States from India in the hope that he would attend medical school. But by his second semester, he started to display symptoms of schizophrenia and ended up getting suspended from campus. Each week, he would visit with Norma and explain how guilty he felt for shaming his family. He talked of feeling as if his intelligence was getting sucked out of him and of hearing voices. He described the sound to her—like having earphones stuck to both ears and tuned to your least favorite radio station, with no control over the dial or the volume. The description, as Norma told her students, reminded her of when she had been a nurse at the University of Virginia, working the 3
P.M
. to 11
P.M.
shift and going home each night after her rounds to turn on the television and see various evangelical preachers proselytizing on channel after channel. She couldn’t imagine having those preachers stuck in her ear 24/7. In the case of schizophrenics, she said, the station was often tuned to a constant stream of disparaging comments such as “You’re ugly” or “That person hates you” or “You smell” or “That person is going to hurt you.”

Her schizophrenic patient came to her office one day, and she gave him a shot of Prolixin, an antipsychotic medication that sometimes muted the voices to whispers. He went home and called her to say good-bye again. She hung up and dialed 911 and sent an ambulance to his house. Sure enough, by the time paramedics arrived he had overdosed on
asthma medication; he ended up in the intensive care unit for three days on dialysis. He survived that suicide attempt but hung himself not too long after. “For some people,” she said, “it’s just too much to bear to live like that.”

In Norma’s profession, you didn’t always win—but when you did, it affirmed life. Caitlin wanted that for herself too.

Ever since high school, Caitlin had been thinking about becoming a school psychologist, since one day in ninth grade, when her sister had called Caitlin on her cell phone while she was in class. Looking at her caller ID, Caitlin knew her sister had stayed home from school that day. Worrying that something awful had happened to their parents, she slipped out of class and into the bathroom to take the call.

“What’s going on?”

“Mommy’s high and they’re fighting,” her sister said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Caitlin hung up and wandered into the empty hall, debating whether she should tell a school nurse she felt sick so she could go home. She had never told a soul about what was going on at home. A friend turned the corner, saw her crying, and took her to a counselor’s office. With her friend’s support, she felt safe with the counselor, who helped her talk about her family problems for the first time. Talking made her feel better. Caitlin knew she wanted to help people, as her school counselor had helped her that day and as Norma helped her students and patients.

“I want to change lives, like on a big scale, like huge,” Caitlin said once. “I plan on living an extraordinary life.”

Of the death class excursions, the autopsy observation was by far the most popular field trip, right behind the visit to the maximum-security prison, and most students could hardly wait to see a dead body being dissected. Caitlin, who had seen her mother’s abused and withering body up close, wanted no part of it. She told her professor and her parents that she was not going. Norma pushed her anyway, told her to get past her fears. There’s no way in hell, Caitlin thought. The germs alone would make her want to run away and drench herself in sanitizers and antiseptics.