The Death Class: A True Story About Life (14 page)

Another time, while working as a nurse at the University of Virginia
Medical Center, she noticed an elderly man walking near the hospital while she was on her way back to her apartment. He looked sad, she would recall many years later. He had black marks on his throat, brutal signs of his radiation treatments, and he seemed worn down and lonely, wandering out of the hospital by himself. So she invited him over to her place for lunch with her roommates. Her two roommates were also nurses, and they had all been friends before coming to the University of Virginia Medical Center together. One worked in labor and delivery. The other worked in plastic surgery. The nurse in labor and delivery had even received a free nose job in the department after volunteering to let medical students watch the procedure. Norma worked in neurology intensive care. It was the unit that treated people with neurological disorders, including Lou Gehrig’s disease, and patients suffering from brain injuries after roadway accidents. Neurology intensive care had been Norma’s first choice. Her roommates didn’t seem surprised that she had brought the man over for lunch. But they always joked with her after that, asking which stray she would bring home next.

Whenever Norma’s internal helper buzzer went off, she could end up drawn into the most unexpected, sometimes sketchy, sometimes absurd situations—such as inside a women’s prison classroom, nearly two hours from campus, where she had decided to teach without pay. Sitting before her during one visit were two dozen inmates. In the second row sat a mother who had drowned her baby in a bathtub. In the back was a transsexual who had shot two Camden County police officers to death. In the front row was a former exotic dancer who had dismembered her girlfriend, scattering her head, legs, and torso across three different cities. Norma’s pro bono lesson of the day? Safe sex and STDs.

The professor always joked that she “had no danger button,” no clear sense of alarm, to warn her of threats. When it came to her students, she was cautious. When it came to herself, not so much.

Once she took a van full of students on a community service field trip. During a pit stop in Alabama, Norma just about had a heart attack when a student darted off into the night to pet a stray dog. The professor fretted that it might bite her or pass on some God-awful infection.
Shortly after, while back on the road, the professor spotted a homeless man sitting in the dark at the entrance of the highway.

“We’re pulling over!” she shouted to the volunteer who was driving. “I think I have some cereal,” she said, rifling through the van, hopping outside, and scampering into a ditch to the toothless, shoeless man. She also gave him half of a banana and a small container of soy milk.

“Wait, let me get this straight,” remarked another student sitting in the backseat, “I can’t pet a dog, but it’s okay for Dr. Bowe to give cereal to some crackhead?”

The professor chuckled at the comment later, admitting that it had been kind of ridiculous. But frankly, there was no proof the man was on drugs, and it didn’t matter to her anyway because, besides looking frail and weak, he had also looked hungry. She thought the dog, on the other hand, had looked like an attack dog. It was guarding a truck, and Norma pictured calling her student’s father to explain why it had ripped the girl’s face off, all because she wanted to pet it.

Just as she didn’t have much of a danger button, she also had no problem thrusting herself into people’s normally private lives.

On that same road trip, during a stopover at a Holiday Inn in Birmingham, the hotel manager broke down crying as she explained to Norma, who’d checked in at a discounted rate, how her dog had just died after nineteen years of life. She was keeping the dog’s body in a freezer at a nearby funeral home and planned to hold a burial and funeral the upcoming weekend. Norma held a bereavement session with her students and the hotel manager right there in the buffet breakfast room with cold scrambled eggs and half-eaten English muffins still on plastic plates.

Some considered it her caring curiosity. Others, flat-out nosiness. But I understood her tendency because I’d always had the same habit—no filter when it came to asking personal questions, no limits on poking my nose into stuff people don’t naturally talk about or care to share. It had served my reporting career well.

Once the two of us ended up crashing a Buddhism retreat in the woods of upstate New York on a whim because Norma wanted to meet the lama of honor who was running the sessions; she and the lama had a mutual student in common, and Norma had some general questions
about Buddhism. But she didn’t want to enroll in an entire weekend of meditation and training sessions, and she had no desire to actually
become
a Buddhist. So we just showed up and slipped right in between the chants as the lama started talking about focusing your breath and concentrating on the pit of your stomach. When it was over, Norma cornered the lama and coaxed the woman into meeting her for an organic lunch.

Part of her audacity stemmed from her own childhood, all those stashed guns, fistfights, and mob dinners. But the other part, particularly her extreme tolerance for the maniacal and macabre, had to do with spending years working in neurology intensive care and psychiatric wards. After a nursing career like hers, very little could faze her. She could remember chatting about dinner plans with a doctor as he sewed a woman’s eyeball back in place. The patient had gotten into a fight over a guy, and the other woman had bitten her eye out. It had ended up hanging from a tendon.

Another time, Norma saw a patient who had undergone a sex change operation from woman to man, long before it became a common procedure. The former woman had been given a penis made of her own flesh, which could be pumped into an erection by squeezing a scrotal pump. Many years later, on an autopsy field trip with her students, the class walked in to see a naked body on the table with a full erection.

“Dr. Bowe, how can that be?”

Sure enough, she explained, the deceased person had had a penile implant just like the one she’d seen when she was a nurse, complete with a pump.

Nothing was too off the wall for the professor. In fact, the more unusual and the more intensely personal, the more at ease she felt. As if they had a sixth sense too, the people with the most mind-boggling problems gravitated toward Norma.

But the pull went both ways.

A
DULTHOOD
,
N
ORMA BELIEVED
, is about giving back and passing lessons on to the next generation, so that the virtues you work so hard to develop live on even after your death. Norma came to embrace the idea
of Erik Erikson’s seventh stage of life, “Generativity vs. Stagnation,” as she explained in her lectures to students. This period, according to Erikson, comes down to questions such as: What is my legacy? What will I leave behind for the next generation?

If a person never figures out his or her identity and never finds real love or intimate relationships during earlier stages in life, he or she can hit adulthood and become a miserable complainer, she said. “Nothing makes them happy,” as Norma explained it to her students. No one is good enough, nothing satisfies them—not even winning the lottery. A life lived in this manner will likely lead to serious letdowns in the final stage of Erikson’s cycle—the one before death.

But those who have developed all the virtues Erikson described in previous stages of life, who have come to know, understand, and love themselves, who have found true intimacy and discovered purpose in their career, creative, or community endeavors, often develop a different attitude in adulthood. They work toward goals that will leave something behind for the next generation, whether money, wisdom, creativity, or genes. They often want to make life better for their children, and even if they haven’t had children of their own, they work to leave something behind for people around them. This is
generativity,
according to Erikson, a term he coined that emphasizes productivity, caring, and behavior that often involves committing oneself to a cause, people, or a larger universal purpose—and a teacher is in many ways the ultimate example of giving something back and passing it on.

E
ACH SEMESTER
,
N
ORMA
took her students from the death class to visit a hospice center, in which residents spend their dying days; in order for patients to be admitted, they have to have been diagnosed by a doctor as having six months or less left to live.

Father Hudson House was a cozy place with creaky stairs filled with nurses, such as the director, Sally, a short, unassuming grandmother with ginger-colored hair lopped off at the shoulders, feathered bangs, and tiny gold hoops in her ears. She wore white hospital staff pants, white slip-on nurse shoes, and ankle socks with pink bow designs.

Sally had been working with the terminally ill since the 1970s, when the public first began noticing that people were dying alone and in pain. Caregivers had been going into the homes of the dying to assist but soon realized that those who were less fortunate didn’t even have homes to die in. That was when hospice facilities like Father Hudson House began opening in New Jersey.

Since her career had begun, some of Sally’s own family members had died in the hospice center, including her thirty-seven-year-old niece, who had succumbed to a brain tumor. Some people who came to them had no family at all, she said. Her staff members had searched the Internet, even gone to Ellis Island, to rifle through records to track down relatives.

Father Hudson House had been home to a hospice dog at one point and was decorated with wooden mallards and gold and green wall trim, as well as a piano and an old boom box with a crate full of Benny Goodman CDs and sound tracks with titles such as
Strings of Paris, Songs of World War II,
and the sound track to
Singing in the Rain. Jeopardy
blared at full volume from television sets as white-haired folks reclined in chairs, while some hobbled through hallways, clinging to handrails.

On every hospice field trip, Norma stopped in to see a patient named Jim, a ninety-six-year-old who had lost both his legs to diabetes and had outlived the six-month prognosis.

“There’s my favorite person!” she would exclaim. Jim seemed to remember her each time. He had a hollow nose, red eyes, and thick, calloused hands from his years of working on a tugboat. The students took a liking to Jim too, sitting next to him in his room, his leg stubs draped in a blanket, listening to him tell stories about his family and life on the tugboat.

After one trip, when back in class, some students said how sad it must be to spend your dying days in a hospice center, no matter how kind the nurses. The place, for all its charm, seemed pretty dreary. It could use a makeover.

“So let’s do one!” Norma replied, not entirely sure of what she was getting herself into. But the death class went along with the idea, and within a couple of weeks Norma and her students, including Caitlin,
had recruited nearly fifty volunteers to paint the walls in brighter shades, such as yellow, and furnish the hospice facility with bright bookcases, pictures of suns and trees on the wall, a revamped game and recreation room, and a beauty salon. Jim, chipper as ever, chatted with the youngsters about his life on the water as they painted. When done, the place was a rainbow of purples, reds, and greens.

And Jim? He outlived many of his neighbors in that made-over hospice facility, greeting a dozen more semesters of death class students—longer than any doctor could have anticipated.

It had been only a small project, completed in a single weekend. There were no cameras in the room to capture it for a reality television show and no wealthy donors. The students had raised the money to pay for the paint themselves, as well as securing donations of the furniture and decorations. This was Erikson’s theory of generativity in vibrant action, a lesson that Norma had learned on her own so many years before from the lonely 110-year-old woman who lived in the trailer with her dog.

After the makeover, the students pitched in to decorate another hospice facility, this one for dying children. Norma kept a sign on her office door, right next to an article about the survivors of the Virginia Tech University shooting. It was a quote from the man whom Erik Erikson had written a 1969 psychobiography about, entitled
Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence,
for which he had won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. The quote from Mohandas Gandhi read: “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

In late 2008, the death class students who had made over the hospice facilities decided to launch a community service group, with Norma as its innovator and adviser.

They would call it Be the Change.

O
NE MORNING, KNEE-HIGH
banks of dirty snow lined the sidewalks and roadsides like mounds of dirt left over from freshly dug graves around the Crabiel Parkwest Funeral Chapel in New Brunswick, where the funeral for Norma’s neighbor was being held. Inside, the
men, including Norma’s partner, Norman, wore yarmulkes. The couple and their daughter, Becca, sat behind the widow, in the second row.

Paul Griminger, a longtime friend of Norma’s family, had lived for eighty-eight years—surviving the Holocaust, outwitting the Nazi Anschluss in Austria, and in 1938 leaving for Palestine, where he had ended up fighting as a British soldier and later being stationed in Egypt. After the war, he had become a professor of nutrition at Rutgers University, settling in Norma’s Highland Park neighborhood. But in the fall of 2008, he had fallen ill and been told by a doctor he would need an aortic valve replacement. The procedure would give him the benefit of living probably another year.

His mind was astute, and he still very much enjoyed waking up to his morning paper each day, often writing letters to
The New York Times.
He had four children and nine grandchildren, and he decided that another year would be worth it; he wanted to live even longer than that if he could. But in the event that he might encounter complications during surgery, which he knew was risky given his age and condition, he scheduled the procedure for November 5, 2008; he did not want to miss the opportunity to vote for Barack Obama on November 4. On the day of the election, Griminger and his wife, Olga, drove to the polling station to cast their votes and then went home to prepare for his surgery at New York Presbyterian Hospital.