The Death Class: A True Story About Life (19 page)

Carl had covered Stephen’s torso with leaves and dirt but had left his head exposed: according to police reports it was sticking out above ground.

When Norma eventually learned the details, it didn’t make her feel “all warm and fuzzy toward Carl,” she said. That was for sure.

But she knew the person he was now, not the person he’d been at twenty-five.

In prison, Carl returned to the religious values that his mother had tried to instill in him during his youth. He signed up for mail-order courses from Christian colleges and Bible study classes in prison. He could debate religion and quote scriptures for hours. To prove his restored devotion, he became born again. “I convinced myself that my failure to live a Christian life was the reason why I was in prison, and that only my devotion to the Lord would get me out,” Carl once wrote in an essay. “So I went all in for the Lord.” But by forty, Carl was beginning to realize that believing in the power of the Lord wasn’t going to be enough to change his predicament.

Carl wanted to learn about other religions without being required to commit to a single one. He also realized that of all the spiritual systems, aspects of the Buddhist tradition seemed to make the most sense to him. It was more like a philosophy or a way of life than a religion. So Carl asked his pastor in prison whether he minded if he studied Zen Buddhism. The pastor wasn’t enthusiastic about the idea, but he allowed Carl to get in touch with a teacher from a Zen Buddhist school, who agreed to begin conducting classes at the prison.

His spiritual studies had been progressing nicely until one day in 2003, when a guard told Carl, “Get your stuff.” The next thing he knew, Carl was shackled and put onto a bus, leaving his comfortable prison community, where he had his own cell with a desk and took classes learning skills such as carpentry and upholstery making. He wasn’t
informed why he was being transferred or what had prompted the move. He soon realized he was headed upstate, to Northern State Prison.

Upon arrival, guards sent him straight to the medical unit to get a checkup, but during processing Carl looked around and saw the guards take off running. One locked Carl in the medical unit. He watched officers bring in an inmate who looked as though half of his face had been torn off. It turned out that another inmate three floors up had dropped a heavy metal shoe locker onto the guy’s head. The guards gave Carl a pillow, blanket, toothbrush, and miniature tube of toothpaste.

It turned out that the prison did not have Buddhism or meditation classes. Within days of showing up, Carl asked if a Buddhist teacher could come in to work with him and other men, but his repeated requests were ignored. He asked if he could talk to a clergyperson about the idea, but again, Carl said, he was refused. Finally he wrote a letter to the Liberation Prison Project, which connected inmates to volunteer Buddhist teachers. He also threatened to file a federal civil rights action lawsuit. That seemed to get the prison officials’ attention. The prison notified him that it was accepting applications from volunteers, and within six months it had found a teacher, a well-known spiritual teacher and meditation instructor, Dean Sluyter.

When Dean walked into Northern State Prison in 2005, three men greeted him for the first meeting. “The other two guys weren’t quite sure what was going on,” Dean later remembered. “But Carl? He was very clear, very precise. Clearly had been reading and practicing.” Every Thursday night, Dean would show up at 6
P.M.
Prison officials would call out for Buddhist studies, and the men would emerge from different wings, meeting in a chapel for the hour-and-a-half-long sessions. The group soon grew to include eighteen regular attendees. Carl became the cornerstone of the Buddhist community at Northern State. Dean called him “the deacon.”

During each session, the men would sit unflinchingly as prison announcements roared out of the overhead speaker above their heads four or five times an hour. They became masters of meditation, Dean explained. “The Buddha said, ‘Practice like your hair is on fire.’ And those guys practiced like their hair was on fire. They recognize the urgency;
for them this is not some weekend workshop at the yoga retreat. It’s survival. This is life or death, sanity or insanity.”

Carl kept a forty-five-page yellow booklet,
The Thirty-seven Practices of Bodhisattvas.
He’d placed a yellow Post-it note on page 6, with the lyrics of the Tibetan yogi Milarepa:

Fearing death, I went to the mountains.

Over and over again I meditated on

death’s unpredictable coming,

and took the stronghold of

the deathless unchanging nature.

Now I am completely beyond all fear of dying.

Norma knew that Carl had forgiven his father in the years since he’d learned of the sexual abuse of his sisters. Even though he still got upset about it from time to time, he had found it within himself to call his father from prison every once in a while, hold a conversation with him, and even tell him “I love you.”

When asked why, he simply replied, “How can I ever expect to be forgiven if I can’t forgive?”

It seemed to Norma that Carl was navigating through the stages of Erikson’s life cycle, despite his horrible mistakes. The final stage—the eighth one, before death—as Norma taught, came down to reflection. Erikson called this stage “Integrity vs. Despair.”

“If you can look back at your entire life and at the end of the day and say, ‘You know? My life was good. I’m pleased with how it all turned out . . . and if I could do it all over again, I’d be happy to’—those people have integrity,” Norma told her students.

She knew Carl might not, in the end, end up “happy” about how it had all turned out, but he was trying his hardest with the time he had left to put as many good deeds as possible on the ledger.

Based on Norma’s own experiences, when the end came, people who have made it through every stage and its difficulties satisfactorily, people who have developed a strong sense of Erikson’s
generativity
—meaning beyond themselves—can face their death with less fear and discontent.
She said they can simply let go. If they die a natural death, it usually comes peacefully, without violent resistance or pain, like that of the first patient Norma watched die when she was a nurse in training; she ended up holding the patient’s hand as the last life blew out of her body and never forgot how serene it all seemed.

“Wisdom, then, is detached concern with life itself, in the face of death itself,” Erikson wrote. “. . . Only such integrity can balance the despair of the knowledge that a limited life is coming to a conscious conclusion, only such wholeness can transcend the petty disgust of feeling finished and passed by, and the despair of facing the period of relative helplessness which marks the end as it marked the beginning.”

Those who look back and realize that they are unhappy, unfulfilled, who leave behind a trail of ruined relationships, a broken family, or maybe have never experienced the feeling of real love or never figured out who they really are—their lives could end on a harsher note. When death arrived, Norma told her students, “Oh, my God, they hang on and hang on. They’re in pain.”

“Those people,” she said, “die in despair.”

The professor had witnessed many such deaths. Scared people who were simply not ready to let go.

“Despair expresses the feeling that the time is too short, too short for the attempt to start another life and to try out alternate roads to integrity,” Erikson wrote. “Such a despair is often hidden behind a show of disgust, a misanthropy, or a chronic contemptuous displeasure with particular institutions and particular people—a disgust and a displeasure which . . . only signify the individual’s contempt of himself.”

“It’s hard to watch,” Norma told her students. “They have a lot of unfinished business, and the clock has run out now. There is no way to go back.”

The hardest death Norma had ever had to watch had happened two years earlier. It was her mother’s.

L
INDA HAD BEEN
living in California since she’d split from Norma’s dad, and by December 2006 she was suffering from lung cancer. Even
though Norma had barely spoken to her mother for more than a decade, she ended up flying back and forth to California while juggling her classes at Kean to help Linda through the chemo treatments, as she had done when her grandmother had been treated for lung cancer.

In her final days, Linda could no longer move, swallow, or respond to people around her, and she had been on a ventilator for days, medicated with morphine. Doctors had managed to remove her tumor, but the cancer had devastated Linda’s body, and she had developed a MRSA staph infection that was eating her insides. She needed a tracheotomy, but doctors warned she could die on the operating table during the procedure. Linda was 67, and would no longer be able to swallow or eat. Norma was her medical proxy. In her classes, Norma taught her students that a medical proxy was someone named in a person’s living will—the document that specified end-of-life care—who would make medical decisions on behalf of an individual in the event that he or she could no longer make them. Norma always handed out copies of living will forms to students. There were checklists about issues like whether the person wanted feeding tubes or resuscitation. Linda had specified in her living will that she did not want to be kept alive with tubes and machines.

Norma’s brother, a musician, was overseas on tour with an orchestra at the time. Linda had split from her most recent husband, an older man whom she had met after divorcing Norma’s dad for the second time. Now she was running a high fever and the infection was not getting better. Antibiotics had not slowed the infection. Norma had to wear a mask, gown, and gloves around her so as not to contract MRSA. The doctors said they would give her mother two days to turn around, and if she did not get better Norma would have to make a decision whether to have her mother extubated.

Linda had always been a well put together woman, particularly attentive to her hair and makeup. The movie
Must Love Dogs
seemed to be the only distraction keeping up her spirits through the first rounds of chemo. Now that she could not speak, Norma thought her mother would have hated to see herself in such a sorry state. Even if she survived the surgery, she might have to relearn to walk and talk and
swallow, but doctors were not hopeful that she would get that far in recovery.

“Okay, you’ve really got to fight,” Norma told her mother. “Give me some kind of sign about what you want, because if nothing gets better they’re going to do exactly what you had written down.”

Norma went out into a waiting room and began to cry, knowing she would have to make the call to take her mother off the machines—to end her life.

An elderly woman approached Norma. The woman was slight, with curly silver hair, orthopedic shoes, and spectacles. She reminded Norma of Mrs. Claus. Norma figured she was a hospital volunteer. She tried to comfort Norma, who explained to that stranger the tubes, the directive, the decision she faced.

The woman explained that she had recently made a similar decision about her husband. She took Norma’s hand and told her to come along to the lobby. People had written the names of loved ones on ornaments and origami cranes. Family members were lining up to hang them on a Christmas tree. The woman helped Norma make one. She hung it on a branch. Her mother’s name dangled alongside all the others.

“It’s going to be okay, dear,” the old woman said to her. She asked for her phone number and continued checking in for the next few days. Norma would not see the woman again after her mother passed away. But she would not forget the comfort she had felt in hearing the gentle tremble of her voice, the kind of comfort she had felt in the presence of only one other person in her life: her grandmother.

“Do you want us to do it tonight?” doctors asked.

“No, not tonight,” Norma replied.

She returned to her mother’s home that evening, stripping down at the door, tossing all of her clothes into the washing machine with bleach and hot water to disinfect them from any trace of MRSA. She took a long, steaming shower and stayed up most of the night going through old photo albums.

Hospice care has its own version of a life review, as Norma knew. Workers and counselors sometimes conduct it with terminally ill people—like an oral history. Some write down their stories. Some record them on
tape. Some use music to stimulate buried memories. Some invite friends and family members to talk about old times.

There were even forms, in some cases, that offered life review guidelines with prompts: Who took care of you as a child, and what were they like? Who was your first love? Who were your closest friends in college? If you were going to live your life over again, what would you do differently? The same? What was the unhappiest period of your life? What did you learn from it? What was the happiest?

Norma knew that her mother was not alert enough to engage in her own life review, so sitting alone in her home that night, she did one for her. She thumbed through photographs of her mother on vacation in Thailand and China with the last man she had married, a man Norma had never known.

When her parents had divorced a second time, Norma had been an adult. As Norma remembered it, her mom had been having an affair with a bridge partner, and when her father had found out, he’d threatened to have the guy killed. Her mother had called her father’s place of work and ratted him out, telling his bosses that he had been giving their contracts to the mob. From what Norma understood, the “big boss guy” sat Linda down, gave her money, and said, “We never want to see you or hear from you again. Let this be a warning to you.”

Norma could remember her mother crying and saying, “They’re going to kill me.” That was when she moved to California.

It was the second time Norma’s father had come close to getting arrested, and he decided to get out of town and lie low.

The sixteen-year estrangement from her mother had been triggered by a series of serious incidents. One of the first occurred when Norma was at the apartment of her mom’s cousin in Brooklyn one Fourth of July. She’d walked out on the balcony and saw her drunken mother dangling her daughter, Melissa, who was a little girl at the time, over a railing on the forty-eighth floor. Norma thought, Wow, this woman can’t hurt me now, but if she were to hurt my kid, that would be something I couldn’t get over. Not long after, Linda tried to take Melissa out of ballet class, and another day, she tried to sign her out of school, both times unannounced and without permission. That was when Norma told her,
“Don’t come near me. Don’t try to call.” Her mother did not see Melissa again, and she would never know Becca.