The Death Class: A True Story About Life (20 page)

In the final months of her life, Linda had come close to making some kind of apology to Norma. One day when Norma was driving her to get chemo, Linda looked at her and said, “I wasn’t the best mother.”

Norma didn’t reply. She just let it hang in the air, knowing that was probably the closest to an apology she was going to get. After a few seconds of silence, Norma told her mom, “It was a long time ago.”

That night of the life review in her mother’s California home, Norma knew her father would have to go on living with his own upsets and mistakes after her mother’s death. She knew that the eighth and final stage of life was also about “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle,” Erikson wrote, “and of the people who have become significant to it.” Despite their feuds, everyone in the family knew that her parents’ love for each other, twisted and violent as it had been, was real. Norma’s father would have to go on living with all that had been unsaid. The next morning she called her father. “They’re going to extubate her today.”

“I want to talk to her,” he said.

In the hospital room, Norma held the phone to her mother’s ear. She hoped her father wouldn’t start cursing and getting inappropriate, saying things like “You owe me money,” as he had been known to do.

“Linda,” she heard her father say, “I’ve loved you since the first day I saw you.”

Maybe this will be okay, Norma thought, moving the phone closer.

He went on. “You were the love of my life.”

Her mother’s eyes began to flutter.

“Thank you for two beautiful children,” he said. “I’m sorry you’re so sick. I don’t want you to leave with any regrets.”

Norma thought she could hear her father crying.

“We had so many good times,” he continued. “I want you to remember the good times, not the bad.”

She let the phone call end as her father said his last good-bye. Then she told her mother, “They’re going to take the tube out. I’m going to stay with you the whole time.”

Norma climbed into the hospital bed with her mother and wrapped her arms around her. She could hear her panting.

“I’m here,” she told her. “It’s okay.”

Norma had brought a portable CD player to the hospital. She slipped in a CD of her brother’s classical music. The doctor arrived with nurses. One held her jaw, another pulled the tube out through her mouth; it slid like a long, ribbed milk shake straw out of her trachea and throat.

She could not breathe without the tube. Norma climbed into the hospital bed in her mask and hospital gown. Medical staff turned up the morphine, which stunned Norma. It seemed like too much. But her mother hung on.

Norma cradled her until it was all over. But her mother’s last moments had not been as graceful as her grandmother’s or as those of the woman from nursing school.

“I can’t even imagine what she thought,” Norma said while recounting the story. “She did struggle, she was gasping for breath, and I was playing the music, and she looked a little panicked.” Norma paused, her eyes red from crying. “It was really hard.”

At one point Norma felt as though allowing the doctors to take out the tubes had been the wrong decision, even though Linda’s wishes had been specified in the DNR. She considered stopping it all. But it was too late. The clock had run out.

I
SRAEL’S TURN TO
share his essays with the class arrived yet again. Each time the professor had called on him before, he had declined. But this time he changed his mind. The visits with the inmates had lingered with him. His old friends from his gang, some of whom now lived at Northern State, haunted him. He could tell that too many inmates still didn’t take full responsibility for their crimes. But a rare few like Carl seemed to be making steps toward redemption and integrity. Pulling out his good-bye letter, Israel hesitated.

“Dear Jason,” he began.

Jason was a teenager Israel had met after he’d landed a job working at
a boot camp for troubled boys, like the one he’d graduated from, he explained to the class. Israel had been twenty-four at the time, going on six years of leaving the gang life behind him, trying to find some way to make amends for his past but unsure of exactly how. Jason was still entrenched in a gang and told his new mentor that he wanted out for good. Israel gave Jason his word: he would help him escape the gang life.

When Jason graduated from boot camp, he fibbed to his fellow gang members, telling them that Israel was his probation officer. Every time his friends were about to go out and do something stupid, he would call Israel, who would drive by and call out, “Jason, come here.”

“Yo, that’s my probation officer,” Jason told the gang. “I gotta go.”

Israel was no officer, just an older-brother type who took Jason to the gym with him or out for meals, and helped him get a job at UPS. He told him what he’d learned, how getting out of the gang life was like being a recovering drug addict. For the next year, Jason followed his mentor’s advice.

But one night, while Israel was seeing a movie in Manhattan, he got a phone call from one of the teens he’d met at the boot camp. He’d always told the youngsters he worked with to reach him on his cell at any time if they needed him. The teenager told Israel that something had happened to Jason. He’d been walking down the street when two guys had approached him from behind. They’d shot him twice. He hadn’t survived.

Jason’s killers, Israel would later learn, had been members of his own gang.

Israel blamed himself. He had tried pulling Jason out of the gang too fast. He’d kept on pulling and pulling, thinking he knew what was right, thinking Jason could get out without paying a price. He had let his street senses slip—and look what had happened.

“You always get one you get attached to,” Israel said. “He was my kid.”

Almost a year had passed since Jason died when Israel shared his story with the class. The two suspects had been arrested and were facing trial. But they were still alive and probably also housed at Northern State Prison.

Norma listened. The others did too. Israel admitted that he’d held a gun to another young man’s head. That was why he’d felt so strongly about helping Jason and so tormented that he had failed him.

O
NE WEEKEND, BEFORE
his semester in the death class ended, Israel went to Burlington Coat Factory, and, after riding down an escalator, he came face to face with someone he recognized from ten years earlier: it was the guy he’d nearly killed. He’d come back from Puerto Rico and was a grown man now. Their eyes met. Israel remembered those dark eyes, the way they had watered, the terror they had held. He remembered the mother’s screams.

The two men stood in the department store, staring at each other. Israel noticed he had a baby stroller and a woman by his side. His thoughts raced. You got a family now? It looked as if his old enemy had moved on with his life. Settled down. Israel wondered if the guy had heard that he’d left his old life behind too. After all, they’d crossed paths at Burlington Coat Factory, not on some street corner. Now here they were, two men who’d both received a second chance at life.

Israel wanted to apologize. But how could he start? I’m sorry I beat your dad and you down with a gun and put a gun to your head with your mom on the floor.

No words came out. None was needed.

Instead, both men stood there for what felt like several minutes in silence. Then both turned and walked away.

November 2008

After the hospital released his brother, Jonathan had no time to worry about his breakup with Caitlin. He didn’t know how often she had been turning to Norma at all hours in tears, coping with her mother’s suicide attempts. Jonathan was too busy making sure Josh took his daily pill. His brother seemed to be getting better; he was brushing his teeth again and taking showers. Jonathan figured they needed a break from New Jersey. Josh had seemed sane enough lately, so Jonathan booked them a flight to Uruguay to see their grandmother. It would be good for Josh to hang out on the beach and relax as they’d used to when they were kids.

The white sand, the clear water, and Grandma’s cooking seemed to do the trick at first. Josh seemed happy in Uruguay, almost his old self again. He even put on deodorant and a nice outfit and told Jonathan, “I want to go out.”

“Okay,” Jonathan replied. They spent the night out at the bars and dance clubs, like two college-age guys with no worries in the world.

But by the time they had been in Uruguay for nearly a month, with their trip almost over, Josh began complaining that he wasn’t feeling well.

One morning, Jonathan gave Josh his pill. But he could tell his brother had hidden it in his cheek, then gone to the bathroom and flushed it. Jonathan confronted him.

“You don’t understand how the medicine makes me feel,” Josh told him. “I’m having suicidal thoughts. I’m having thoughts of killing you when we’re sitting
at the dinner table and I have a knife in my hand. I feel like stabbing you.”

“Okay,” Jonathan said calmly. “Well, you didn’t stab me. Maybe if you were not on the medication you would have stabbed me. Let’s worry about it when we get back. We’ll set up an emergency appointment with the psychiatrist.”

O
NCE, WHEN
J
ONATHAN
was fifteen, he was running along a beach in Uruguay when he noticed a pack of six dolphins swimming and playing together. Jonathan ran alongside them for a while and then glided straight into the water, where he swam next to the dolphins as if he were a part of their family. They were enormous, and he was so close to them, he even touched their skin. Jonathan was exhilarated and thrilled but not the least bit scared.

When Jonathan was a little boy, watching his father stab his mother as his brothers slept, he didn’t feel fear—confusion and anger, maybe, but not fear. Even when the car crashed into the bridge and they hauled his dad off to jail, he was not afraid. Jonathan just figured out what needed to be done next, and did it.

He had never felt real fear—until now.

He knew Josh was capable of killing him. He had even come to expect that his brother would do it eventually. It was just a matter of when. Jonathan decided to draft his will.

In their grandmother’s house, the rooms were dark. Jonathan’s bedroom door was open, and he could hear Josh pacing up and down the hall, over and over, all night long. Did he have a knife?

Jonathan did not sleep.

T
EN DAYS AFTER
returning from Uruguay, Jonathan found himself buckled over on his knees in the shower. His arms and chest were covered in psoriasis. When he had it checked out, a doctor told him it was from stress.

Jonathan couldn’t talk about it with anyone else, but he felt he was
failing both himself and his brother. He’d lost Caitlin, the only girl who really seemed to understand him. He was exhausted and deeply in debt from paying Josh’s medical bills and living expenses. The flexibility of his job had helped provide time to care for his brother at first, but lately work at the real estate firm was going to hell, and there just didn’t seem to be any way out of the mess.

He knew Josh would never be 100 percent better, but even if he improved just 50 percent, he might have a shot at living a good life. Maybe he could go to community college, finish school, and get a part-time job, or they could move back to Uruguay for good and Jonathan would support him.

Some nights, Jonathan stayed up late after working all day to listen to Josh play the guitar or sing and play along with him. But his brother would get mad. “You’re copying me,” Josh told him. “You’re acting like me. You’re doing that on purpose to try to control me. You never wanted to play the guitar before, you never even liked the guitar.”

Jonathan was trying to
help
him. He’d thought singing together would be
good
for him. Jonathan started doubting himself. How am I going to help him if all of the things I thought I was doing right are wrong? How am I going to do this?

A social worker came to visit shortly after they returned from Uruguay. She told Jonathan to face facts. “You can’t spend all the time you spend with him, you’re hurting your life. You can’t do this forever.”

After Josh’s diagnosis, Jonathan had written him a letter. He figured maybe written words would sink in better than a face-to-face conversation, since there was no telling what Josh was hearing these days:

Josh I love you so much and I don’t give a fuck what I have to do to help you but I will even if it’s against your will. I want you to talk to me and tell me what you think about everything and what you think about yourself and what’s been going on lately in your head and in your life. . . . You’re the smartest kid I know and after everything that has happened to us this is the last thing you need. But at the same time it will bring us together if you let it. I want to be there for you but I can’t do this shit alone I need you to trust me.

He went on:

I’m not against you, I’m on your side I’ll always be on your side. No matter what Josh, like I told you in the car that day that you came back from Washington. I wish it was me that was going through it instead of you. . . . The most important thing you need to know about me is that I feel alone. I always feel alone, even when I’m around a lot of people. I’ve felt like that since what happened with Daddy and Mommy and the only time I don’t feel alone is when I’m with you, or with Chris or Caitlin. I can’t lose you Josh and you can’t lose me, no matter what.

Jonathan had never been a religious person. But in the shower that day, he began to pray. “Please let Josh be strong,” he said, crying. “Please make things better for him.”