The Death Class: A True Story About Life (30 page)

Parneeta answered. She had Sangeeta’s long black shiny hair, her round brown face, and her bright eyes—except there was something different about her eyes: they were surrounded by a reservoir of laugh lines.

She remembered my high school article about her daughter. Parneeta went into another room and came back with an armful of mementos and old photographs, including one of mother and daughter smiling against a billowing studio backdrop, both in floral prints, both with the front of their hair pinned back the same.

Parneeta told me that she had emigrated from Fiji to America after divorcing
Sangeeta’s father and that she had not known many people when she arrived. Unlike her daughter, she had not grown a crop of close friends. Sangeeta had been Parneeta’s best friend. “I used to
laugh
so much with her,” she said, stretching out the word “laugh” as if holding on to the note of a lullaby. “When we were together, nobody could tell we were mother and daughter.”

It was a hard life. Parneeta was a single mother, raising Sangeeta and her older brother alone. At first, they lived in public housing projects, until Parneeta found work at Nintendo, and that was when they moved into the Lynnwood apartment. Then she took a second job on the weekends to cover the bills, rent, and groceries.

Parneeta had not been there for her daughter that morning when she was killed—and she had spent many years hating herself for that.

“That morning I woke up. I was having a little cold. I was thinking I should not go to work. Maybe I should call in.”

She had dragged herself out of bed in the dark of the morning hour and into the shower.

Was the killer waiting for her daughter already then? She always wondered. Lurking in the shadows? Spying as he watched for her to leave the parking lot?

“She was asleep,” Parneeta continued. “I checked her bedroom door. It was locked. I double-locked the front door and drove to work.”

She’d been at work for several hours when the officers showed up.

After the funeral, Parneeta quit both of her jobs, believing they took her daughter away. She stared at Sangeeta’s pictures for hours. She drove through red lights. Every day, she dreamed of Sangeeta. If she did not dream of her, she felt angry.

Her son, Parnesh, had been in a persistent state of trouble, which worsened. Parneeta had thrown all of his clothes into a garbage bag before Sangeeta died and told another family member to pick him up. But he ran away and got into drugs, stealing, and hanging out with gangs. Eventually he landed in prison.

Weeks disappeared into months, into years. Parneeta prayed, meditated, went to a temple every night. She went for long walks and did yoga in the mornings. She lighted incense and candles, and cried out into the air. “I could feel her around me.”

Her son was locked up forty-four times—and spent about four and a half years on and off behind bars for crimes such as residential burglary and robbery.

Following the family custom, Parnesh entered into an arranged marriage in 2006. But that still did not change his ways. He felt as though he had lost his heart when his sister died. Nothing in the world could soften him again. His wife became pregnant, but when she went to the hospital in labor, Parnesh did not even go with her.

He showed up hours after the delivery. Parnesh looked at his wife holding their firstborn child in her arms. A strange feeling washed over him. He could sense something powerful in this child’s presence. His mother could too.

A
LITTLE GIRL
shuffled into the dining room, where I had been speaking with Parneeta. She had on pink-striped socks and a pink polka-dot cotton dress and a tangerine sweater embroidered with sequined starry flowers. Her hair was swept up in a ponytail.

“Baby,” Parneeta said, pulling the child into her lap. “Look who’s here.”

The girl looked at me. Those big eyes. Framed by long, paper fan–like eyelashes. Parneeta unfastened the girl’s ponytail, and black locks went tumbling down her back.

She was three years old, Parnesh’s daughter—Parneeta’s granddaughter.

Her middle name was Sangeeta.

Parnesh had found a job, and his wife gave birth to a second child, also a little girl. The birth of his first daughter had compelled him to get his act together, stay out of jail, and become a devoted father and husband, and for the past three years he had done just that. The family had pitched in to buy a house with grandma. Parneeta found a new job as well. It was close to home. If they needed a babysitter she never hesitated to take off time from work.

The little girl buried her face in her grandma’s chest, and Parneeta wrapped her arms around her and nuzzled back.

“That,” Parneeta told me, “is how our lives changed.”

August 22, 2011

It was Norma’s birthday, and I had been trying for months to convince her not to spend it alone, as she always preferred to do. I had moved from New York back to California, but I told the professor I would be flying back to the East Coast in the hope that she would take me to Newport News, Virginia, where she had spent her happiest years with her grandmother as a child and also where she had buried her grandmother as an adult the day after her birthday. We had been planning this trip for years, and more than once she had canceled on me.

This time around, I was not surprised when Norma didn’t respond to my messages right away. I knew she did not care to dwell on the more painful parts of her past, and I knew she detested being with people on the days before, during, and after her birthday even more. Considering that she barely let her family near her those three days, I suspected the last person she would be eager to share that time with would be me. I got onto the plane anyway.

Norma had agreed to let me follow her around beginning in 2008 because she wanted to spread her class lessons to a wider audience. But she had not anticipated that I would still be tagging along and asking probing questions—particularly about
her
—three years later.

“Always the journalist,” she would say in response to my questions.

“Always the nurse,” I would reply.

I arrived the day before her birthday. Late the next morning, I got a response from her: she had changed her mind about our excursion. We would
go to her cabin in New Hampshire. She did not think she was up for Virginia.

At that point, I was happy to take whatever I could get.

When she pulled up in her black hatchback an hour later at the shopping center parking lot where we had agreed to meet, she looked pretty in her long pale gray cotton summer dress, raisin-colored lipstick, and a necklace made of turquoise and rose-shaded buffalo charms. It turned out I had not been the only one pressuring her; she had relented and gone to a birthday breakfast with her older daughter that morning.

As soon as I sat in the front passenger seat, she looked at me and said, “I think I changed my mind.”

About the trip? I asked.

No, she replied. About the destination. Her grandmother’s hometown in Virginia, she felt, was pulling her.

“Let’s do it,” I said, and we pointed the car toward Virginia.

We stopped in Baltimore, her father’s hometown, for the night and ate crab cakes for dinner. There was no birthday dessert and no singing or clapping waiters. Norma was explicit: she wanted none of that.

The next morning, she drove around Little Italy, pointing out her father’s and grandfather’s old neighborhood, the tenement row houses now replaced by condos, the storefronts that used to house spaghetti shops.

As she steered, she pulled out a birthday card her father had sent her. She had tucked it between the seat and gear panel. Inside the card, her father had written, “You have accomplished much, endured a tough history of memories. However you have
prevailed
. And I adore you for that.”

We were almost to Virginia. I took the wheel as Norma moved to the backseat, where she pulled out some bridal shower invites. She had offered to put together the shower for a young woman she knew whose mother had committed suicide. She was also scheduled to help her pick out her wedding dress in a few days.

Norma bounced around in the back, trying to write out the invites, but she soon gave up when the bumpy road made writing impossible. She checked her Facebook messages, catching up on the hundreds of missed
birthday notes from yesterday. “Oh, my God, there was an earthquake in New Jersey!”

It had rumbled the East Coast just minutes before. Students and neighbors had started posting that they had felt the jolt. “Wait,” she said, clicking on more status updates. The epicenter of the quake was actually centered near Richmond, Virginia. We had just left Richmond and were about twenty minutes away when it hit. That must have been what that bumpy road was all about. Maybe, she joked, it was her mother trying to send us a message.

She pulled up a
New York Times
article on her phone. It was a 5.8 magnitude earthquake felt all the way from Washington, D.C., where it had damaged National Cathedral, to Manhattan’s Wall Street, Maine, and Georgia. Geologists announced that it was the strongest quake in central Virginia’s history. The only other two that had come close had struck in 1875 and 1897.

A powerful hurricane was headed for the Northeast, where it was expected to hit Virginia, New York City, and New Jersey, among other areas, over the next several days. By the time Norma returned to Highland Park the next week, her home would be flooded and her power would be out. She would end up sleeping in a motel for the next three months following Hurricane Irene, well into the new semester.

But neither of us knew any of that. We were just cruising along with Norma’s Sirius XM radio station tuned to the Coffee House channel.

It was just as Norma always said: “I have no danger button,” no clear sense for when to get out of harm’s way. We were sixty miles from Newport News, and the skies were hydrangea blue and clear.

W
E PASSED
C
HRISTOPHER
Newport University, a statue of Leif Eriksson, and Civil War Trails and turned onto Shoe Lane, a narrow road shaded by tall pine and crab apple trees. Swings hung from tree branches in front of Savannah-style mansions. Some of the homes had pillars and rolling green lawns.

We pulled into the driveway of a white house on a high ridge with chipped green paint trimming and flowering bushes. It overlooked a dried-up
creek, and two dogwood trees still stood where her grandmother had planted them. “It always felt like she was in a tree house, you know?” Norma said, walking up the driveway.

It used to be painted gray, Norma remembered. Her grandmother had sold the place when she’d gotten sick, not long before she had died. The nameplate in front now read “Beale.”

“I would park at the end of the driveway and walk up,” Norma said. “My grandmother would stand at the doorway waving. She was so excited. I remember she always wore a diamond necklace with a bigger diamond and two small ones.”

Norma climbed the front steps, crunching pinecones on the way to a wooden deck. “They have a Jacuzzi now,” she said. “Should I ring the bell? I’m sure nobody’s home.”

No one answered. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and the owners were probably at work. “This was her bedroom right here,” Norma said, trying to peer in through a draped window. “Then the backyard . . . I was friends with the little girl that lived behind.”

We got back into the car and drove down the road, to the bay overlooking the James River, where she’d used to bring her books and study while people crabbed and fished. The lion statues in the park that her grandmother had dedicated to her still stood there with puffed-out chests.

“Well, we’ll just do a little cemetery field trip next,” Norma said, trying to remember the name of the memorial park in which she had buried her grandmother. We headed to the nearest one listed on her GPS, the Garden of Rest, and Norma went inside the main office to get a map. The cemetery director led her to the plots himself. His family plots were near hers. “Enjoy your visit,” he said.

She stared through her sunglasses at the two matching flat headstones, both with brass plates set against marbled stone.

Her great-grandmother, Celia W. Hayflich, 1887–1984.

Her grandmother’s headstone had gold flower etchings: Rosalie H. Stein, 1910–1990. Norma explained that her great-grandmother and great-grandfather had come to Ellis Island from Russia by ship, after fleeing pogroms against Jews. They had made their money by going into the hatmaking business in New York.

Norma trolled the cemetery grass in search of rocks to put on their graves. She picked up two flat stones and placed them on the metal plates, sitting cross-legged before them.

In Erikson’s first stage of life, mistrust threatens the life of a baby if that child has not been properly loved. In the last stage of life, despair darkens the death of a dying person if that person’s life has not been properly lived. Hope, as Erikson taught, began in the first stage of life if trust was established with loving care. In his writings, Erikson quoted a
Webster’s Dictionary
entry when he stated, “Trust (the first of our ego values) is here defined as ‘the assured reliance on another’s integrity,’ the last of our values. I suspect that Webster had business in mind rather than babies, credit rather than faith. But the formulation stands. And it seems possible to further paraphrase the relation of adult integrity and infantile trust by saying that healthy children will not fear life if their elders have integrity enough to not fear death.”