The Death Class: A True Story About Life by Erika Hayasaki Read Free Book Online

first, before having a child. She’d wanted to become a journalist when she left her hometown of Newport News, Virginia, and enrolled in the University of Miami. In her first semester, she’d met a young man named Norm, who was studying marketing.
    Linda’s Jewish parents had come from Austria and Russia, fleeing persecution. Norma’s father was Catholic, from Baltimore, Maryland, but his family had later moved to New Jersey. His parents had come from Italy to Ellis Island, his father on the Lusitania, his mother on the Saturnia. He had topaz-blue eyes, a shock of blond hair, and a cocky machismo about him. He drove a 1956 Chevy convertible and had grown up poor and sheltered, fishing and hunting blackbirds to eat with polenta and cornmeal, working in a steel mill with his dad. Linda had developed acircle of wealthy girlfriends at school, but when it came to money her new romantic interest had barely any. It did not seem to matter, since Linda got pregnant soon after they met.
    That summer, Norma’s grandmother intercepted a letter from Linda’s lover. It was about the unborn child. She confronted Linda and discovered the girdles. The deception was over. On August 22, the baby was born. They named her Norma Lynn (combining both parents’ names). “My parents got married,” Norma explained. “And that was, like, the worst thing ever.”
    Norma’s parents moved to Florida. Her dad found a job at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, earning about $75 a month as a service person. The newlyweds fought violently, and within a year and a half, they divorced, and her father, as Norma later learned, denied paternity.
    Still a baby, Norma said, she was sent to live with her grandmother in Virginia, while her mother charged off elsewhere to try to put the pieces of her life back together. She spent her earliest years raised by her grandma and a maid; although Linda lived there too, she wasn’t around much. “My grandmother and mother were at a movie theater. My mother had a stomachache in the movie theater and buckled over in pain,” she said. “My grandmother rushes her to the hospital. I was at a neighbor’s house. At the hospital, they take off her clothing to put on a patient gown and there she is again.” Pregnant, “with five layers of girdles. And they cut off all the girdles, and she was delivering the baby, and that baby was stillborn.”
    Norma looked at me. “So how did I survive? And that baby didn’t?” Her grandmother, who’d split from her grandfather long before much of it happened, told her that she’d buried the dead baby herself.
    “You know,” she went on, “years back there was a case in New Jersey, where a girl delivered a baby at the prom and put it in a wastebasket.” The eighteen-year-old south New Jersey student gave birth in a bathroom stall in 1997, according to news reports, and choked the boy before putting him in a trash bag and throwing him away. The girl went back to the dance floor to rejoin her prom date when she was done, even eating a salad and dancing one last dance. After she was caught, her friends and family claimed they’d had no idea she was pregnant. “Iwas a psych nurse by then,” Norma said. “I remember everyone saying ‘How could people not know?’ ” She thought to herself: it was not as impossible as it might have seemed.
    Her own father had not wanted her in the first place, she believed, and her mother had tried to hide her, perhaps even get rid of her, and then left her to be raised by her grandmother. She was just an unwanted kid; loved by her grandmother, definitely—the dear woman had no other choice. But unwanted all the same.
    D ECADES LATER, THE professor found herself standing at a whiteboard in front of her students, semester after semester, explaining how life and death are inextricably bound with birth.
    Drawing a circle with eight points, she introduced her favorite psychological theorist by writing his name at the top: Erik Erikson. She had