Free The Death Class: A True Story About Life by Erika Hayasaki Page A

running sneakers. She sometimes stooped when she sat, like a weak stem holding up a heavy flower. When Caitlin looked at herself, she saw someone never quite beautiful or remarkable enough.
    One day, while home from her college classes, Caitlin and her sister heard crashing sounds from downstairs, as if someone was chopping down a tree in the basement. Then they heard a blast. Caitlin knew her father owned a few guns. He kept them stashed in the basement in a cabinet, separate from the bullets. The sisters ran downstairs toward the noises. By the time they reached the basement, they realized their mother had locked herself inside with the guns. Their dad grabbed a sledgehammer from the backyard and tried breaking down the door. But before he could get through, Caitlin’s mom pulled the trigger. The bullet lodged in a wall near the staircase her daughters had rushed down.
    “You could have shot one of the kids!” Caitlin would remember her dad screaming.
    “I’m constantly worrying, even when there is nothing to worry about,” Caitlin told the class that day when Norma called on her to read her rewind button essay. “I stress myself out and overdo everything, like it’s going to fill some void.”
    I N CLASS , C AITLIN found herself engrossed by the stories her professor shared about her years working as a psychiatric nurse. Norma would launch into a lesson on mental illness sometimes like this: “I had a patient say to me once, ‘If only you would take me to the roof, I could prove to you that I could fly.’ He was absolutely convinced. Sometimes people get these really grandiose ideas when they’re manic.”
    Norma recounted her experience with another patient, also manic: “Thiskid comes in, and he’s just all over the place. We had to restrain him and take him to the psych unit, but he managed to jump up and run down the hall with the stretcher strapped to him. . . . The psychiatric unit was on one side and the geriatric unit was on the other, and these old people would walk by and he would be plastered to the wall because they just caught him buck-naked full frontal. This went on for about two weeks. One day, I went in and it was quiet, and this nurse says, ‘You won’t believe it. Go in and look.’ And sure enough, I went into the room and he had his hands crossed over his chest with his eyes closed, and I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ And he said, ‘Can’t you see I’m dead?’ He had gone from really high to really low.”
    Norma also told her classes about an extremely bright Rutgers University student she had treated when she worked as a psychiatric nurse in an outpatient clinic. His family had come to the United States from India in the hope that he would attend medical school. But by his second semester, he started to display symptoms of schizophrenia and ended up getting suspended from campus. Each week, he would visit with Norma and explain how guilty he felt for shaming his family. He talked of feeling as if his intelligence was getting sucked out of him and of hearing voices. He described the sound to her—like having earphones stuck to both ears and tuned to your least favorite radio station, with no control over the dial or the volume. The description, as Norma told her students, reminded her of when she had been a nurse at the University of Virginia, working the 3 P.M . to 11 P.M. shift and going home each night after her rounds to turn on the television and see various evangelical preachers proselytizing on channel after channel. She couldn’t imagine having those preachers stuck in her ear 24/7. In the case of schizophrenics, she said, the station was often tuned to a constant stream of disparaging comments such as “You’re ugly” or “That person hates you” or “You smell” or “That person is going to hurt you.”
    Her schizophrenic patient came to her office one day, and she gave him a shot of Prolixin, an antipsychotic medication that sometimes muted the voices to