The Death Class: A True Story About Life (28 page)

There was no way people from other towns, cities, or states could enroll in her death class at Kean University. So, Norma decided, she and her Death in Perspective students would take some of the lessons to them.

They would spread the virtues of
generativity
from Erikson’s seventh stage in the cycle of life, the period when “the instinctual power behind various forms of selfless ‘caring,’ potentially extends to whatever a man generates and leaves behind, creates and produces (or helps to produce),” as Erikson wrote.

In July, the oil was continuing to flow into the sea, so as soon as the summer session of classes ended, Norma arranged to take seven Be the Change students, including her daughter Becca, who was now enrolled as a freshman at Kean, on a road trip to the Gulf Coast to help out with ongoing Hurricane Katrina relief efforts—renovating homes for the elderly—and visiting beaches to hand out water bottles and offer any other services they could to oil-spill relief workers. The group had rented a black Suburban, and the students would be sharing rooms at Holiday Inns along the way on the weeklong excursion.

“Want to come along?” Norma asked me in a last-minute email.

I showed up with a duffel bag one morning at Kean University. Norma was running late picking up the rental, and I spotted a student I knew from the death class. We sat together in the lobby of Hennings Hall, waiting for the others.

“So what’s our itinerary?”

Norma had been too busy organizing to explain all the plans to me, apart from the gulf as the final destination.

“Well,” the student said, “our first stop is Virginia Tech.”

I gulped. I had not been back to Virginia Tech University since covering the mass shootings and the French professor’s funeral in 2007.

The student explained that Norma had thought it would be a good lesson for her students from Death in Perspective at Kean University to pay their respects to Virginia Tech’s dead.

Of course she did, I thought. Who would go on a road trip passing by the vicinity of the campus that had been the site of the largest school shooting in U.S. history without popping in to poke around?

The group of nine road trippers trickled in and piled their belongings into the rented van. By driving through the day and late into the night, stopping at a Waffle House to eat and a Holiday Inn in Roanoke to sleep, we arrived on the Virginia Tech campus the next morning as it was beginning to drizzle. Norma parked the van at The Inn, the stone hotel and conference center that had been overrun by media trucks and satellites that morning three years earlier, when a desperate father had turned to reporters and begged for answers before he discovered that his daughter had been killed.

From there we walked to Norris Hall.

I
T SEEMED UNIMAGINABLE
that Norris Hall had reopened for classes. Who would want to sit through lessons in a place once covered in bodies and blood? What could a campus do with such a building? Tear it down? Board it up?

Yet, to everyone’s surprise, the wooden double doors opened. In the corridor hung a framed sign detailing the evacuation route and another that read
SAFE WATCH
, asking anyone who noticed suspicious behavior to call. The lights in the building were on, and a staircase leading to the second floor was unobstructed.

One by one, we reached the west wing of the second story. Its floor gleamed with boards of blond and mahogany-toned wood. The walls had been painted pale yellow and decorated with paintings in shades of turquoise, tangerine, apple, gold, rose, and aquamarine. It was bright and cheery, like the Isaiah House. To the group’s left was a curved wall of cloudy blue ice-colored glass with the words:
CENTER FOR PEACE STUDIES & VIOLENCE PREVENTION
. Behind a glass door, we spotted two men. Norma knocked on the door to introduce herself, shuffling inside wearing her hiker’s backpack, as the rest of us waited outside in the hall.

Our group had shown up unannounced. Within a few seconds, Norma motioned for everyone to join her inside. A short, white-haired man
with a soft-fuzzed gray beard and a pink face approached. He wore a black dress shirt and khaki slacks and spoke with a Polish accent. I had seen him before—at his wife’s funeral. She had been the French teacher, known to students as Madame Couture.

Jerzy Nowak welcomed everyone inside. The Kean students loved his name; they pronounced it “Jersey.”

He explained that the older daughter of Madame Couture had first suggested the idea for a peace center, which had led to Jerzy’s proposal to transform Norris Hall into the headquarters for a program to prevent violence. The university had chosen that proposal over others, and a $50,000 gift from a group called the Lacy Foundation had helped launch the center.

The very room in which we were standing had been room 211, home to the French class taught by Madame Couture. I knew the scene it had once been. My article published in the aftermath of that event had re-created that setting, from the writings in French on the overhead projector, which translated into “Britney Spears has been married more often than Christina Aguilera,” to the maroon carpet and lightweight metal desks. I knew where each student had sat and what each had worn: a blue fleece, a newsboy cap, a cadet uniform. I knew where their bodies had fallen.

Jerzy’s new office had been set up in the renovated space. The reality hit me: every weekday for the last year, Jerzy had been coming to work on the very spot where his wife had been killed.

As Jerzy remembered it, in the weeks after the shootings, plant growers from across the region had loaded pickup trucks full of flowers and brought them as donations to the campus of Virginia Tech. One particular perennial nearly filled an entire truck: small ruby-pink and white petals dangled from each horizontal stem, like charms on a necklace. The plant was known as a bleeding heart. The manager of the garden on campus received so many such flowers in the days after April 16, 2007, that he could not even accept them all.

You could still see the bleeding heart in the Hahn Horticulture Garden, where Madame Couture was memorialized and where Norma’s students visited after Jerzy gave them all a tour of Norris Hall’s second floor. It was the kind of flower that Jocelyne Couture-Nowak would have appreciated, given the love of horticulture she shared with her husband, who had spent most of his career researching plant stresses and plants’ reactions to threats of weather, pathogens, and predators.

Madame Couture had enjoyed long days planting marigolds and poppies outside the redbrick home with the view of the Blue Ridge Mountains that they had purchased in 2007. They’d lived in the house for only five weeks before launching ambitious landscaping plans, including constructing a screen-covered deck in the backyard, a shed, and a patio; building a gazebo that overlooked the yard; and creating a rock garden. That Sunday before his wife was killed, Jerzy had spent the afternoon clearing branches from a rambling rose overgrowth in their lot.  He’d suggested stopping  work before  dark, but Madame Couture 
had not been ready to quit. She’d asked him to hand over the pruners. It had taken her a half hour to trim the rest of the branches from the rosebush. She’d worn gloves, yet the thorns had pricked her anyway, and she’d left for work the next morning with scratches on her skin.

On her way to class that Monday morning, Madame Couture had stopped by the foreign language department and talked to a colleague about the spring chill. At forty-nine, the Canadian native had pebble gray and white hair that fell past her shoulders, which she often wore in a French braid. Outside, snowflakes swirled. Madame Couture had only one pressing worry on her mind, as she told her colleague: she hoped her flowers would survive the frost.

Nowadays, it was still too painful for Jerzy to go into the details of his wife’s death in his public talks, so instead he had done what Norma had often suggested to her grieving students: he had written much of it down, submitting his account as a personal essay to a research journal,
Traumatology.
During the visit, he provided the Kean group with a copy of the article, which Norma read aloud to the group later in the van.

In it, he described how, on that morning, he’d had no reason to believe that his wife’s class was being held in Norris Hall, where he heard the shootings had taken place. Language courses took place in various buildings, and he thought she taught in Torgersen Hall. His wife had not been answering her cell phone that morning, but that didn’t surprise him either because she often turned it off when she taught. It was not until shortly after 2
P.M.
, when someone from his daughter’s middle school called to tell him that his wife had not arrived to pick up their twelve-year-old daughter, Sylvie, that Jerzy began to sweat. He phoned her department and asked where she had been teaching that day.

The voice replied, “In Norris Hall.”

Jerzy went to get Sylvie, and around 4
P.M.
the two headed to The Inn at Virginia Tech, where other families had gathered, hoping for information about loved ones. But there was no information. It took hours for him to learn that she had not been admitted to any of the hospitals. He took that as a sign of good news at first.

“She could be among the dead,” someone told him.

“You did not need to tell me that,” Jerzy replied.

He
went to join Sylvie, who had left with a family friend earlier. A hotline had been set up, and Jerzy checked in for the next several hours. Nothing. Journalists called his home, asking for updates. In those hours, Jerzy agonized about everything he had failed to tell his wife in their seventeen years of marriage. Did she know how much he cherished her? Why hadn’t he taken that job offer two years earlier?

He had not yet learned the truth, but like so many other families who had not yet heard from their loved ones as night fell, he knew.

As the night ground on, Sylvie told her dad that she was going to lie down on Mom’s bed; she wanted to smell her.

At 11:30
P.M.
, the university provost called, asking if he could come over with the vice provost of education. It took them an hour to arrive, as they went to the wrong address at first because they had not realized the family had recently moved. He let them inside.

“She did not suffer,” the provost told Jerzy. “A bullet went through her head.”

That detail, as horrific as it was, gave Jerzy momentary comfort.
She did not suffer.

That morning, within twelve minutes, Seung-Hui Cho had managed to fire 174 shots, wounding twenty-five students at Norris Hall and killing twenty-five students and five faculty members. He’d killed two other students at a dorm earlier that morning. Cho’s final blast at 9:51
A.M.
was for himself. He died in room 211, his body falling not far from Madame Couture’s.

Six others in the classroom survived, but twelve died. Only one person in the French class had not been shot. The other survivors had been hit in the shoulder, collarbone, stomach, buttocks, knee, arms, back, and head.

After the provosts left, Jerzy went to check on his daughter. He thought she might be asleep, but she was awake. Jerzy needed to be alone with Sylvie, who was still on her mother’s bed. How could he break such news to a twelve-year-old?

He put his arms around her, whispering what he’d learned about her mom into his little girl’s ear. They wept together. Then Sylvie gathered herself together, telling her father that a boy in her class at school had lost
his mother to cancer two years before. The boy had made it through. He was okay now. Together, she told him, they would be too.

The next morning, Jerzy had so many tasks to keep his mind distracted: phone family and friends, contact the funeral home, make travel arrangements, figure out expenses and insurance issues, respond to the media requests flooding his inbox and the reporters showing up on his doorstep. It seemed as though a hundred people stopped by that day with coffee, flowers, cards, food, condolences. It was not until the beginning of day two that he really broke down.

How could he answer a teenage girl’s questions about growing up—questions a mother would know the answers to far better than him? He had left so much of the day-to-day household responsibilities up to his wife, from cooking to child rearing to paying the bills. How could he learn to handle everything without his beloved wife’s guidance? He had never thought about planning a funeral; now he had no idea where to begin.

The doorbell rang at 7
A.M.
, in the midst of Jerzy’s breakdown. It was a neighbor offering coffee and help. Jerzy accepted her offer. Others from throughout the community came to his aid too. A colleague handled the media, giving interviews in front of Jerzy’s home while Jerzy escaped to run errands. Family and friends began arriving the next day from around the world, as the Red Cross shuttled them from the airport.

Sylvie’s teachers came to the house to set up an individualized study schedule for her and help her catch up on missed assignments. A memorial fund was established in Jerzy’s wife’s name. Money would go toward building a special garden for her on campus. Donations poured in from across the United States.

Six days passed. Candles flickered and burned out. The roses and carnations left on memorial stones outside Norris Hall wilted. The weather turned warm, and students returned to campus. Mourners replaced the dead flowers with fresh ones. Jerzy was not allowed to view his wife’s body until Sunday evening. He asked to go in before the rest of the family, to determine whether it would be okay for the others to see her. When Jerzy entered the room, he looked at the body of the woman who for so many years had called him “darling.” He searched her hands for the
scratches from the rambling rose thorns. He traced the track of dried droplets of blood between the fingers of her left hand. The bullet had scratched her wedding ring and hit the left side of her forehead.