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

had a rewind button for your life, what would you go back and change?
    Caitlin
    Dr. Bowe
    Death in Perspective
    If I Had a Rewind Button . . .
    The thing is, I loved my mom so much and I still do. When I was little . . . I would follow her everywhere and want to be around her all the time. [But] when she was high . . . it was like a switch turned in me and I was evil. So many times she convinced me not to flush [her pills] down the toilet, and not tell daddy. She would swear on my life that she would never do it again. Well I’m 22 years old and it still happens. . . . I wish so bad that I had handled everything differently, or somehow forced her into rehab.

THREE
Rewind Button
    Spring Semester, January 2008
    For too long, Caitlin convinced herself that she could ward off death with homemade sacraments. Daily showers in her parents’ house turned into heroic lifesaving missions. If the shampoo and soap bottles did not face in exactly the same direction, if the ends of the bathroom towels touched each other or were not perfectly aligned, Caitlin believed her father would die.
    Day after day, the Kean University student methodically straightened the bathroom knickknacks, as if everyone else’s life depended on it, all the while neglecting her own. No one told her this behavior might have been a symptom of a larger psychological challenge, until the fall of 2007, when she enrolled in a mental health class with Dr. Norma Bowe.
    The professor immediately identified the behavior that Caitlin described in her papers and class discussions. She called it obsessive-compulsive disorder, a way of existing that made Caitlin reliant on rituals—habits that helped her feel as though she had some control in a world that was skidding all around her. But Caitlin didn’t begin to clue the professor into where her need for control might have started until she enrolled in a second class with Norma, Death in Perspective.
    The new semester began at the start of 2008 and would last five months. It was in this class that Caitlin revealed through her assignments how deep-seated her fears of death actually were. She explained to her professor in private how she couldn’t bring herself to move out of her parents’house and leave them to themselves because she was terrified that something would happen to them. She woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, hurrying to the bedside of her sleeping parents, just to make sure they had not stopped breathing. She couldn’t fathom the thought of losing either of them, but especially her dad. He was her fiercest protector. The one person in her life who made her feel important. Her shampoo bottles, she believed, would prevent catastrophe. And if not, the light switches would do the job; she flicked them on and off and repeated the words “God forbid” three times out loud.
    She had not always wrestled with this need to monitor the fate of her family. When she was a little girl, she had found other ways to manage. Her mother could be screaming and thrashing around the house, all because her father had hidden her pills again, and Caitlin would kneel on the floor, lost in her crayons and coloring books, as if tuning out commercials on a television. She retreated into her own world of play.
    In elementary school, Caitlin found a rusty copper key in her backyard. It was a skeleton key, believed to open multiple doors. She became a skeleton key collector. Her dad brought her new ones, and she cherished each of them, especially because they came from him. He told her she could accomplish anything she wanted in her life. “Don’t ever give up,” he said. “Don’t be a quitter.”
    But as she got older, skeleton keys no longer held special powers that she imagined might offer a way out. Tuning out the arguments became impossible. She stopped believing that she could do anything. Only the rituals, such as organizing pennies in a precise order with all heads or tails matching, seemed to ease