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

her anxieties.
    Over the last ten years, the professor had developed a stockpile of writing-for-therapy exercises that she pulled out on a whim. She’d probably read more than two thousand good-bye letters. Midway through Caitlin’s term in the death class, Norma asked students to answer the question “If you had a rewind button, what would you go back and change?”
    Caitlin went home and wrote as honestly as she could, submitting the assignment in the next class. One afternoon soon after, Norma took her seat in the circle of desks in the classroom and announced to thestudents that one assignment had stuck out from the rest and she hoped that person would read it aloud. Caitlin looked around, wondering who among her three dozen peers the professor might be referring to.
    “Caitlin,” the professor said, looking in her direction.
    Caitlin’s jaw dropped. She couldn’t be serious, she thought. Out of all these students, Norma had picked her to share? She felt put on the spot. But she was also surprised that her professor had paid enough attention to her story to even mention it. The other students had shared their good-bye letters in the second class. Some had lost family members and friends to accidents and diseases. Their struggles seemed far more tragic than hers. Who in this classroom, she wondered, would really care to hear about her?
    At first Caitlin tried to ask the student next to her to read it for her, but Norma encouraged her to take ownership of the letter, read it herself. Reluctantly, she did.
    “It was about two weeks after my fourth birthday when I found my mom unconscious in my backyard with one sock on,” Caitlin began, her voice trembling as she felt all eyes on her. Tears blurred her vision as she blinked to make out the rest of the words on the paper. “She went into a coma. I don’t remember how long because I was so young, but I do remember everyone telling me Mommy was sick. It wasn’t until I was about eight years old that I understood she did it to herself. She is a drug addict and has been since before I was born. You might think I’d want to rewind and change the fact that I ever knew.”
    When Caitlin found her mom that day, she had no idea what was wrong with her. Caitlin tried to get her to wake up, but she wouldn’t budge. Was she dead? She hardly even understood what dead meant at that age, but she knew it wasn’t good. Caitlin yelled for her father, a firefighter, who was home that day. He came running, scooping her mom up like a sack of toys. But he didn’t call an ambulance. Instead he decided to drive her to the hospital himself. Caitlin and her sisters crawled into the backseats of the minivan. Their dad deposited their mom’s motionless body across their tiny laps. The girls held on to her arms and legs for the ride.
    She had seen the scars on her mom’s wrists since she was little. They ran across like raised veins. But she didn’t learn until she got olderthat her mom had slit her wrists and set her bed on fire before Caitlin was born.
    As Caitlin got older, she realized that the pills were the problem. Some of the labels had weird words, like Xanax, Vicodin, and Percocet. The pills were bad. The pills might kill her mother. “She loves the pills more than she loves you,” her father would tell Caitlin, forcing her to look at her mother’s swollen, drooling face.
    Whenever her father found out her mother had been using while he was at the firehouse, he flew into a rage, even slapping her around. But her mom barely seemed to feel it. All drugged up, she did not even respond.
    There were times Caitlin found her mother on the bathroom floor, unconscious with toothpaste smeared across her face and the sink. Imitating her father’s reaction, Caitlin would yell and slap her and then tear the house apart searching for the sock full of pills. Sometimes her mother begged her not to flush the pills or tell her father. Feeling guilty, Caitlin obeyed.
    One day, her mother