Volume 52 - Issue 4

THE MAGAZINE ABOUT YA L E & N E W H AV E N

VOL 52 / ISS 4 / FEB 2020

THE NEW JOURNAL

Do w n by

Wo rn We l l ne

ss

editors-in-chief Laura Glesby Max Graham executive editor Elliot Wailoo associate editors Hailey Andrews Elena DeBre Beasie Goddu Alejandra Larriva-Latt Helena Lyng-Olsen Jack McCordick Eli Mennerick Trish Viveros Candice Wang copy editors Jisoo Choi Matthew Kleiner Yonatan Greenberg Nicole Jefferson Sofia Laguarda

reporting supported by the Edward Bennett III Memorial Fund members and directors Emily Bazelon, Peter Cooper, Jonathan Dach, Kathrin Lassila, Eric Rutkow, Elizabeth Sledge, Jim Sleeper, Fred Strebeigh, Linda Colman advisors Neela Banerjee, Richard Bradley, Susan Braudy, Lincoln Caplan, Jay Carney, Andy Court, Joshua Civin, Richard Conniff, Ruth Conniff, Elisha Cooper, Susan Dominus, David Greenberg, Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, Laura Pappano, Jennifer Pitts, Julia Preston, Lauren Rabin, David Slifka, John Swansburg, Anya Kamenetz, Steven Weisman, Daniel Yergin friends Nicole Allan, Margaret Bauer, Mark Badger and Laura Heymann, Susan Braudy, Julia Calagiovanni, Elisha Cooper, Haley Cohen, Peter Cooper, Andy Court, The Elizabethan Club, Leslie Dach, David Freeman and Judith Gingold, Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts, Bob Lamm, James Liberman, Alka Mansukhani, Benjamin Mueller, Sophia Nguyen, Valerie Nierenberg, Morris Panner, Jennifer Pitts, R. Anthony Reese, Eric Rutkow, Lainie Rutkow, Laura Saavedra and David Buckley, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Elizabeth Sledge, Caroline Smith, Gabriel Snyder, Elizabeth Steig, Aliyya Swaby, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Daphne and David Sydney, Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather, Blake Townsend Wilson, Daniel Yergin, William Yuen

creative director Chase Westover design editors Meher Hans Rebecca Goldberg Zihao Lin Sam Oldshue

The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc., P.O. Box 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. Office address: 305 Crown Street. All contents Copyright 2016 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the publisher and editors-in-chief is prohibited. The New Journal is a student-run publication at Yale University. While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. The Yale University name and trademark is owned and used by permission of the University. Two thousand five hundred copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven communities. The New Journal is printed by Turley Publications, Palmer, MA; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. The New Journal encourages letters to the editor and comments on Yale and New Haven issues. Write to Editorials, 203432 Yale Station, New Haven, CT 06520. All letters for publication must include address and signature. We reserve the right to edit all letters for publication.

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THE NEW J O U R N AL volume 52 issue 4 FEB 2020

28 cover SINCE 1967 www.TheNewJournalAtYale.com

WORN DOWN BY WELLNESS

Yale requires many of its unionized employees to disclose

private medical information and undergo “wellness coaching.”

Those who refuse have to pay.

Elena DeBre 16

feature RUNNING ON LOVE Relationship by relationship, a New Haven alder builds community power in her ward.

Laura Glesby

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feature THEY TELL YOU HOW TO DIE In Connecticut, death doulas aim to ease the transition to the other side.

Candice Wang

standards 4 snapshot

THE PEOPLE WHO PICK UP—Jack Delaney

For New Haven’s 911 operators, the city’s day-to-day emergencies take a toll.

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snapshot IMAGINING A PLACE TO BE—Charlie Lee In the year and a half since a mass K2 overdose on the New Haven Green, what steps have been taken to address substance use disorder downtown?

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point of departure ONE OF THE MANY, ONE OF THE FEW—Michelle Fang A U.S. military veteran and mother navigates her senior year at Yale.

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poems ORDER and VISITATION—Lauren Dominguez Chan

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endnote A YEAR IN REVIEW (SORT OF)—Staff

FEBRUARY 2020

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Snapshot:

THE PEOPLE WHO PICK UP For New Haven’s 911 operators, the city’s day-to-day emergencies take a toll.

JACK DELANEY

Illustrations by Sam Oldshue Design by Meher Hans

I

t’s noon at the call center at the New Haven Police Station. The operators, dispatchers, and supervisors are visible less by the ceiling lights, yellow and dim, than by the white glare that monitors cast upon their faces.

These screens are everywhere: three or four per person, each with a different spreadsheet or alarm system, while another larger screen dominates the wall, displaying the names of officers on duty. A TV tuned to the news plays silently overhead; no one is watching it. A supervisor holds two phones, one for each ear, and simultaneously yells information to a dispatcher across the room. By the wall, an operator stops mid-sentence to answer an incoming call, then another; traffic starts to pick up. An active shooter, a

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fire, a panicked mother to be talked through CPR. The rapid speech of a dozen-odd employees fills the shadowed room. From time to time a joke is thrown into the mix, and a short laugh sends a voice flying. But always within seconds, that professional tone—any call-taker’s best asset—returns to calm a desperate caller.

This is a standard day for the New Haven Public Safety Communications Department, which is responsible for managing the thousands of emergencies that flare up across the city daily.

Although an employee’s duties can differ throughout the week, new hires generally begin as operators.

Known more colloquially as call-takers, their job is to handle the initial calls, from the mundane to the dire, of those in distress. Senior operators may be assigned to the post of dispatcher, coordinating fire, police, or ambulance responses to the emergency situation. Overseeing all of this are the supervisors, typically long-time dispatchers, who watch the list of held calls to ensure there is no backlog. The entire effort is facilitated by the director of the department, George Peet, who has been here since 1997. Each morning these employees, many of whom have been here as long as Peet has, must wake up and steel themselves in whatever way possible for a fresh batch of crises.

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In an office down the hall, the call center’s clamor is inaudible. Sunlight streams in from a wide window overlooking Route 34. The employees to whom I talk range from recent hires to old hands; all of them have no shortage of war stories. David Mancini, a jovial dispatcher with some top teeth missing, recounts a running gun battle that affected three neighborhoods and the highway. Debbie Thornton, the two-phoning supervisor, was the dispatcher for the 2002 drug operation in the Hill neighborhood during which Officer Robert Fumiatti was shot in the face. “He died three times on the way to the hospital,” she tells me. Fumiatti survived five more years before suffering a fatal heart attack, likely tied to that earlier injury. Another operator offers the story of a wife trying to save her overdosed husband. For Sheila Villegas, a call-taker of five years, the hardest calls are those in which children call for their parents or a child is in distress. “I have a ten-year-old at home, so those are always touchy,” Villegas said.

These cases, terrible as they sound, are the exception in that the operators eventually learned how they turned out. Much of the time, Peet says, the trauma of a call does not resolve itself. “Call takers talk to people in all types of emergencies, from childbirth to stabbings to shootings to houses on fire

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to people trapped to people having their own mental issues. We’ve talked people off of bridges—all these sorts of things. There’s no closure.”

Yet other factors compound the inherent stresses of the job. Work policies, for one, are seen by all involved as archaic and often draconic. Peet notes that employees sometimes get schedules with inconvenient days off, and that many policies are driven only by seniority. As a result, it can take years as a call-taker before the job starts to pay dividends.

Benefits, too, are scant. Thornton, a twenty-threeyear veteran of the call center, worked a second job at Home Depot until 2018 to support her two children as a single mom. In her opinion, daycare accommodations, or similar employee support, would have made a major difference.

Mancini, his chair propped up beside a desktop Bill Murray sticker, explains that many operators quit as a result of the high stakes nature of call-taking.

“We work in a mistake-free environment. What you do—on the phone and the information that the call-taker takes, and how the dispatcher dispatches it, and how the supervisor’s listening to make sure everything goes smoothly—is the difference between life and death.”

He looks at me intently for a moment, then leans forward. “Regrets, bro. You don’t want those. That’s

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why whether you just got married or you just won powerball and you’re having the best day of your life, or she just broke up with you and she’s going out with your brother and everything else and life’s miserable—you got to deliver.” He gives me a rueful, gap-toothed grin.

Peet also sees a lack of public awareness about the difficulty of call-taking as another factor exacerbating employee turnover. “We kind of get left out of the picture an awful lot,” he says. I ask about the 911 SAVES Act, introduced last August in the U.S. House of Representatives, which would aim to bring more prestige and better pay to the profession by changing its classification from clerical work to protective services. When I mention the Act, Peet can’t help but beam. “That would be like ‘God hear my prayer’ being answered,” he says with a laugh.

“Just the fact that [dispatchers] would be seriously considered as part of the public safety process. Like anything, people want someone to say ‘you do a good job.’ It takes a very humble person to do what they do and to not get the recognition for it.”

How do call-takers and dispatchers maintain their mental health day in and day out, faced as they are with the sometimes jarring sequence of calls from non-emergencies, such as noise complaints, to calls about fires, overdoses, murders, and the like? One answer may be institutional support. “The city and the department offer EAP, Employee Assistance Programs. We’re constantly watching people for signs of stress,” Peet maintains. When asked about NHPD Chief Otoniel Reyes’s suggestion of mandatory mental health check-ins for police officers, he says it’s a procedure his department would also be in favor of adopting.

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Even so, many employees at the call center are skeptical of the current mental health infrastructure’s efficacy. “Most people are hesitant in utilizing EAP because there’s a stigma to it,” says Mancini, rubbing his chin.

Villegas is of a similar mind. “I think partly some of the employees don’t feel comfortable admitting they need some type of help for their stress levels. I think sometimes they may feel weak, or they don’t want others to know they’re suffering from some sort of PTSD or from certain calls.” Yet the system also needs work, not simply the mindset of call-takers. “I think that in our department, they just expect you to get over it, in a sense,” Villegas notes. “With all first responders, I don’t think they make mental health a first priority.”

Where institutional tools fall short, personal coping mechanisms pick up the slack. Each operator has their own tried and true way of destressing. For Mancini, this involves “cats, guns, motorcycles, martial arts” and his girlfriend, who is reportedly “lovely.” Thornton, who recently moved to a farm with geese and ducks not far from New Haven, relies on baking and smooth jazz for relaxation. Teri Nelson Durant, a veteran dispatcher who previously worked at a post office, has a ritual of praying every morning on the way to work. At home, she takes her mind off of work by spending time with her fifteen kids. “Grasping them outside of here is what helps keep sane,” she says. “It keeps me busy.”

As for Villegas? “Honestly, my therapy is my dog,” she says softly, with a tentative smile. “After a rough day at work I go home, and he’s there, and he’s just so happy to see me—just coming home to him and my son, just trying to forget about what I went through during that shift.” She

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looks at the wall behind me. “Unfortunately, after working here for so many years, you kind of get numb. Because it’s just one call after another call after another call.”

The call center is more full of banter than one might expect, usually through small jibes that sneak their way in during the slowest hours of the day. A frequent instigator is Mancini, who came in second at a recent amateur stand-up competition, and who explains somewhat redundantly, after a half hour of wisecracking, that he likes to tell jokes: “That’s my self defense.” The other operators interviewed largely share his thoughts, but it is Durant who most succinctly expresses the importance of a sense of humor.

“Sometimes we have to laugh and joke,” she says with a throaty chuckle. A light rain licks the rooftops behind her, out the window. “Sometimes we find ourselves laughing a lot just to keep from crying.”

Peet suggests that the most heartening consolation may come from a sense of purpose. “I don’t want to say there’s more positive than negative, because the negative’s pretty heavy, but I believe that the positives that do occur are so rewarding that they help to wash some of the negative away,” he says. “We try as managers to instill in their minds that people usually are calling 911 at some of the most dire moments of their life, and you are the person that’s able to help them. So you can walk away knowing you did something good and valuable on that day.”

The other operators agree. After his first gig out of the military, a post at Town Fair Tire which he describes as “a great fucking job,” Mancini says his late mother called him up. “She’s like, ‘Why don’t you help people?’” He shakes his head. He took the job as a dispatcher, he says, to serve the community. “I was born here; I was educated here; now I have the privilege of working here. I have a vested interest in seeing New Haven do well.”

FEBRUARY 2020

The signature detachment of operators’ voices tends to conceal how much the job matters to them. Peet, the director, recalls a particularly brutal 2013 blizzard, which dumped more than four feet of snow on the city.

“Any time we sent an ambulance out, within moments they were stuck,” he says. He remembers having to tell his operators that they could not leave because the doors downstairs were blocked. It was impossible for emergency services to reach those in need. Employees took turns sleeping in the office while their colleagues, exhausted as well, told frantic callers that they could not help. Caught up in the memory, Peet is somber.

“As a public servant dedicated to safety, to tell someone you’re on your own—that doesn’t fit within anything that you have within you, let alone training.”

Before I leave, I sit for a half hour or so with Thornton at her desk while she supervises. As she recounts the decades’ worth of calls she has fielded, it seems like a dam breaks inside of her. The words come out in streams. She tells me about cars flipping over, cops being shot, how she managed these horrors as a single mom trying to raise her kids alone. At last she arrives back at the death of Officer Fumiatti, for whom she felt responsible as his dispatcher, at which point we both realize her cheeks are wet. Out of her hundreds of thousands of dispatches, many heroic successes, this one remains with her. I ask Thornton how one deals with it all. “You don’t,” she says. She turns away; the phone is ringing.

– Jack Delaney is a first-year in Pierson College.

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GIN

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In the year and a half since a mass K2 overdose on the New Haven Green, what steps have been taken to address substance use disorder downtown?

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s darkness begins to fall, lampposts flicker to life across the New Haven Green, illuminating the crisscrossing pathways and park benches. The place is almost completely deserted, save for a few people emerging from Center Church. Ray Greene, who is currently experiencing homelessness and receiving treatment for substance use disorder, stands on the corner waiting for the bus back to the town of Hamden, Connecticut. He’s bundled in a thick winter coat, and wears several pairs of thin cotton gloves. On his back he carries a large, worn-out backpack, which he says contains most of his belongings.

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AP LA CE TO B E CH ARL

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SNAPSHOT

The New Haven Green, the city’s most central public park, came to national attention in August 2018, when 116 people were hospitalized after ingesting K2 there. K2 is a drug often described as a form of synthetic marijuana, but in reality, the two drugs have vastly different compositions, and K2 is significantly more dangerous.

Greene says he has noticed a greater police presence since the mass K2 overdose in 2018.

“They’re definitely around here more since then, just making their faces known,” he says of the police officers. “It’s probably for the tourists and the families that want to come here, I guess. That’s their priority.”

The police aren’t the only people who have been frequenting the public park lately. Phil Costello, an advanced practice registered nurse and the clinical director for Homeless Care at the Cornell Scott Hill Health Center, spends much of his time on the

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Design by Rebecca Goldberg | Photos from Wikimedia Commons

New Haven Green, stopping at each park bench to chat with people and checking the vital signs of anyone who appears to be unconscious or at risk of an overdose. Greene says he often sees Costello making his rounds on the Green. “It’s good to know there’s somebody who’s looking out,” he says. * It’s around dinnertime on a cold night in February, and Phil Costello is standing by the entrance of the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen on Temple Street. He’s leaning against the door of his black pick-up truck, wearing black scrubs. He carries two heavy backpacks, one slung over each of his broad shoulders. Patrons of the soup kitchen are shuffling towards the entrance for dinner.

Many are coming from the New Haven Green, less than a block away. Most greet Costello by name as they pass, and he does the same. “Hey,” he says to a man standing by the entrance and smoking a cigarette. “How’re you feeling this week? How’s your breathing?” They chat amiably for a few minutes, cracking jokes and discussing the man’s various health issues.

Costello describes his specialty as “street medicine,” which primarily involves checking up on members of the New Haven community who are experiencing homelessness. Much of his work centers around the intersection of homelessness and addiction. “The people I usually work with spend most of their time just trying to figure out how to survive,” he says. “That makes finding windows of sobriety and stability in which to provide consistent and actually effective treatment for addiction or anything else particularly difficult.”

As Costello sees it, his work both prevents unnecessary, and expensive emergency room visits and ensures that people who do need emergency treatment at a hospital get it. * Costello was making his rounds on the Green when the 2018 overdoses began, and he was one of the first responders to treat the overdose victims. Though he describes the amount of K2 present on the Green that day as an anomaly, he believes the event was consistent with the rise in substance abuse disorder he had observed on the Green in years prior. Connecticut currently has the ninth highest rate of opioid-related deaths FEBRUARY 2020

per capita in the country; New Haven County consistently ranks among the highest in the state for per-capita rates of overdoses, according to the Connecticut Department of Public Health. “The biggest thing that came out of this whole K2 thing is that it made the city more aware of what we all already knew, which is that our people desperately need help,” Costello says.

“The people I usually work with spend most of their time just trying to figure out how to survive.”

Shortly after the K2 poisoning, then-Mayor Toni Harp outlined a number of initiatives intended to address the problems presented by substance use disorder in New Haven. Through his work on the Green, Costello witnessed the implementation and effects of these projects firsthand. Among the initiatives was the New Haven Police Department’s adoption of hot spot technology, which allows officers to track drug overdoses throughout the Northeast and anticipate spikes in overdoses in New Haven before they occur. In the past year, the New Haven Fire Department has also partnered with local treatment centers to print cards with information about New Haven-based services.

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Fire Chief John Alston argues that much of the solution has to do with simply providing people with the information they need to seek treatment. “We knew we wouldn’t be able to just arrest or legislate our way out of this problem,” he says. Alston believes the card program has been successful at directing people towards seeking treatment. “Eighty-three percent of the calls we get at the Fire Department are medical, and a significant number of those are going to be drug related,” he says. “If we believe that to be the case, we either give someone a card or we place it on their person so they find it later. We’ve had treatment centers reporting that lots of people are coming in seeking treatment because they found the information on these cards.”

Mayor Justin Elicker, who was inaugurated in January, supports the emergency responders’ emphasis on treatment rather than policing. “City Hall’s philosophy on how to address substance use disorder is about not criminalizing drug use but treating it as a medical issue,” he says. “Nonprofits in the city like the APT Foundation treat people regardless of whether they’re currently using or not.

Research shows that you’ll get better results that way.” (The APT Foundation is a treatment center in New Haven that offers a range of services, including several methadone clinics in the area.)

Mayor Elicker does note, though, that police presence on the Green has increased since the K2 overdose. Phil Costello has noticed this in his work as well. “There are a lot of people trying to help out,” he says. “But has the increased police presence changed the drug issue? Probably not. Police presence is a band-aid, not a solution to the problem.”

Former Mayor Harp also created a task force with representatives from law enforcement, City Hall, treatment centers, non-governmental organizations, the Green’s Committee of Proprietors, the churches on the Green, and local residents. According to Costello, who was involved with the task force, the most important thing to come out of the group’s work was a proposed plan for a drop-in center and clinic near the Green, where people struggling with addiction could get treatment. Costello believes that establishing such a center would be a critical step towards addressing the problems of substance use disorder in New Haven. In Vancouver, he said, opioid treatment centers that feature supervised consumption or injection facilities have been shown 10

to reduce the likelihood of overdose-related deaths.

According to Costello, there are currently two ongoing efforts to raise money for a drop-in center near the Green, but funding remains a significant hurdle. “It would make a big difference in the community if Yale would help out with that,” Costello says. Yale has historically been involved with providing access to treatment services in New Haven: the Hill Health Center, where Costello works, was founded in 1968 as a collaboration between the local community and doctors at the Yale School of Medicine.

“Police presence is a band-aid, not a solution to the problem.”

As Costello envisions it, the drop-in center would include a clinic and a sobering room where people could rest and recover in a safe and monitored environment, reducing the risk of arrest or hospitalization. “One of the biggest problems is that there just isn’t a place for these people to be able to go,” he says. “A lot of them just need a safe, warm space, where they can be consistently addressed by the same people.” The center would also have mailboxes where people experiencing homelessness could receive mail and staff members who could help with scheduling medical appointments.

“Many people don’t think about this, but for people who don’t have regular phone service, scheduling medical appointments and getting treatment can be extremely difficult,” Costello says. “Even if an THE NEW JOURN AL

appointment is made, if nobody ever answers the phone to confirm the appointment, it’ll just get cancelled.”

But other recent efforts to open treatment centers in New Haven have been met with backlash from a group of residents of the Hill, including Ward 3 Alder Ron Hurt and Ward 4 Alder Evelyn Rodriguez, who claim that the city is already saturated with social services. Last fall, the New Haven Independent reported that community members resisted the Hill Health Center’s plan to build a new, $20 million, fifty-two-bed inpatient treatment center. Opponents argued that further increasing the relatively high concentration of treatment centers runs counter to efforts to make lower-income neighborhoods safer, pointing out that the area around the APT Foundation’s methadone clinic in the Hill has been the site of a disproportionate amount of crime. The plan for the treatment center was ultimately approved by the Board of Alders.

Part of the resistance to the opening of new treatment centers in New Haven stems from the perception that this initiative would attract people from outside New Haven, who might create a drain on the city’s social services and contribute to higher crime rates. “We need to make sure that the surrounding towns and cities are adequately providing programs for their residents, so they don’t feel forced to come to New Haven for treatment,” Mayor Elicker says.

“This is part of why this issue centers on the Green, because it’s right next to the bus stops, so it’s where these people spend their time.”

But according to Costello, though many people do travel to New Haven to receive treatment, they usually return to their own communities at night and are unlikely to stay in New Haven. “They’re typically not the ones spending time on the Green,” he says.

“Plus, the K2 incident had nothing to do with opiates, so blaming opiate treatment centers that are actually helping people get better just confuses things.”

Costello believes that building public support for the drop-in center near the Green is the most important factor in making the center a reality. In his view, increasing police presence on the Green without expanding access to treatment services nearby serves primarily to appease local business owners who feel that the prevalence of substance abuse on the Green is bad for business. “What we need to do is educate local businesses and community members,” he says. “We FEBRUARY 2020

need to let everyone know that if people are inside getting help and staying safe, they’re not out in front of the storefronts, and they’re not having these issues on the Green.” When asked if he thinks the center will become a reality soon, Costello grimaces a little.

“It’s a slow process,” he says, chuckling and shaking his head. * Ray Greene says he has noticed the fire department’s card program, and believes it’s making a difference.

“People got to get this information somehow,” he says.

But he believes a drop-in treatment center near the Green would be transformative. “You’ve always got to be moving around from place to place to get the services in New Haven, so if it was right here I bet a lot of the people here on the Green would be doing a lot better,” he says.

He sees the Green as the best possible place to spend his time, but he says he wishes he felt more welcome there. “A lot of folks think of people hanging out on the Green as a nuisance, but I’m not trying to be a nuisance,” he says. “I just need a place to be.”

After spending the night in Hamden, he says, he’ll return to the New Haven Green the next morning.

– Charlie Lee is a senior in Davenport College.

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P O I N T O F D E PA R T U R E

ONE OF THE MANY, ONE OF THE FEW A U.S. military veteran and mother navigates her senior year at Yale.

MICHELLE FANG

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illary Browning is a senior in Hopper College—but she never endured Bingham Hall or made a home out of the Hopper Courtyard. She lives a few blocks away from Wooster Square Park in New Haven. Half-marathon certificates, heartwarming pictures, and mementos from her military past speckle the wall of her apartment.

Her husband, James, a Navy veteran with a warm smile and dressed in a simple t-shirt and jeans, greeted us in the home’s foyer as he sat on the wooden floors playing with their ten-month-old.

Round, bright-eyed, and excited but shy, the baby, Lily, crawled on a multicolored play mat.

James isn’t the only Navy vet in the house.

Browning served as a journalist in the Navy for six years. Upon retiring from the military, she applied to Yale through the Eli Whitney Students Program, which provides a pathway to the college for nontraditional students—people who have taken at least five years away from formal education. In August 2016, when Browning was 24, she moved to New Haven and enrolled at Yale.

Fewer than two years later, as a sophomore, she would give birth to Lily, her first child.

Each veteran carries their own story, reasons for serving, and experiences. Browning, a petite brunette who loves writing, explained that she initially didn’t consider college because of her high school grades. She worked at a restaurant until a recruiter called her out of the blue due to her military entrance test scores. Her parents were unconvinced that their sensitive daughter would join. At the age of 19, in 2012, Browning decided to enter the Navy as a journalist to prove her parents wrong.

As a military journalist, Browning was first stationed in Sasebo, Japan, tasked with creating commercials and hosting radio shows for the

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Illustration by Sam Oldshue.

Design by Chase Westover.

American Forces Networks. While producing video-news in Sasebo, Browning met her husband James, a bomb disposal technician concurrently stationed in Japan.

Eventually, Browning was deployed for seven months to Bagram, Afghanistan, where she documented military history. She later spent time on the USS Eisenhower ship, serving as the editor-in-chief of the boat’s daily newspaper.

For a long time, a school like Yale didn’t even seem like a possibility for her. “The military teaches you that you’re replaceable,” she said.

“When people get discharged, they feel like one of the many, so they don’t apply to schools like Yale,” whose applicants hope to be one of the selected few. However, an advisor at Service to School (S2S), a non-profit that assists military veterans with the college application process, encouraged her to apply. “Without the Eli Whitney school program, Yale would be inaccessible,” Browning said.

Most military veterans in Yale College are enrolled through the Eli Whitney program, which has an annual class of around thirty students.

While the program enrolls students from all sorts of backgrounds, it has, within the last decade, started to accept more and more military veterans. In 2010, not a single veteran studied as an undergraduate at Yale; today, there are sixteen veterans and one active duty member of the Marine Corps in the undergraduate student body.

Part of what explains this increase is that, in 2015, Yale became the first participant in Service to School’s Vetlink program, which provides college counseling for high-achieving U.S. military veterans and seeks to match them with the nation’s most selective universities.

Patricia Wei, director of admissions for Yale’s Eli Whitney Program, explained that Eli Whitney THE NEW JOURN AL

students are “academically just like other undergraduates but age-wise more like graduate students and faculty.” But some Eli Whitney veteran students have voiced that fitting in isn’t always easy. Former military medic Jake Fischer reflected that while “being a veteran didn’t make me stick out, being older could be awkward.”

He described how Eli Whitney students aren’t allowed to live on campus and sometimes have trouble dating when most of their classmates are younger. Andrew Nguyen, a former Army Ranger, explained that he wanted to connect with people who have different outlooks in order to fully experience college life, so he joined an Alzheimer Buddies group, the Sigma Nu fraternity, and the Rugby team.

Unlike Fischer and Nguyen, Browning is less “plugged in” to extracurricular activities on campus. While Browning originally wanted to “be super involved,” she “realized how little she knew” once classes began. Other students were quoting Foucault and seemed well-versed in classical texts. In order to catch up, the veteran journalist chose to “bare down” on academics because “everyone else felt so ahead” and placed less of an emphasis on clubs. Browning also has different day-to-day priorities than those of most undergraduates—instead of going to Toads or finding suite parties, she needs to buy groceries to cook dinner, get gas for her car, and finish renovation projects in her apartment.

While Browning values her time at Yale, it became difficult for her to stay on campus with a hungry baby at home. Browning is one of the few Yale undergraduates who are parents. She said that the parenting support groups at Yale that she’s found are mainly geared toward faculty and graduate students, so she and her husband had to try especially hard to find communities of parents. Browning only recently found a group at the Office of International Students & Scholars and heard about a mom-baby fitness class.

When Browning first got pregnant, she worried about how her baby would affect her schooling.

She recalls that Risa Sodi, the dean of the Eli Whitney program, assured her that being a student would offer her a unique degree of flexibility during this time in her life.

Browning has built a home in New Haven with her husband and child, and she’s found community with other parents outside of Yale, FEBRUARY 2020

whom she has met through her daughter. Now, in her senior spring, Browning is taking three classes, which add up to four hours of class per week. This relatively low course load has allowed her to take Lily to group playdates alongside her husband.“I could let my husband take her alone,” Browning said in an email, “but we enjoy watching her interact with other little ones, and these meet-ups are important for us too.”

As a new mother, Browning could only be away from home four to five hours at a time, so there have been instances when raising a newborn baby has come into conflict with Browning’s classes.

Last semester, when Browning was taking two back-to-back seminars, her husband would bring Lily to campus and she would have to step out of class to breastfeed her. Browning missed most of the career fairs, which were held late in the afternoon, when she had to feed Lily.

“I do lay awake at night wondering if I should be in the library more and at home less,” she said.

“When people say, ‘Wow, how are you doing this mom/student thing?!’ I feel guilty, because I feel like I’m not actually doing it. My role as a mom is secure, but my role as a student feels fragile.”

But Browning’s undergraduate peers have been a source of strength for her. “People usually give me too much credit,” Browning said. “I’ve said that I’m a mother in classes and people seem floored. My husband is a stay-at-home dad. I get a lot of support.”

Browning’s secret society even threw her a surprise baby shower. At the party, she received face masks and bath bombs, and onesies, toys, and blankets for her baby.

– Michelle Fang is a sophomore in Davenport College.

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Order LAUREN DOMINGUEZ CHAN

It was snowing when I dialed, raining when I hung up, chaos even for me who mixes the chaff back into the wheat and salts the on-ramps and rakes up needles only to scatter them on the ground and walk through as if to cut a covenant, or sew one together. At dawn, with all the inertia of imagination, I laced my boots and cradled the laundry.

Is it even worth it to clean these clothes?

No matter. When the washer door clicked shut I knew that ours is not the slipped disk in the spine of a novel, it’s just the end and so we wring it out, make it lie flat.

Illustrations by Zihao Lin  14

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Illustration by Zihao Lin

Visitation LAUREN DOMINGUEZ CHAN

When my foot falls asleep I recall that the body won’t evince itself or mist its limbs with feeling more often, only when it needs to tell me to get up and move along. Last night a spindly old man told me about the etymology of a word, an insight so luminous it made me stir and realize I must have already known it in order to dream that I learned it. But like Ishmael, why say more? Leak awakens knowledge of lack and now I’m staring at the drip from the kitchen sink wondering if all the oceans are peering down the spout, holding back.

– Lauren Dominguez Chan is a junior in Grace Hopper College..

FEBRUARY 2020

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PROFILE:

RUNNING ON LOVE

Relationship by relationship, a New Haven alder builds commmunity power in her ward.

LAURA GLESBY

O

n the first Monday of November last year, Americans’ mail slots were unusually stuffed with promises. Political hopefuls grinned at constituents and flooded inboxes and voicemails with last-minute Can-I-Count-On-YourVotes. Across New Haven, a divisive mayoral race huffed its last bitter breaths in the eighteen hours before election day. For a moment, the frenzy found its way to an uncontested aldermanic race in New Haven’s twentieth ward, as Delphine Clyburn wedged flyers behind doorknobs on the block just around the corner from her Newhall Street house.

Clyburn was running unopposed for her fifth twoyear term as alder of New Haven’s Ward 20, which spans much of Newhallville, a neighborhood at the northern border of the city with a majority-Black and low-income population. Clyburn had an hour and a half to canvass before she needed to leave for her 2 p.m. work shift at a state-run group home for adults with developmental disabilities. In New Haven, alders receive a stipend of $2,000 a year; most have to work full time jobs in addition to their political responsibilities.

The majority of the block’s residents were at work, so she slipped flyers through mail slots and slid them between door hinges. Her silver hair was clipped back in a characteristic bun, aside from an orderly wisp that swept across her forehead. Occasionally, Clyburn stopped to greet pedestrians with a hug before checking whether she would see them at the polls the next day.

On the day before the election, in a ward with over four thousand residents, Clyburn handed out only about two dozen flyers. She had chosen the particular block not because it would be politically strategic, but because 89-year-old Ella Anderson lived there, and Clyburn wanted to pay her a visit.

When Clyburn knocked, Anderson (whose name has been changed in this story to protect her privacy) answered the door in a flamingo-colored nightgown, wearing curlers in her hair. Anderson ushered us inside and dragged out chairs for us at a dining room table covered in a red plastic tablecloth. Small heaps of mail rested on the table before us.

Anderson brought out materials she would need to renew proof of her eligibility for Connecticut’s 16

Design by Meher Hans

Energy Assistance Program, which helps low-income households pay for heat in the winter, by filling out forms for a local non-profit called the Community Action Agency of New Haven. Clyburn was putting the pre-election rush on hold that morning to help Anderson reapply for the government benefit that would keep her house warm.

For another politician, the visit to Anderson might have been an unusual detour. But Clyburn treated it as just another part of her job. On and off election season, Clyburn frequently goes “on the doors” both to visit with and advocate for her constituents. Local activists attest that since Clyburn took office in 2012, the change has been palpable in Newhallville. Her ward is slowly becoming a neighborhood city officials can no longer ignore. * For most of her childhood, Clyburn was whisked from home to home, for reasons that often only made sense to her in retrospect. Her parents died in separate car accidents—her father first, and then her mother.

She knows that she was 3 years old at the time of her mother’s death because at age thirteen, she found a newspaper clipping about the crash in a Connecticut public library. Soon after the accident that killed their mother, Clyburn and her older sister found themselves under their great aunt’s care in North Carolina.

“She made sure everything was clean,” Clyburn recalled of her great aunt. (Since then, Clyburn has kept her living spaces immaculate; her kids used to call their home “the museum.”) But Clyburn said that if she so much as misspelled a word in her homework, her great aunt would beat her. Her great aunt also implored them not to trust anyone: “You don’t depend on nobody,” Clyburn remembers her saying.

In that house, Clyburn grew up playing baseball and kickball, skating and riding bikes. She would cut out her own paper dolls and build paper houses for them, with paper furniture. But when her grandfather came to visit during the summers, Clyburn recalls that he noticed her aunt’s abuse and arranged for her to move

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to another aunt’s home in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

In Bridgeport, Clyburn found herself living with four younger kids she had never met.

That aunt made a habit of disappearing, according to Clyburn; some weeks, she would leave the house Friday and come back Monday. In her absence, Clyburn, who was 13 at the time, said she took care of the four younger children also living in the house. “I was practically like the mom around the house,” Clyburn said. “I knew how to run a house, keep it clean.”

One day, when her aunt was absent, she decided to make hot chocolate for the other children in the house.

She boiled water on the stove, and the water spilled onto one of the other kids—she doesn’t remember how—burning one girl badly enough that she had to go to the doctor. After a year with the aunt who was so often gone, Clyburn wound up in her first foster home.

Clyburn’s first set of parents assigned through the foster system had always wanted a daughter. The Watsons were an elderly couple with no other children, and Clyburn felt loved there. But one day, Clyburn found herself reassigned to a new foster family, where eight other kids—including one of Clyburn’s biological brothers she didn’t know she had—resided.

Clyburn recalls that one of the other foster children living in her new home could not hear or speak. The girl soon wrote Clyburn a letter saying that the father of the house “touched her,” as Clyburn recalls it. Clyburn was 15 and scared; she had been scared of the father even before receiving the letter. Unsure of what to do, she initially kept the letter to herself, and prayed by a stream of water outside the house each night: Lord, help me get out of this house. Help me. Help me.

Soon, her foster sister “began to show,” Clyburn said.

In the letter, the girl had only confided that the father “touched” her. But the truth revealed itself in the form of a fetus. As a ward of the state, according to Clyburn, the girl gave birth and was forced to relinquish her baby. The whole family had to go to court. Clyburn said she brought the letter with her and testified against her foster father. Each child was relocated to a different house. * A triangular patch of grass two blocks away from Anderson’s home, where Starr Street intersects with Shelton Avenue, was once called the “Mudhole” — the center of New Haven’s drug trade. In the nineties, a pair of articles in the New Yorker explored gang dynamics at the Mudhole as a case study of urban decay in an era of deindustrialization. At the time, the gradual shutdown

FEBRUARY 2020

of Newhallville’s primary employer, the Winchester Arms Factory, spiked unemployment rates in the area.

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, notorious for its racist policies, had redlined Newhallville decades earlier, marking it a “definitely declining” neighborhood and paving the way for institutional discrimination against its residents. In media portrayals, a reputation for crime and poverty followed Newhallville for decades. In 2013, the Yale Daily News described the neighborhood as “among the poorest and most dangerous parts of the city,” claiming that it was “still not a safe place to walk late at night.”

Local activists were committed to advocating for more opportunities and resources for Newhallville. In 2010, residents organized in response to a controversial plan to convert the former Winchester Arms Factory into a mixed-use building that would house, in part, a tech company focused on financial aid reimbursement.

The activists held weekly meetings on Mondays in a prominent New Haven church. They demanded that the developer employ more Newhallville residents for the construction of the building.

“It’s not just a portion who should be loved,” Clyburn said; every part of the city deserves equal access to resources.

Clyburn heard about the meetings and decided to show up to one of them—and then another, and another.

She had been involved in labor organizing for decades; since 1987, she had served as a delegate for the statewide 1199 Healthcare Workers’ Union, representing colleagues across Connecticut in disputes with management. She even volunteered at one meeting to invite then-Mayor John DeStefano to her home to press him about the new development. When they met, Clyburn felt that DeStefano didn’t sufficiently address her concerns about local hiring.

After their conversation, she sent him a thank-you note asking “why he didn’t care for every part of his city.”

At one of the meetings, Clyburn met another Newhallville neighbor, Shirley Lawrence, who was then a lead organizer for a union-affiliated non-profit, Connecticut Center for a New Economy.

“She stood up and asked probably the most important questions in the room,” Lawrence said of Clyburn. “I was looking at her like, whoa, O.K., this is a pretty strong lady 17

here.”

Lawrence’s job involved identifying and mentoring community leaders. After the meeting, she met separately with Clyburn to urge her to run for alder of Ward 20. At the time, Lawerence said, people in Newhallville tended to distrust politicians; she felt that her neighbors were ready for a change. Clyburn agreed to run in 2011 and picked Lawrence as her campaign manager. After the Democratic primary, the New Haven Independent reported that Clyburn, who was new to politics, defeated the incumbent alder, Charles Blango, with a decisive 58 percent of the vote.

How did she pull it off? “She probably knocked on every door in the neighborhood,” Lawrence said. “And she still does it to this day.” * At her third and final foster home, Clyburn did not have to worry about a predatory caregiver. But she didn’t breathe more easily, at least not at first. Eight other kids lived with the Coversons at the time, and three more would eventually arrive. Each day, the father would bring the kids candy bars after work. Still, Clyburn remained guarded. “Trust no one,” she recalls thinking.

When she came home from school each afternoon, she would immediately retreat to her room. Her new foster mother expressed love for her anyway, promising that she would be there whenever Clyburn could trust her.

Once, when Clyburn was still a teenager, Mrs. Coverson told her that she wanted to adopt her. She wanted to give Clyburn their family’s name. But by that time, Clyburn was engaged. She told Mrs. Coverson to adopt the younger foster children in the house instead.

“I had that thing in me—do for yourself, make your own way,” Clyburn said. “That’s from my aunt. That stayed with me.”

Clyburn met her husband, Michael, through the Coversons’ Bridgeport church, which was affiliated

“When I took this ward, I fought for this ward.

For Downtown to even care about us,” Clyburn told me. “I felt like we were foster kids with no voice.”

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with his North Carolina congregation. “We dated over the phone and through the mail,” she said. They met three times in person before they got married. Clyburn was 19.

The Coversons were reluctant to support the marriage; a part of them wanted Clyburn, and all her siblings, to remain in the house forever. But the Coversons worked with Clyburn’s high school friends to put together their wedding.

Forty-one years later, Clyburn and her husband are still together. They moved to New Haven in 1986, buying the Newhallville house they still live in. The couple hashave started multiple churches, and currently run Grace and Peace Cathedral International on Starr Street. In the backyard of their home, greenery flows amidst stone statues. Occasionally, the neighbor’s cat wanders through the yard, around the house, out to the sidewalk. Blue-andwhite birdhouses adorn trees. Wind chimes sing on the back porch. * The most anger I’ve ever heard in Clyburn’s voice came out as she scrolled through her phone to show me a photograph of a demolition site in the neighborhood.

In the image, which she’d captured the other day, a pile of bricks and debris lay outside a crumbling building.

Clyburn said she had asked the site’s manager to throw the wreckage into a dumpster, but the manager said that the dumpster would overflow. “So. What?,” Clyburn flared.

“Get the dumpster.”

We sat on green plastic chairs inside the Orchid Cafe on Winchester Avenue. On Clyburn’s cell phone camera roll, photographs of her newborn grandson interrupted a stream of images of sidewalk cracks and untrimmed trees.

“I ride around this city,” she said. “I ride around this city [in my car] to see how every neighborhood is faring.”

She sees a disparity in the way many city employees treat constituents in different neighborhoods; she has a particular grudge against the Trees department, which she claims doesn’t adequately trim the trees in her ward.

Construction sites in the city’s wealthier neighborhoods don’t look like the one in the image she has just shown me, she said. She’s concerned about contaminated materials that could spread through the debris. But for Clyburn, developers’ lack of dumpsters is about more than just the health risk. “They don’t even respect us.”

Soon after she got elected, Clyburn set out to fill the lapses in the city’s care for Newhallville from the ground up. She enlisted someone on every street to report back to her about each block’s condition. These neighbors would inform her about poor property upkeep, whether someone was sick, whether someone had passed away. Neighbors have also told her about suspected drug deals occurring THE NEW JOURN AL

driving bimonthly food deliveries from a nonprofit called FISH to her homebound neighbors; she and three friends delivered food to all of FISH’s clients in the ward. When 14-year-old Tyrick Keyes died from gunfire in her ward in 2017, Clyburn sat with his mother in the hospital and mobilized neighbors to cook food for her after the funeral.

“My Reed Street is my love street,” she said in passing once, in reference to the street where Keyes’s family lived.

“It’s not just a portion who should be loved,” Clyburn said; every part of the city deserves equal access to resources. “I call it love,” she added. “But love could be the way we let development come, the way we let our schools be, housing, the cost of things, how they keep things clean, our parks, whatever. Everybody should be treated the same. But everybody was not.” *

Photo by Laura Glesby

in nearby houses. Clyburn said she has parked outside of those houses for hours at a time, watching cars driving in and out, to see if the complaints checked out before relaying them to landlords or to the police. She recalled that one day, as she was walking down Reed Street, someone came up behind her and imitated the sound of a gun, threatening her. Clyburn kept walking. “I didn’t pay them no attention,” she said calmly, “because I know why I’m out there.” She scrolled through more photos on her phone, showing me the license plate of a double-parked car and a pile of chopped-up tree branches lying on the sidewalk.

Door by door, Clyburn has urged neighbors to demand love from a political system that was never meant to hear them. When she first got elected, she found fifteen of her neighbors willing to commit to serving as community organizers within the ward. Alongside Clyburn, the team of fifteen met regularly and urged neighbors to vote, join city commissions, and voice their opinions at public hearings.

Newhallville “changed a hell of a lot” since Clyburn took office, Lawrence said. “She let people know that you actually can trust someone that’s in politics… From day one, it was about the people, until today, it’s about the people.”

The difference could be felt from the highest office in City Hall. “When I think about Newhallville when I first ran … I went to some of the streets not too far from here,

* “When I took this ward, I fought for this ward. For Downtown to even care about us,” Clyburn told me. “I felt like we were foster kids with no voice.”

Clyburn goes to constituents’ homes nearly every week—not only to help them apply for government programs, as in Anderson’s case, but also to spread the word about public meetings, or to check in about whether landlords have responded to grievances. When she meets with constituents, she’ll ask about their daughters or how their health has been lately. These visits, she says, are her way of “loving on them.”

On a day off from work, she once spent six hours talking to residents of an elderly housing complex in her ward who had complained of slow repairs. She made a habit of FEBRUARY 2020

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and there was a real sense of despair,” New Haven’s former mayor, Toni Harp, said at Clyburn’s re-election campaign launch in July 2019. Harp and Clyburn both took office in 2012. “What we’ve seen happen here… we have seen a transformation,” Harp said.

Newhallville’s Ward 20 now has one of the highest rates of voter turnout of all thirty wards in New Haven; Newhallville resident Barbara Vereen proudly declared the ward to be “the highest voting Black ward in this city.”

When Barack Obama ran for re-election as president in 2012, over two thousand voters waited in an hours-long line in Ward 20, the third-largest turnout in the city, close behind the whiter and more affluent neighborhoods of East Rock and Westville.

“I was putting the ward before my health, and my family, everything,” Clyburn said.

Five years ago, during her second term in office, Clyburn and other community activists beautified and rebranded the “Mudhole” as “the Learning Corridor.”

One nearby resident, Doreen Abubakar, secures regular grants to fund biking and outdoor education programs there. The block hosts an annual Harvest Festival in the fall. In August, child reporters in the neighborhood’s Kids TV program released a mini-documentary about the block’s dramatic transformation.

During this period, Newhallville’s Community Management Team—one of the city’s twelve neighborhoodbased committees that provide an opportunity for residents to weigh in on new development projects and hear updates from city officials—grew to become one of the most active and effective in town, at least on par with those of New Haven’s wealthiest neighborhoods. Clyburn was one of the people who worked to bolster the group, urging more and more of her neighbors to come out to meetings. A group of more than thirty people, mostly Newhallville residents, had come out for the group’s monthly meeting in September 2019, sitting around several circular tables with built-in blue stools.

As neighbors and guests offered updates and announcements, the Management Team’s chair, local preschool director Kim Harris, rallied the group to participate in upcoming events. It didn’t seem to matter what people advocated for; what was most important to Harris was that the neighborhood’s voice was heard.

“Let’s flood the house with Newhallville people,” she said, referring to a city meeting about public housing.

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Of another public meeting: “I just want to flood [it] with Newhallville people ‘cause there’s a lot of things going on, and we’re gonna know about it.”

Soon, Harris announced a gala hosted by the Board of Alders’ Black and Hispanic Caucus in late October. She wanted to have a table of Newhallville residents there.

Tickets were seventy-five dollars, but to Harris, they were well worth the cost. “That’s the best seventy-five dollars I’ve ever spent,” she told the group. “I get to tell them, ‘Newhallville, Newhallville, Newhallville.’”

She urged the group to go. “If we got to lay away twenty dollars a week to make it, let’s lay away twenty dollars a week so that we could be amongst the people making decisions for us.” * Clyburn’s relationship-centered, community-powered approach to political leadership has proven its power, but it’s also taken a toll. By her fourth term as alder, a few of the neighbors she most relied on had passed away. Clyburn tried to take on their work by herself. “Things started—I started breaking down,” she said. She swallowed, held her voice together. “It’s a lot to take on, one person.”

Clyburn began to receive calls about Ward 20 during her shifts at the group home where she worked, which sometimes got her into trouble with her boss. Her doctors implored her to take better care of her health. She had also started withdrawing from her personal finances to assist her constituents—particularly the elderly residents.

She would help cover light bills and gas bills. Clyburn even paid one hundred dollars to remove a wheel boot that the city had placed on a young man’s car. “He had to go to work,” she said. “I didn’t really know him that well, but he was in my ward.”

Throughout her forty-one-year marriage, Clyburn was in charge of paying the gas and electricity bills for her and her husband’s home; the rest of her paycheck was hers to spend on what she wanted. But as she lent money to her constituents, Clyburn began to ask for her husband’s help with utility bills. Their kids were paying their own expenses, and her husband grew suspicious. Someone finally told him that she had been helping neighbors with expenses; now, she has to make up the lost money herself.

Clyburn laughed as she recalled what her husband said: “Nobody’s gonna help us Delphine, remember?”

Clyburn started to work overtime to make up for the money she gave to her constituents, sometimes starting her shift at 6 a.m. and leaving at 11 p.m. “I was putting the ward before my health, and my family, everything,” Clyburn said.

There is only so much love—only so much time, only so much money—that one person can muster. “I’m still THE NEW JOURN AL

Delphine Clyburn at her church, Grace and Peace International.

now trying to pull out of my financial base from what I did to my family,” Clyburn said. “I’m struggling back now to rebuild our little nest egg over the years.” * Time slipped by inside Ella Anderson’s home on Starr Street. Channel 8 hummed on the TV in the living room, interrupted by occasional Black Friday ads and a paid message from then-mayoral candidate Justin Elicker. Sitting at the dining room table, Clyburn took out one of the required Energy Assistance forms and walked Anderson through it, pointing out the places where a signature was required. Periodically, Anderson retreated to the kitchen and brought out another form or bill that seemed redundant or perplexing. The papers accumulated on the table amidst piles of notecards and mailers and other receipts. Slowly, Clyburn and Anderson pieced together the source of confusion: it seemed that the Community Action Agency of New Haven had sent Anderson an extra form.

“If I could just get a person to talk to me…” Clyburn said.

As Clyburn called up the Community Action Agency, Anderson read the words printed on Clyburn’s campaign flyer in a murmur: Strong constituent services… She proclaimed that the photograph on the flyer was beautiful.

No one answered Clyburn’s call. The agency’s voicemail FEBRUARY 2020

Photo by Laura Glesby

was full.

Anderson retrieved a new form from the pile, and Clyburn read aloud that Anderson could learn more about the status of her benefits if she created an online account, accessible on her computer and smartphone.

But Anderson doesn’t use the Internet. “I keep telling them, they think everyone has that,” Clyburn sighed.

Clyburn gently folded the Energy Assistance forms and placed them on top of a pile of mail. “These are very important,” she said.

Next time, Clyburn said, she’ll come with a plastic bin and a set of dividers. She’ll sit down and help Anderson organize her financial records by year.

“I figured, if I could have you, things could work out,” Anderson told Clyburn. “I’m just not used to people going out of their way to help me.”

But Clyburn couldn’t stay forever. It was almost 1 p.m., and she had to be at work in an hour. She stood up soon after to leave the house and cross the street, where she would deliver a few last election flyers to people’s doorsteps.

—Laura Glesby is a junior in Timothy Dwight College.

She is co-editor-in-chief of The New Journal.

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Design by Rebecca Goldberg

F E AT U R E

In Connecticut, death doulas aim to ease the transition to the other side.

CANDICE WANG

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S

usan Clark, age 5, would shiver in her bed. The heat never reached the room on the top floor that she shared with four siblings. In the middle of the night, she braved the stairs in the darkness to use her eldest sister’s bathroom on the floor below. It was that, or peeing in a bucket.

That year, her 2-year-old sister died. “She just disappeared,” Clark, whose name has been changed in this story to protect her privacy, said sixty years later. “My parents never talked about it. She was just gone, gobbled up in the night.”

Clark never found out what happened to her sister, only that her parents didn’t have enough money to pay for a doctor. Later in the year, she started school in Valley Stream, New York, and discovered a funeral home across the street. During recess each day, redheaded Clark crossed the street and entered the facility. The managers let her into the home, where she ambled through a room full of open caskets. “I’d go in and look at the people, and collect all the little memorial cards,” Clark said.

Death once again touched her life decades later, in February 2019, when her youngest sister Joe died of a fentanyl overdose at age 56. She left no will, only a scribbled note for Clark that mentioned that she wanted to be cremated. That’s when the chaos began.

The rest of Clark’s family was Catholic, and demanded embalmment and a burial. Yet after Joe’s autopsy, Clark couldn’t stand thinking about how uncomfortable her sister would’ve felt with the embalming process. “I was extremely embarrassed, because of how private she was.”

As Clark lived closest to Joe’s home in Hamden, she exercised the legal authority to cremate her sister. “I rushed to everyone’s hate list. My eldest sister threatened to sue me. Now no one speaks to me. I lost Joe, I lost the whole family.”

Clark believes that her family’s inability to discuss death led to the division between her and her siblings. But Clark wants to be different from her family. After stumbling upon a New York Times article about death cafes—monthly meetings for people to chat about death over cakes and tea—she decided to venture to her first one in late July 2019 at Koffee?, a cafe in New Haven. She’s only missed one session ever since. These nighttime meetings provided Clark a space to talk about her sister again, to share with others the lonely journey she’d been

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on ever since Joe’s death. It was her doorway into the death positivity movement, which has been slowly altering how people approach death and dying across the country.

Two nights before Halloween, Nathalie Bonafé, with her gray pixie cut and a scarf knotted around her neck, commenced the tenth death cafe of the year by inviting attendees to introduce themselves.

A newcomer named Amber, dressed in a pea green cardigan, went first. “I’m here because I’m 63 years old and childless.” With no children to care for her and her husband in their old age, she said, she worried about dying alone.

A tray of vanilla scones and chocolate chip muffins, sugary crust glistening in the reddish lamp light, passed from hand to hand. Bonafé, the moderator of the discussion, broke eye contact with Amber to place a scone on a napkin. Dripping rain jackets hung from the backs of chairs in the cafe. Of the twenty people who had gathered, some were past middle age and worried about the future. Others were doctors or hospice care workers. Four, including Bonafé, were death, or end-of-life, doulas, non-medically trained people who are hired to help those approaching the end of their lives. The rest were just curious. Amber, perched on a stool, passed the tray of desserts to Mo, an energy healer (whose name has been changed in this story to protect her privacy), with large eyes magnified by thick rectangular glasses. Across from Mo sat a young woman sporting devil horns and a young man dressed as the Joker. Behind the couple sat a young botanist and a middle-aged man with wooden beads around his neck.

As the introductions finished, Bonafé cleared her throat. “Thank you all for sharing,” she said. “I want to reiterate that we’re here to be human together. We’re here to embrace our humanity.”

Stories tumbled from participants’ mouths, as the warm lamp lighting and the scent of coffee grounds weakened inhibitions. Another death doula with curly bangs covering her forehead spoke about a client, a terminally ill 49-year-old Ghanaian woman with a husband and numerous teenage boys. “Why her? Why not me?” she asked.

In response, a middle-aged man shared that his daughter is non-verbally autistic. After spending years questioning “why me,” he decided upon a new world view. “I believe in a deterministic world,” he mused.

“We’re living in this beautiful machine.” He

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had surrendered control over what happened in his life, and tried to live in peace with his circumstances.

Bonafé, delighted, sipped her coffee. “I’m going to have to smoke a cigarette after this because I’m on such a dopamine high. Just being present here with all of you—it’s beautiful.” * The death positivity movement aims to destigmatize death and transform it from the terrifying to the peaceful. From death cafes to end-of-life doulas, the movement supports those who feel sidelined by the medical system.

In some ways, “death positivity” is a return to the way people used to relate to death. According to Stephen Latham, a bioethics and political science professor at Yale, death was not a taboo subject before the medical advancements of the twentieth century. Prior to the invention of antibiotics in the years following World War II, simple infections killed people, sometimes within hours. “There was almost nothing that medicine could do to stave off death,” said Latham. The inefficacy of early medicine against disease made death a less predictable, pervasive force in communities. The stigmatization of death, according to Latham, is more of a modern phenomenon.

In 1953, the polio vaccine was invented. A year later, the first successful organ transplant occurred.

Two years after that, metastatic cancer was treated successfully for the first time. By the 1970s, doctors became skilled enough to keep terminally ill patients alive, making death a long, drawn-out process.

“Medicine got good enough to be burdensome,” Latham said, or powerful enough to maintain patient’s lives at the expense of a good quality of life. Death moved from home to hospital, causing people to spend their final days secured on a gurney surrounded by masked doctors, attached to tubes and blinking machines. According to a 2016 study, 72 percent of Americans die in hospitals.

As more people died under fluorescent lights in hospitals, death became removed from everyday life.

The death positivity movement, said Latham, is an attempt to oppose that change, “to make death more calm, more beautiful, more anticipated,” something that can be normalized and embraced. * There are nine end-of-life doulas registered in Connecticut with the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance, which includes 288 doulas nationwide.

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From advocating for their clients’ needs in hospice care centers and arranging financial plans to making cups of tea and having deep conversations, doulas bring guidance to those who confront the medical system in the weeks before death.

When Bonafé, owner of a private death doula practice called A Gentler Parting, takes on a client, she never knows how she will end up assisting them.

If the client asks for a shaman, lawyer, or financial consultant, she finds one. If the client is in pain, Bonafé consults nurses to readjust pain medication.

If the client’s family members are in distress, she talks them through any fears they may have. The crux of the job, according to Bonafé, is being a loving presence.

“They just want the company,” explained Bonafé. “We let them be in this circle of love.”

Bonafé’s fees depend on a client’s needs. She charges $500 for two to three preliminary meetings, which last around six hours each. She meets with the client’s family and combs through legal documents, such as wills and advanced healthcare initiatives, which outline a patient’s end-of-life medical wishes. In total, most clients end up paying between $2,000 and $6,000 for a doula’s services. “Once people understand what I bring to the table, they have no problems with my fees,” she wrote. “I can help them save aggravation and money overall by helping them think rationally instead of out of fear.”

Despite increased media coverage in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, end-of-life doulas are still relatively unknown. When Bonafé attends dinner parties and describes her job to people she’s just met, they often respond with shock and confusion. Many people do not learn about these services, or understand them, until it’s too late.

Chanel Reynolds was one of those people. In 2009, Reynolds received a phone call that changed her life.

Her husband José, 32, had been struck by a vehicle while biking. Reynolds spent the next week in the ICU, torn not only by the possible loss of her young husband, but by the logistics of death: she and José weren’t prepared to die. After the first forty-eight hours at the hospital, the doctors told Reynolds that José would never recover. They inundated Reynolds with questions: did they have disability insurance? Did José write a legal will? Did he have an advanced care directive? Would he want her to pull life support?

Reynolds’ most pressing thought was: what would THE THE NEW NEW JOURN JOURNAL AL

happen if she pulled the plug on her husband? How long would it take for him to pass away? (She has since learned that the time frame can range anywhere from immediately to a few weeks.) She realized how little she knew, standing in the sterile hospital hallway, helpless. “That was a whole new pitch-black room that I was looking into,” Reynolds said.

Without guidance, the process of facing death or grieving can be overwhelming, even all-consuming.

With only doctors to direct her through the process, Reynolds felt lost. * The work done by death doulas often overlaps with the treatment provided by palliative care doctors, who offer the most holistic medical care available for patients suffering from long-term or terminal illness. At Yale New Haven Hospital’s palliative care department, a doctor first evaluates a patient’s condition on a scale of zero to one hundred, with one hundred indicating perfect health. Afterwards, the patient sits down with the doctor to outline their “Goals of Care,” which allows the palliative care team to understand what matters most based on the patient’s desires and preferences. The doctor then constructs a plan of care, which may include pain medication and physical therapy. Similarly, doulas sit down with their clients to talk through what they want most in their last few weeks. The doctors connect patients with chaplains and art therapists, something that death doulas also regularly do.

But there is a systemic shortage of palliative care, which makes palliative care departments short-staffed and limits the amount of time that can be spent on each patient. While there are only 1,400 palliative care centers nationwide, 42 percent of all Americans have had a friend or relative suffer from terminal illness in the past five years. Palliative care specialists at Duke University estimated in June 2019 that there is one palliative care physician for every 808 general patients in the United States. At Yale New Haven Hospital, the palliative care department, comprised of twenty-five staff members, cares for thirty five to fifty patients at any given time, according to Mark Swidler, a palliative care doctor at YNHH. This number is a small fraction of the 1,541 beds available at the hospital—which explains where end-of-life doulas step in. They do what palliative care doctors and hospitals cannot: provide hours and hours of constant, undivided care to the dying.

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Part of the reason that palliative care departments cannot keep up with demand is that they are underfunded.

Most patients enrolled in palliative care are above the age of 65, so Medicare pays for a large percentage of their palliative care costs. According to Health Affairs, Medicare’s approach to reimbursement favors medical procedures over palliative care procedures. In other words, Medicare doesn’t cover palliative care to the extent that it does other medical expenses. This disparity in reimbursement is visible in doctors’ paycheck gaps.

In New Haven, general surgeons earn $161,000 more per year than palliative care physicians, according to Glassdoor.

Bonafé is a strong proponent of palliative care, but recognizes its current limitations. “They’re not given a lot of space and resources to function,” she said. She wants palliative care physicians to refer patients to her doula practice, but she says her meetings with doctors at YNHH have been fruitless.

Laura Morrison, a palliative care doctor at YNHH, hesitates to refer her patients to doulas because health insurance does not cover doula fees. “It’s harder to refer when it’s financially out of pocket,” said Morrison.

“They just need to know that we are around to help them do an even better job,” Bonafé said. “Until they understand that, we are not going to be welcome with open arms.”

In December 2018, Bonafé took on a client, a retired German professor at Yale whom I’ll refer to as Sara for the sake of confidentiality. She was dying from cancer and had no living family. During her last four weeks, Sara moved into a nearby hospice, and Bonafé visited her daily. Beyond advocating for her needs, such as readjusting her laxative medication when Sara experienced debilitating diarrhea or speaking to the front office when a staff member made a rude remark (“Well, you’re not going to be here long!”), Bonafé made sure that Sara’s experience was as peaceful as possible. When Bonafé noticed that a jazz guitarist came to play on the weekends, she scheduled a concert in Sara’s room. Sara loved jazz. “She was absolutely delighted,” Bonafé reminisced, with a wistful smile.

One afternoon, on one of her better days, Sara looked up at Bonafé from her bed with a feisty smile.

“You should bring some wine. It’s medication, you know.” In her younger days, Sara had been a wine connoisseur, but had not had one sip since her cancer 25

diagnosis. The following day, Bonafé brought a bottle of French wine, and they enjoyed a glass together in the waning afternoon light. Bonafé recalled that Sara said, in a burst of joy, “I don’t remember ever having such good wine.”

“She was in heaven,” said Bonafé later. “It brought her so much joy. I saw her big smile, and that rush of dopamine.” When Sara passed away weeks later, Bonafé combed through Sara’s apartment, donating furniture and passing important legal documents to her attorney.

Those surrounded by family members can also benefit from working with doulas. Sharon McCullough, an end-of-life doula working out of Southington, Connecticut, is trained in Clear Light Meditation, which helps make the dying process more tranquil through bedside meditation. Last year, one of McCullough’s clients lived in hospice care for the last few days of his life. The client had recently ended a series of aggressive treatments that left his family in a state of stress and conflict. McCullough decided to lead a meditation at his deathbed. “I was able to provide peace in a turmoil-filled environment.”

Clients are willing to pay thousands of dollars for these services, which include companionship, meditation, and the doula’s constant phrases of affirmation and comfort. The expanding market for end-of-life doulas reveals the gaping hole left by the medical system when it comes to death.

And yet end-of-life doulas face a long road ahead before they become a household name. Their obscurity arises not just from the fact that the clients of death doulas can’t posthumously make referrals, but also due to the lack of nationwide standardization.

While nurses and doctors must pass standardized exams in order to earn a license, death doulas aren’t licensed. Instead, they may attend one of dozens of different training options and take an online exam, which costs $115, to earn a proficiency badge from the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance. The organization’s website stresses that “families can know that an end-of-life doula who has earned a NEDA Proficiency Badge has met certain standards,” called “Core Competencies.” These standards include basic values such as professionalism, technical knowledge, and communication. The National End-of-Life Doula Alliance’s mission is to increase awareness about and popularize this profession across the country.

Currently, not every doula training program or 26

doula falls under the umbrella of this organization.

Realistically, the standardization of end-of-life doula practices won’t be easy. Each doula has their own approach to treatments, whether it’s meditation or legal assistance, and a doula’s expertise arises from experience and practice in the field, something that can’t be evaluated on an exam.

Additionally, being an end-of-life doula is not a full-time job. Five of nine end-of-life doulas in Connecticut don’t have a full roster of clients likely because most people have not heard of their services.

“Nobody makes a living being a death doula yet,” Bonafé said. Bonafé works as a landlord, Harrison pet-sits, and McCullough works in a hospice. Doula Jill Bowens works at Quinnipiac University as an administrative assistant while starting a private doula practice. “The goal is to phase out of my nine-to-five and spend the last retirement years of my life as an end-of-life doula, doing this work as long as I can,” said Bowens.

For now, Bonafé mentors younger doulas like Bowens and makes sure that each visitor to her death cafe is received with open arms. Six months ago, at the July death cafe, Bonafé noticed a newcomer—Susan Clark. Her vibrant red hair and stories made her unforgettable to Bonafé, as Clark opened up about her sister’s death during discussion. “She was sharing in a very beautiful way,” Bonafé recounted. “And then magic happened.”

At each subsequent cafe, Bonafé noticed that Clark smiled a little more. At the next cafe, Clark brought in a framed photograph of Joe, Clark’s sister, taken in Hawaii days before her death. Eyes obscured by sunglasses, Joe wore a t-shirt emblazoned with turtles, a parrot balanced on each shoulder. Joe adored turtles and had adopted two from a shelter, Clark told the group. At the October death cafe, Clark was the last to speak.

“We’re tenacious for life,” Clark said. “We don’t want to give it up. It wasn’t in her control. It was her time to go. I probably will be fighting with her forever for leaving though.”

As the cafe wrapped up, participants zipped rain jackets and returned mugs. People slipped into the rainy night, on solitary walks or drives back home, just as quickly as they gathered.

– Candice Wang is a junior in Berkeley College.

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Yale owns vast timberlands in northern New England—and 27 doesn’t want anyone to know about them. Some question whether the land has been managed sustainably.

MAX GRAHAM

F E AT U R E

WORN DOWN BY WELLNESS Yale requires many of its unionized employees to disclose private medical information and undergo “wellness coaching.” Those who refuse have to pay.

Design by Chase Westover

ELENA DEBRE

I

f you enter Yale Law School and make a left up the stairs, you’ll notice the stainedglass window portraits—a lawyer with a quilled pen, a judge clutching a case, the scales of justice—guiding you as you ascend. Rosanna Gonsiewski, a senior administrative assistant, climbs past those windows to her third-floor office every day, but she has yet to reach the promise of justice they hold. We meet on a quiet Friday afternoon inside her office, which we’re both relieved is empty. Her coworker is taking a sick day. Gonsiewski, I learn, holds onto those tightly.

Especially after she used up twelve to satisfy Yale’s Health Expectations Program, or HEP. Gonsiewski spent all of her sick days getting colonoscopies—not because her doctor mandated them, but because Yale, her employer, forced them.

After her fiftieth birthday, Gonsiewski received a notification that HEP, a mandatory health screening and “coaching” system for many of Yale’s unionized employees, was requiring her to get a colonoscopy. “Some of this is really disgusting,” she warns me. She laughs and puts her hands to her face, her brown curly hair bounces in front of her eyes. Gonsiewski had been previously diagnosed with an irritable bowel, so she knew that cleaning out her system for a colonoscopy wasn’t going to be an easy process. But if she didn’t complete the exam six months after her birthday, her paycheck would start to drop $25 a week—a 28

cost she couldn’t afford. So she scheduled the colonoscopy for a month after her birthday. Then the complications began.

At first, she only planned to take three days off of work: one day for a clearing of the system before the procedure, one day for the colonoscopy, and one day for recovery. But during the first procedure her prescription medicine counteracted the anesthesia, and she was screaming “Ow!” on the operating table. They had to redo the procedure.

Another three days off work. This time, her system wasn’t cleared and she would have to do two days of prep. Four more days off work. Ten sick days used.

Gonsiewski was irritated. After working so hard to accumulate her sick days, HEP was eating away at them. “This was not something I deemed an emergency,” she tells me. If it had been her choice, she would have waited to complete the colonoscopy during a break. Yet under HEP, the medical decision wasn’t hers to make. It was Yale’s.

And the threat of losing $25 a week, Gonsiewski tells me, “instill[ed] so much fear” that she had to get the test done. Twenty-five dollars a week is $100 a month. One thousand three hundred dollars a year. It’s groceries for five weeks in New Haven. A month’s rent. Childcare. Money towards a mortgage. Part of her daughter’s tuition.

Last spring when Gonsiewski got the flu, she was too dizzy and feverish to come to work for four days. When she returned, she learned two THE NEW JOURN AL

of the days she was out sick were going to come out of her paycheck. Gonsiewski couldn’t believe it. She always left herself a cushion of sick days for medical emergencies like this. But after the colonoscopies required by HEP, she had none left until July 1. With a chronically ill husband and daughter in college, Gonsiewski couldn’t afford to miss even the days of pay that were already gone.

She wouldn’t be able to take a sick or vacation day between March and July.

Gonsiewski is one of around 5,400 clerical, technical, cafeteria, maintenance, and power plant workers at Yale, who, belonging to unions Local 34 and 35, have been required to enroll in Yale’s Health Expectations Program since January 2017. HEP also applies to those employees’ spouses and dependents who use Yale Health or Aetna insurance. If employees (and dependents) don’t comply or choose to opt out, they suffer a fine of $25 per week.

Yale rolled out the workplace wellness program of HEP with the hope of keeping employees healthy—and also with the hope of reducing the money it spends on healthcare. In theory, if Yale could identify an employee’s health problem early, they could act early and avoid serious healthcare costs. Local 34 and 35 provide employees with affordable health care plans— with a $0 premium option if employees elect the Yale Health insurance. Yale was threatening to increase healthcare costs substantially, so HEP was negotiated as an alternative, lower cost option.

But when employees enroll in HEP, they are shepherded through a long list of invasive

Yale’s noncompliance fee is among the highest in the country, meaning HEP is among the nation’s most punitive wellness programs.

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screenings and tests, like the colonoscopy Gonsiewski underwent. Christine Turcek, a first line cook at JE, who had a double mastectomy after battling breast cancer, was forced to get a mammogram under HEP. Even though she medically couldn’t complete the breast exam, she was still threatened with the fine. It took repeated long explanations to HEP representatives— which forced her to relive her experience with cancer each time—in order for them to grant her an exemption for the test. If an employee doesn’t complete HEP’s requirements by a certain deadline, the $25 per week pay dock begins. The weekly deductions continue for at least three months, regardless of whether the requirement is fulfilled before that period ends.

Although it’s not unheard of for companies to charge penalties for opting out of wellness programs, Yale’s non-compliance fee is among the highest in the country, according to the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), meaning HEP is among the nation’s most punitive wellness programs. * Jason Schwartz, a locksmith at Yale, refuses to comply with HEP on principle. He takes the $25 a week pay cut, his version of a silent protest. “For some people that work at Yale, $25 is a lot more money than it is for me,” he tells me when we meet at Blue State on Wall Street. Some people in his union earn only $16.92 per hour, and it’s often harder for them to accept the cut.

He leans across the table to whisper. “But I had to cut down on non-necessities,” he says. He used to visit his in-laws in the Philippines every year.

The trip was something that he always looked forward to, but with the pay cut he’s suffered from not complying with HEP, he says he can no longer afford to go. His wife and daughter will go without him this year.

Schwartz is right: For many of Yale’s lowest-paid employees, like Gonsiewski, the choice to opt out isn’t financially feasible. That’s why Gonsiewski joined leading plaintiff Lisa Kwesell, a part-time service assistant at Yale, to sue Yale and to make HEP participation voluntary. The plaintiffs assert 29

that HEP is “coercive.”

Under the American Disabilities Act and Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, employers can collect medical and genetic information from their employees only if they provide the information voluntarily. Since this law was enacted, there have been disputes over what “voluntarily” means. In 2016, it was deemed that employers could charge employees up to 30 percent of their insurance premium as a penalty for not participating in wellness programs—and still call the program “voluntary.” But in 2018, the AARP, which is known for fighting for employee rights in workplace wellness lawsuits, won a lawsuit that got rid of this clause in the law. Nothing was left in its place. With no new guidelines, just an absence of old ones, the question of what makes a program “voluntary” is now entirely up for interpretation. Yale declined to comment on the case due to the ongoing litigation, but the University’s legal stance is that HEP qualifies as voluntary. Many required to participate in the program disagree. Their legal battle with Yale has been proceeding for two years—with no clear end in sight.

HEP’s testing isn’t just problematic for those who have experienced certain medical conditions. Over-screening can cause “people to feel more vulnerable, to be terrorized by false alarms, and to be overdiagnosed and overtreated,” says Gilbert Welch a professor at Dartmouth College’s Geisel School of Medicine.

Some employees are particularly concerned with how HEP affects the privacy of their medical records. HEP is implemented not through Yale, but through a third-party company known as a wellness vendor, called HealthMine. Gonsiewski was shocked to learn she had to send her private information to a company she had never heard of. She had no idea a different company was administering the program until she received the link to register.

HealthMine gathers HEP members’ test results and insurance claims and sorts through the data. The company flags employees with

30

high weight or blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease. It gathers their health records.

And it reveals their information to yet another third-party company, TrestleTree. TrestleTree then connects the employees with mandatory health wellness coaches—nurses or dieticians who focus on providing strategies for managing stress and weight.

Yale calls TrestleTree a “health transformation organization” on the HEP website. But TrestleTree is not a covered entity under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, a law that protects patients’ privacy. When enrolling in HEP, employees sign a contract that states, “I also understand that information disclosed under this authorization may no longer be subject to the HIPAA privacy rules.” Yale employee’s health information is then accessible to TrestleTree—and to the organization’s wellness coaches.

Noah felt like his coach was in his face even through the phone: “When did you weigh yourself this week? How much did you weigh?”

Yale claims that these health care coaches are “highly trained.” In fact, the only training required of TrestleTree coaches is a threeweek program in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Yet these coaches are supposed to provide in-depth health counseling sessions, much longer and more intimate than one might have even with their own doctor.

In flyers sent to employee homes, Yale writes that TrestleTree’s health care coaches will “be a trusted guide and advisor for you and your health.” What Yale doesn’t say is that the health care coaches might pester you with phone calls until you complete a mandatory three-hour session with them. They might send you a tape

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measure in the mail if you’re overweight, as they did to plaintiff Mary Brassil. Or call and email multiple times a day, until you answer, as they did to Noah, a law enforcement official and a spouse of a Yale employee.

Noah, whose name has been changed in this story to protect his privacy, has a hard time talking about TrestleTree without raising his voice. “I’m a private person,” he said, “so right off the bat, the concept of talking to someone on the telephone who I’ve never met, who’s not a doctor, who’s not my doctor, who’s really not a stakeholder in my health felt totally invasive, over the top, and unnecessary.” Noah was recently hospitalized after Sudafed mixed badly with the diuretic pills he takes for his blood pressure. After this incident, HEP required him to see a health coach. Noah had sorted out what went wrong with his doctor, and he was soon feeling well again.

Yet when Noah was released from the hospital, he still had to meet with a TrestleTree health coach. “Right off the bat, a gun was put to my head,” he tells me. The coach called him at work, and when he didn’t pick up, she would call again. And then email him. And email again. He explains that the whole experience was “invasive, condescending and bordering on harassment.”

Noah felt like his coach was in his face even through the phone: “When did you weigh yourself this week? How much did you weigh?”

He received calls multiple times throughout his work day and would have to complete his sessions during his free time. His coach, he said, obviously seemed to be reading from a script. Even though he explained to her he had to do one hundred sit-ups and one hundred push-ups a day for law enforcement training, she kept calling him to ask if he completed the core workout she recommended. Then she would email him the link to it. Again. * For a company that seems to have so much information about its clients, Trestletree

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publicizes very little information about itself.

None of the Yale employees I spoke to could tell me the name of their assigned coach, how the company got their health information, where TrestleTree is located.

I decided to investigate. Next door to Yale Human Resources on 221 Whitney is a brick building with what looks like an abandoned construction project blocking the front entrance. 205 Whitney Avenue. The sign in front advertises a construction company, Yale’s Women Faculty Forum, a nonprofit. There’s no mention of TrestleTree.

If you walk inside and turn left at the stairs, there’s a printed paper sign leaning against the wall, reading “TrestleTree Health Coaching (Office on the 2nd floor).” I take a picture.

My first proof that the company’s real. I walk upstairs and the office seems abandoned. Each room has a scale. There’s a BMI chart. It seems more like a weight loss coach’s office than a health one.

A woman with a short blonde haircut, one of the coaches, is in her office. She tells me she really can’t say anything when I approach her.

She seems nervous. She stands up immediately when I introduce myself and starts to usher me out. She tells me everything said has to be approved by her manager. I keep pressing but I’m met by silence. She brings me to her manager, a slightly younger woman with a similar blonde short haircut, and they share a look of rolled eyes and tight smiles before looking towards me. I can tell their lips are going to stay pressed together. I’m directed to check out the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching for any more information. I leave carrying a post-it note with the URL. * Barbara, an employee at Yale who requested that her name be changed in this article due to a fear of retribution, was flagged as someone who needed coaching, she suspects, because of her clinical anxiety. But her whole experience with the coaches, she tells me, stressed her

31

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out more. “I’m so pissed off honey, I can’t even tell you,” she’s smiling, and she says this through her teeth. We’re sitting so close together that I can feel her breath on my face. She tells me she has bronchitis, a polite warning I suppose, and I try to subtly shift away without offending. But, really, I’m not that worried. As a student at Yale, my healthcare is simple. Yes, sometimes the walk to Yale Health is cold and long, and sometimes there’s a wait. But beyond that, I never really worry that much when I feel sick. I just go to the clinic. I lean back in, deciding, slightly guiltily, that hearing her was worth the risk of sickness.

Barbara whispers, “You have to be careful here.”

Her eyes are wide as they scan the room. Blue State on York Street is brimming with students— finishing their morning Hindi homework, eating a croissant after morning lift, trying to fit a Constitutional Law textbook and coffee on the small table. There’s no maintenance staff in the 32

cafe. Or technical staff. Or clerks. No Union 34 or 35 workers. Nobody here would quite know what we’re talking about. But Barbara already feels targeted, surveilled, and she’s worried. So, we whisper.

“It’s such an intrusion,” she says of her coaching experience. “I said to [the coach] ‘Do you want know about my bills at home too? My mortgage?’

Seriously.” Barbara said she would rather give the health coach her financial information than her health history. “Medical records are so personal.”

A few minutes after Barbara leaves our interview, she returns and sits down next to me again, a little flushed from the cold, a little flustered by her thoughts. She’s speaking quickly and louder.

“I just want to let you know I’m not against this university. I’m grateful for my job.” I assure her I understand. She pauses for a moment. “There’s just some bad stuff that goes on here,” she says.

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d

* In the four colonoscopies that ate up Rosanna Gonsiewski’s sick days, the doctor found some polyps. They were precancerous and had to be removed. That finding, in some ways, explains why HEP exists, why it mandates rigorous testing: to find health issues before an employee gets truly sick, and before hospital visits and surgeries become too expensive for Yale.

Gonsiewski is glad the doctor found the polyps, but she didn’t want them found at that time, at the expense of her limited number of days off work.

For her, their removal wasn’t “do or die.” If she had been in control of her healthcare, she would have waited until the operation worked better with her schedule, when she had a cushion of sick days.

Over the phone her husband, Glenn, crystalised that feeling. He tells me he called up HEP saying, “If I want to drop dead, it’s up to me to drop dead.”

Well, he says he learned, it’s actually up to the union.

Not every union at Yale has HEP in its contract.

The Yale Police Benevolent Association, the police’s union, has a similar version of it, but union members that don’t participate in the program don’t have to pay a $25 fee. Managerial staff and faculty members aren’t subject to HEP. Neither are Yale students. A representative from the Local 34 and 35 unions who wished to remain anonymous maintained that since those unions— the maintenance workers, the technical workers— negotiated down to a a very low premium for employees (even $0 on Yale Health insurance), they had to give Yale something to promise that they would work to stay healthy and keep down healthcare costs.

Yet, as it turns out, the lowest paid employees at Yale are paying one of the highest fees for noncompliance in the country. Stanford University implements a wellness program with procedures similar to Yale, including screening and health coaching. But its program is incentive-based, rather than punitive: if employees participate in an advising appointment, a preventative screening, and make a plan for wellness goals, they can earn $200. If they take a wellness class, they can make $260.

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“I’m a grown adult man. I’m going to be 47 next month. I’ve been in charge of my own medical care for my whole life,” Jason Schwartz tells me.

He perceives that Yale doesn’t trust him to keep track of his own health—and this message feels personal. To Schwartz, Yale seems to be saying that those who do the most menial work on campus aren’t responsible enough to take care of their own health, but that those in higher positions at the university are.

In Yale’s view, the people who work more physically intensive, riskier jobs—such as a power plant mechanic or fire inspector—are more expensive to cover with health insurance. But HEP’s rigorous testing, coaching, and punitive fees make these workers vulnerable, too, just in a different way. HEP strips away your sense of choice over your own body, Schwartz explains to me.

Gonsiewski is surprised that more people aren’t talking about this issue. So is Barbara. And Noah.

And Schwarz. HEP is affecting thousands of employees but many seem to think they’re alone in their sense of violation and victimization. Each of the employees I spoke with asked me if I had heard similar stories or complaints—unsure if they were the only ones. The silence around HEP is pervasive. But those who work in Yale’s kitchens, dining halls, and facilities are paying attention to their health—and their message is loud and clear.

– Elena DeBre is a sophomore in Pierson College.

She is an associate editor of The New Journal

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ENDNOTE:

A YEAR IN REVIEW (SORT OF)

Congrats! You’ve reached the end of our February issue—the last issue ever to be produced by The New Journal’s 2019-2020 Editorial Board. It has been a wild and wonderful year of friendship, carbs, and thirty-six hour production weekends. To close out our last magazine, we collected some of our favorite lines from the previous four issues we worked on and presented them below, now totally out of context. Enjoy!

No one even noticed the explosion. “All the students slept through the night with a smile on their face.”

“Yale clientele are not necessarily dying; they’re not necessarily from here; and they come here very temporarily.”

When I asked Becky if her llamas are sexually frustrated, she hesitated—not because they do not encounter any difficulty but because I had misnamed her alpacas as llamas for the fifth time.

“I don’t think I’m the best person [to be mayor]. Barack Obama would be better than me,” he said solemnly.

I don’t have the nostalgia, the tinkering mindset, or the self-confidence required to go around telling people you collect decapitated snowmen, Supermen, and Rutherford B. Hayeses.

“Throwing away books is a very important thing,” he tells me.

Elicker wore his signature cornflower-blue shirt and held a Klean Kanteen gingerly with both hands as we spoke.

Wars brought shortages, and at times, the students found the food so unbearable that they threw the boiled beef on the floor and the rancid butter out the windows.

I prayed that the Shiru Cafe Bot wouldn’t find out.

“I’m sure that men are attacked too,” she said.

The Yale truck parks in Quantum’s reception bay and empties the day’s load into a murky brown pool that the company’s vice president Brian Paganini calls a “really gross milkshake.”

A sign hung above the pen: You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy an ALPACA, and that’s kind of the same thing.

I’m here for journalistic investigation, I reminded myself as the tour finally began. I did NOT sign up through Match.com.

“Lean into it,” he said. “It’s supposed to feel like a washing machine.”

By some bizarre alchemy, a car ride through a “long tunnel” during that trip inspired Kakimoto to conceive of a coffee shop that, instead of making a profit by selling coffee, would gather data from students and sell it to companies looking to recruit them.

As he was getting out of a silver Buick, I recognized his bearded face and shouted, “Doug!”

Burton reflects that unlike in Hadley, where his store is surrounded mostly by fields and cows, in New Haven “there’s some quirky people walking the street. It’s been fun.”

Pings are comforting; gurgling is not a good sign.

As more participants arrived, it became clear that the ghost tours are typically a couples, or perhaps aspiring couples, event.

A little girl with a ponytail trailed curiously behind her teacher, hoping he would make the small blue robot move again.

Briefcase in hand, he halted his beeline towards the municipal building at 200 Orange Street and turned to face me.

My Toblerone bar had arrived; the drone flew away, arching over a line of buildings until it vanished from view.

“Racism, classism, elitism. Nah.” A blended reality utopia? Perhaps.

Ip remarked that certifying to be a drone pilot is “like going to the DMV.” 34

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Yale Student Poets Reading Tuesday, April 21, 4 p.m.

– name is a first-year in Trumbull College.

beinecke.library.yale.edu for more information on all the events and exhibitions for you

FEBRUARY 2020

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Truth History Democracy Hear from some of the most outstanding journalists in the world and gain insight into the media and its role in contemporary culture. poynter.yale.edu  36

THE NEW JOURN AL