P E R M I S S I O N
TALK
TO
S TA R T I N G T H E C O N V E R S AT I O N ABOUT SUICIDE.
It
is not easy to start a conversation with someone who has just lost a brother to suicide. What do you ask? How do you bring things up without sounding insensitive or prying? Even a question as simple as, “how are you?” seems off. How is she supposed to feel? Graciously Joanna Dobrowolska says she is doing a lot better. “I think. But yeah, it’s just weird how normal everything is at this point. It’s been enough time, but it comes in waves ...” Weird how normal? “The suicide threw me out of whack,” she says. “It did not feel like real life, nothing felt normal.” She turned to her friends for distraction and comfort. Something that a close friend, Becca, told her at the time stuck: “Everything is going to be different and feel not normal,” she told her, “but from now on, it’ll be the new normal.” Logical incongruity has been the hardest part for Joanna. “It’s not a rational thing to commit suicide,” she says. “It’s against every biological instinct.” She no longer likes being in the home she grew up in, especially at night. The house in the cul-de-sac where he died. “I’m always looking behind my shoulder,” she says. “It’s really an irrational fear and anxiety about this house, especially
b y J o h n D eV i l b i s s
downstairs. I hate it down there. But I guess it’s what people feel, right? Feel like this?” Questions and thoughts like these have populated the journal she holds in her lap, including an abundance of expletives and curses. “Because no nice words ever describe something like this at all.” Anger, hurt, confusion—regret. Words to help her confront what she saw but did not want to believe. “My brother is dead,” were the first four words she used in her March 2, 2018 Facebook post, less than a week after his suicide. Cold, blunt, spare like what she was feeling inside. Four words, 15 letters dropped like breadcrumbs along a darkened path.
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44 UTAHSTATE I FALL 2018
MY BROTHER IS D E A D ,” W E R E T H E FIRST FOUR WORDS SHE USED IN HER MARCH 2, 2018 FA C E B O O K P O S T , LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER HIS SUICIDE.
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