My Brother Danny's Letter From A Young Brother (1986)

“A new realization breaks over me. Truth is, I don’t have to go home. Don’t have to face my parents. Don’t have to feel pain anymore. Don’t have to face my parents. Don’t have to feel pain anymore. All I have to do is let go of this rock. Stand up, throw my arms out to the sky, and let the wind take me. This, here and now, could be my fate. This would be a clean ending to my useless life. A good way to die. Slowly I peel shaking fingers off the rock, imagine the release as I let the wind shove me off the mountain, imagine falling like flying, sweet relief. I tense the burning muscles of my legs, ready to stand. To surrender. No, Danny. A voice rides the wind I lift my head up and squint against the wind and rain, somehow

It’s easy to feel worthless. Almost every person feels this deep emotion at some time in life, but people handle it different. Everywhere people are always judging. Judgement from parents, from family, and even from friends is inescapable. People can tear themselves down in many ways, such as through school, not feeling they look good enough, and even just not feeling like they’re ever good enough to be living on Earth. In Janice Mirikitani’s poem “Suicide Note,” it talks about an Asian-American student currently in college. She tries her hardest, she wants to succeed and make her parents proud. Her parents have high standards for her, as they want her to receive a 4.0 grade point average. Although she gives her best effort, her grade point average is still less than a 4.0, and for that reason her parents are not proud of her, she’s not their perfect, ideal daughter. So she enters that point where she no longer feels proud of her accomplishments, she feels worthless, and unintelligent. She decides to commit suicide by jumping out of a window in her college dorm. In her suicide note she apologizes to her parents for not being good enough. “Suicide Note” is a free form poem, it has no set stanzaic pattern, the sentences break in unexpected places, and the structure varies throughout the poem. It uses imagery to connect with the reader, and the stanzas are set up in way that make the lines to appear as they are falling. Through the use of enjambment, and end-stopped line the

In the novel My Brother's Keeper: Virginia's Diary; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1863 a young girl named Virginia Dickens is left by her father and her brother Jed, who is eighteen years old, from their home in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to help Virginia's Uncle Jack hide his horses from the Confederate soldiers.Virginia Dickens, who is a nine year old in the year of 1863 wants to go with them, but her father says that the safest place for her is right in her own hometown, Gettysburg, with Rev. McCully's wife. Jed entrusts his journal to her, and he asks her to write in it for him while he's gone --- to be his eyes and ears and tell him everything she thinks and feels. The author "Mary Pope Osborne" writes about this little girl in the form of the diary. The book takes place in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It is a Historical fiction book.

Many young people are affected in some way by suicide, and must learn to cope with the horrible loss it has taken from them. “Dogrib Midnight Runners”, by Van Camp, “was inspired by a suicide. As far as [he knew, that was] the first published story that ever takes place in Fort Smith. And [Van Camp wanted] to talk about what a great thief suicide is: the huge, never-ending echo of its fatal decision” (Vranckx). In this short story, a group of friends are faced with their friend, Justin, committing suicide for no clear reason. Justin was remembered as an intelligent, fun individual and appeared happy. The reason why Justin committed suicide was unclear. One particular humorous, happy memory his friends had of him was that when he drank too much, he would take off all his clothes and run. In Richard Van Camp’s short story, “Dogrib Midnight Runners”, the “ritual of running” is so important to healing and rebirth because it allows the group of friends to cope with the loss of their friend while rebuilding a meaningful friendship and support system they had lost during the tragedy.

In the reading “Some Lines for a Younger Brother”, the writer brought back her memories of what she remembered from her younger brother. Sue started with the details of when her youngest brother was born. She proceded to talk about how it impacted her family and brother when her father passed away in a car accident. Her family had to move to the Manzanar Relocation Center. When the writer started talking about moving to the relocation center she started bringing in more details, this was also a main point and very big part of the reading.

“That is when I remembered that I had a father. During the alert, I had followed the mob, not taking care of him. I knew he was running out of strength, close to death, and yet I had abandoned him. I went to look for him. Yet at the same time a thought crept into my mind: If only I didn’t find him! If only I were relieved of this responsibility, I could use all my strength for myself… Instantly, I felt ashamed, ashamed of myself forever.” Slowly though, he starts to feel more and more that his father is a burden, like page 107. “I gave him what was left of my soup. But my heart was heavy. I was aware that I was doing it grudgingly. Just like Rabbi Eliahu’s son, I had not passed the test.” On page 108, he becomes frustrated with his father. “I sat next to him, watching him. I no longer dared to believe that he could still elude Death. I did all I could to give him hope.” Then finally, on page 111-112, “The officer came closer and shouted to him to be silent. But my father did not hear. He continued to call me. The officer wielded his club and dealt him a violent blow to the head. I didn’t move. I was afraid, my body was afraid of another blow, this time to my head… When I came down from my bunk after roll call, I could see his lips trembling; he was murmuring something. I remained more than an hour leaning over him, looking at him, etching his bloody, broken face into

For ten years my parents sheltered me from the truth about my Grandfather’s suicide. The day he died is a blur, but I remember our afternoons together in his garden reading books he brought home from the library he worked at, and evenings eating Chinese food and watching ice skating—two of his favorite things. Finding out he committed suicide left me with myriad questions. As I matured my desire for understanding intensified. Drawn to human behavior and the mechanisms that affect it, I applied to the University of California at Berkeley as a Psychology major. In the summer prior to beginning my studies Anthony killed himself.

“Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” - Phil Donahue. As a complex, tragic public health issue, suicide occurs in men significantly more often than in women. Suicide is simply defined as the act of intentionally ending one’s own life, however, the factors that play into a person making that decision are anything but simple. The most evident and severe effect of suicide is the loss of a valuable, meaningful human life. According to Harvard School of Public Health (n.d.), suicide affects parents, children, siblings, friends, lovers, and spouses; the loss to society is psychological, spiritual, and financial. People who lose a loved one to suicide often experience devastating effects and deal with a complex grief. These

Danny is angry and disappointed in what he has done. He stays in Sofia’s cot all day and digs his nails into his forearm because he is so nervous. “Because all he’s felt like doing for the past five days is hiding out in Sofia’s bedroom, on his cot, digging into the inside of his forearm with his nails to remind him he’s a real person.”(De la Pena, Ch.4). This is a pivotal moment in Danny’s development because he is at his lowest point in the book. He feels like he will never have any friends and his life is ruined. He traps himself in Sofia’s room to try and escape all of life’s problems. However this experience teaches him you can run away from your

As he talks to Reuven about the silence between him and his father, he remarks, “…you can listen to silence and learn from it… I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it… It has a strange, beautiful texture… sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to” (249). Danny begins to understand what silence teaches him. He learns to listen to the pain of others because he suffers himself. Moreover, as Danny is about to leave to Columbia for college, Reuven describes, “His beard and earlocks were gone, and his face looked pale. But there was a light in his eyes that was almost blinding… There was a long, gentle silence” (270). Reuven notices that Danny is excited from the light in his eyes, and he now understands that silence is gentle. Because Danny realizes why Reb raised him in silence, he is no longer confused about his future. Likewise, when Reuven’s father asks Danny if he will raise his own child in silence, he replies, “Yes, if I can’t find another way” (271). Although Danny anguishes, he plans on raising his child the same way. He understands how silence taught him compassion, and he learns Reb’s purpose for raising him this way. Due to suffering, Danny understands how to listen to the world’s problems through

The poem “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note” by Amiri Baraka uses vivid images of sights, sounds, and daily activities to symbolize a heartfelt story. In the poem, Amiri, is one of the African American slaves who is frustrated about the discriminatory treatment by whites. So frustrated he wants to commit suicide. The writer used transition words starting with “lately”, “now”, and “then” for each stanza. He was imagining how he acted before his death and how his daughter reacted to his death.

An American author and journalist Jeannette Walls once said, “When people kill themselves, they think they’re ending the pain, but all they’re doing is passing it on to those they leave behind”. This is certainly true of the characters in Susin Nielsen’s realistic fiction novel The Reluctant Journal Of Henry K. Larsen. In this novel, a young boy named Henry is trying to rebuild his life, after his older brother, Jesse, pulled the trigger in a murder/suicide, taking the life of one of his classmates with him. The actions and choices of the characters are reflected significantly in three notable themes: regret, tragedy, and fear. All of these themes entwine into each other and help us to understand the answers to a key question- what motivates

However, in this instance the reader see’s the grandfather making progress when he buries all the “things [he] wasn’t able to tell him. Letters” (322.) This displays him attempting to let go of the past. With that being said he is much elder and lived almost all of his life grieving Anna’s death. The author continues to show what grief over death can cause a person to do.

What makes up a suicide letter? Is it the final goodbye? An apology? Or maybe the last ditch effort to place the blame on anybody but themselves? I don't really know, but yet again does anybody? All I know is that this is one of those. This is not a plea for help, I have made those before and they have gone unnoticed. This is a time for my thoughts to be known and for my silence to be heard.

I was rendered mute by the enormity of this act of self-murder (Chassay, 2006). This article shows us that not only family and friends are affected by suicide, but trained professionals in the area of depression and mental illness have a hard time coping also.