I. Nov. 28, 2018

Alexis Kim and Ally Friedman sat four floors apart in Main Library as they studied on the night of Nov. 28, but neither knew the other was even in the building. In Periodicals on the first floor, Kim, a Weinberg sophomore, was just about to set her phone down – she kept checking it and couldn’t concentrate. As the time on her screen changed to 11:18 p.m., a set of words students have come to dread popped up in an email on her screen: “A loss in our community.” Another student had died, and as she’d later learn, it was another suicide.

Kim has returned to the library, but the exact spot she was sitting in when she got the news remains etched in her memory. Maria Mercedes Arias / North by Northwestern

Then she opened the email, and all she saw was her friend’s name: Daniel Jessell. For a split second, she went into shock. Then she picked up the phone and dialed her best friend.

In the hallway, four floors up, Friedman let out a screech. The Weinberg sophomore saw the email at the top of her screen. “Who?” she thought. “Dan? No. There’s no way.” Jessell, her friend, was a sophomore studying computer science in Weinberg. He came to Northwestern from Delray Beach, Florida, a coastal city about an hour north from Miami.

He was also the fourth student to die by suicide in 2018. Student activists, most recently the Fund Our Care Collective, have since demanded mental health reform, focusing on prevention. The collective formed in the fall in the wake of Jessell’s suicide, demanding more action from the University. Most recently, the group held a town hall focused on student experiences and mental health resources.

Yet little has been said about “postvention”: support for students after a suicide. The National Association of Student Personnel Administrators explains it as “the provision of psychological support, crisis intervention and other forms of assistance to those affected by a campus suicide.” Essentially, it works to facilitate grief. Inside the social petri dish of a college campus, a student, even one who barely knew the deceased, can be triggered by a similar past experience.

But how a person responds to crisis – like Friedman’s reaction – has everything to do with their own background. No two instances of grieving look exactly the same.

Little, too, has been said about suicide outside of the campus “world.” In a study of over 100 self-selected institutions last fall, Harvard Medical School researchers found that one in five students reported thoughts of suicide. (The study breaks down the demographics of the universities, but does not identify them.) At Northwestern, students have come to link the epidemic with the “A loss in our community” emails sent to campus members after a student death. Mona Dugo, the senior associate dean of students, says Todd Adams “starts to feel like the Angel of Death instead of the Dean of Students” after sending one of those messages.

After Kim saw that email, she knew almost everyone else in Periodicals must have seen it too. But she didn’t notice a visible reaction from anyone else in the room. She didn’t expect them all to know him personally. “But it felt weird that everyone else was just going on about their night,” she says, “and this just changed my whole life.”

Kim had received these emails before too. Now, she says, she felt bad because she realized that when she had read about the other students, she reacted the same way those around her had in that moment. “That’s so terrible,” she would think to herself. Then she would search the name on Facebook to see if she had known them, or if she had known anyone who had known them. This time was different. When people searched “Daniel Jessell” on Facebook, Kim appeared next to him in his profile picture, smiling with her long, dark hair worn wavy.

Kim wishes she didn’t show up there, frozen in time online for everyone to see and know and send her messages. It was “overwhelming,” she thought. Every reaction from someone else who didn’t know Jessell made her angry, and she couldn’t quite place why. Kim didn’t know what she wanted them to say instead, she just knew everything was wrong.

She couldn’t find right answers because everything was new. Kim had never experienced the death of someone close to her, so this level of grieving was uncharted territory.

The same went for Friedman, a friend of Jessell’s with deep brown eyes, who says she hadn’t seen much death in her hometown of College Station, Texas. A suicide? “Definitely not.”

The first time Friedman got one of the emails, the previous winter, she freaked out. “Somebody actually … died,” she thought. “This is crazy.” But over the year, she became numb to the news. This time, it was “another loss, and then, it’s my fucking friend.”

Friedman and Kim met the first night of Wildcat Welcome. From there, Friedman introduced Kim to Jessell, who was in her PA group. The two girls remain best friends in his absence, grieving and healing side by side. The first step in that process came the night of the email, when the administration gathered roughly half a dozen of Jessell’s friends together, including both Friedman and Kim, in the basement of Scott Hall. The people Jessell was closest to, all friends themselves, supported each other during that night of healing. Friedman doesn’t think she got home from there until around 5 a.m.

The next day was the worst for both of them. “I called her in the morning,” Kim says, “and then we were just both like, ‘We can’t do anything. We don’t know what to do with ourselves.’”

At a loss, they headed to Northwestern’s Counseling and Psychological Services in the Searle Health Center, across the street from their sorority houses. They walked in together and took separate appointments. In the coming days, Kim attended a follow-up appointment. Friedman slept through hers, waking up at 5 p.m. – a sign, she thinks, that she wasn’t doing well.

The weeks and months that followed brought slow growth. More often now, Friedman will go a day without thinking about it. “The nights are still always the worst,” Kim says in mid-January, speaking for both of them – something the two friends do in conversation.

Kim has returned to the library, but the exact spot she was sitting in when she got the news remains etched in her memory. Friedman, meanwhile, hasn’t been back since.

II. Nov. 28, 2018, to Dec. 5, 2018

The day after she got the email, Kim typed Jessell’s name into the Google search bar over and over again. When the Chicago Tribune published a story about Jessell’s cause of death, she found and read it minutes after it was posted. Learning it was a suicide was the hardest part. “That was when I was like, ‘I can’t be at this school right now,’” she says.

Questions bounced among Jessell’s friends: What if it was a mistake? What if he didn’t mean to do it? What if it was an accident? The email never includes cause of death; it isn’t allowed to, according to Dugo in the Dean of Students Office. It’s just meant to slow down the race against technology, with information hurtling from cellphone to cellphone.

Usually the administration has about two hours before the news starts to trickle out, by Dugo’s estimate. The first priority is to notify the family. “We want to let them have some say over how that goes, who they tell, what they choose to tune into,” she says. She speaks about death and student crisis with a hushed reverence. Eventually, the cause of death will become public record, but until then, the school respects the family’s wishes.

Over the past year, the Dean of Students Office has developed a Critical Incident Team Protocol, seeking to codify the aftermath in the wake of so many losses. The first step is the phone call from the police to Adams. Next is to find those on campus who knew the student well. (The administration identified another friend to notify in Jessell’s case, rather than Kim or Friedman.) Then comes the email to the community at large. When Dugo and Adams started their jobs during the 2012-13 school year, no such protocol existed. No one notified the student body of a death, although student deaths still happened. “I think we’ve spent – we say – six years trying to change a tire while moving 60 miles an hour,” Dugo says.

Building the machinery to respond to crisis situations demands hands-on attention; Adams and Dugo both live within miles of campus. The pair are always on call – after the police notify Adams of a student death, he calls Dugo for backup and the procedural ball begins to roll. One of 13 “Deans on Call” is always available to help, every day of the year.

When Friedman learned of the system, she thought it was “crazy, like they are all planning for it.” But the Dean on Call assists students in all crisis situations – not just a death – by offering support and connecting to resources. That 24/7 coverage meant that someone was there for Friedman and Kim at 11:18 p.m., when the girls received the email, and that Dugo could support Jessell’s closest friends in the basement of Scott Hall that night. Dugo took down their information to contact their academic deans, who would in turn contact their professors. Kim felt instantly comforted to be around those people. “The night that he died, we [Jessell’s friends] stayed up so late,” Friedman says.

As Friedman sat in the Guild Lounge watching pictures of Jessell play through a Google Slideshow, she knew it was important – but not for her in that moment. Maria Mercedes Arias / North by Northwestern

A week later, most of the group gathered in Scott Hall again for Jessell’s memorial on Wednesday, Dec. 5. The Office of Religious and Spiritual Life stepped in to to handle all of the logistics involved, but consulted Jessell’s friends on most fronts. “You’ve got to have a place, you’ve got to have food, you’ve got to do communication, you’ve got honor the wishes of the families, the student who’s going to speak, what photos are going to go up – it’s a whole to-do,” Dugo says. “And you want to do it well, because it’s important.”

Religious and Spiritual Life had offered a religious memorial, with a suggestion of lighting a candle to pass around. The friends turned it down, and Friedman knew Jessell would “cry laughing if he saw that.”

As Friedman sat in the Guild Lounge watching pictures of Jessell play through a Google Slideshow, she knew it was important – but not for her in that moment. “But I think I will be glad I did it,” she says. “That’s why I did it. I think I will look back later and be like, ‘OK, I think he needed that.’ Maybe I needed that. I don’t know.”

“You know, planning your friend’s memorial is not something you expect to do,” Friedman continues. And even if the service didn’t help or hurt, it did remind her of Jessell.

Kim, on the other hand, didn’t attend the memorial at all – she was already home in Buffalo, New York by then. She left during reading week because she couldn’t deal with being around people who hadn’t known her friend, but still wanted to discuss him. But she sent photos for the memorial. She felt bad to leave her friends behind, but hoped the memorial gave them closure, or at least helped them feel better.

At the same time, though, she thinks she was trying not to deal with it. “In a way, I was kind of glad I couldn’t be there,” she says, “because I think it would’ve been really, really, really hard for me to see all the people that he knew and hear them speak about their favorite memories again.”

III. Dec. 6, 2018, to Dec. 15, 2018

At the time, Kim didn’t feel like she could study for finals in the library where she had found out. Luckily, she didn’t have to – and when she went home, the change of environment helped her focus. She needed to be where no one knew what had happened, where no one would come up to her to talk about it, where she had her space. But reading week was still reading week – even at home – and her sister, who was in dental school nearby, became her study partner.

Kim thought the stress of finals would swallow the sadness. “I can just compartmentalize,” she told herself. But she couldn’t. It was impossible, Kim says, to ignore what had just happened and try to study for exams.

Timing was everything. Had Jessell’s death occurred earlier in the quarter, Kim thinks she would have taken the rest of it off. “There’s no way to deal with that and do school at the same time,” she says.

After the week at home, though, she returned to campus to take her finals. Her professors were understanding, but Kim also didn’t want to take an “incomplete” – she just wanted to get the quarter over with.

Her best friend, on the other hand, knows the stress of studying impacted her, but doesn’t think that timing made a real difference. “I still would’ve had two midterms coming up,” Friedman says. “I still would’ve had that paper due. I still just would’ve had that list of things that was still on my mind to do.”

Working in the Dean of Students Office, Dugo notices the intersection between academics, extracurriculars and mental health on campus during crises. She often talks to students who feel “overwhelmed and sinking” due to depression, anxiety or trauma. In such a competitive environment, she says, “They just feel like they can’t let go here.”

The 11-week quarter system doesn’t leave much room to process, even though a grieving community needs time to fully feel loss and take care of itself. Used by just under one-fifth of colleges nationwide, quarters makes it tough to code switch between academia and grieving. It “just wreaks havoc on people: students, staff and administrators, faculty, all of us,” Dugo says. “It just chews us up and spits us out.” That’s why Dugo gave Jessell’s friends the option during reading week to take time for “space and grace” and push back their finals.

Now, more than a quarter removed from Jessell’s death, the campus has begun to forget the initial sting. At least, the collective memory of Nov. 28 isn’t as fresh, meaning the girls aren’t peppered with “just-checking-ins” from acquaintances.

Friedman (pictured, with Jessell) and Kim met the first night of Wildcat Welcome. From there, Friedman introduced Kim to Jessell, who was in her PA group. Courtesy of Ally Friedman

Experience with grieving only comes as one deals with death, already making a first experience with death exceptionally difficult. “The amount of times I was in a Tech classroom in the basement just fucking sobbing was unreal,” Friedman says of managing finals and grief. She asked herself, “Am I studying for finals when my friend is dead? Why does this matter at all? Why? My friends are dying, why do I have to do this?” She wonders what her grieving process would have looked like removed from academic pressures.

The campus closed in around her and felt miserable – Friedman didn’t want to be at Northwestern. Her grandmother lives 15 minutes away, so she was able to get off campus, but she realized what it must be like for others with nowhere to go after a crisis. In the midst of it all, she felt lucky.

This was Friedman’s reality, but – of course – it’s not everyone’s. Central to postvention is that there is no one “right” way to react or grieve. It also aims to stabilize the environment. Dugo became the go-between for communication with faculty for academic accommodations. Friedman felt guilty about using her friend’s death as an “excuse” for academic extensions, whereas Kim felt guilty about trying to shove aside her feelings about Jessell to study. Postvention builds a network of support across campus – from academic deans and professors to crisis counselors – that help heal different forms of pain.

As the pair of friends waded through their grief, one person couldn’t help. Friedman just wanted to talk to Jessell about what happened. She would have relied on him as her sounding board if this had happened to anyone else. And neither girl wanted to burden the rest of Jessell’s friends – their own best friends – with the same problems they knew they were already facing.

“Whenever I think about and start to get really, really sad or start crying about it, I don’t like to call her and reach out to her because I don’t want to bring it up for her again,” Kim says. “I don’t want to make her feel sad again.”

IV. Dec. 16, 2018, to today

Like the rest of campus, Friedman had heard the rumors about CAPS: long wait times, and not much help once you got in. But she began using the service anyway. Now, she can’t find times for regular meetings and would rather strike up a relationship with a therapist she can continue to see regularly. “It’s still not good enough,” she says of CAPS.

Friedman adds, though, that she knew it was not long-term therapy before going in to her first appointment. It just allowed her to access crisis counseling right away when she needed it.

The way Dugo puts it, it’s a framing issue. The same way that a primary care physician can’t take care of specific, individual healthcare needs, the staff at CAPS can’t treat long-term mental health concerns – they’re not supposed to. “If you have a broken bone, you have to go to an orthopedic,” she says.

Dugo’s heard all of the complaints, and listened closely, but thinks the problem is two-pronged. First, the narrative needs to change. The claim that there’s simply not enough CAPS staff, she says, is not the issue. Rather, mental health concerns are complex, taking time to treat, and CAPS is simply not equipped to do that. And Northwestern’s lucky – according to her, it has more therapists per student than other schools.

Second, it’s a culture problem. Many Northwestern students can list their extracurriculars and organizations like groceries, often overfilling their carts. Dugo proposes something akin to a public health campaign: “If you’re not sleeping and you’re not taking care of yourself, then you need to reevaluate and reassess.”

But what happens when crisis derails productivity culture? Neither Friedman nor Kim met with their CAPS clinician after their second appointment, because the timing didn’t work out. When Friedman slept through her follow-up appointment, she apologized to her clinician. “I can’t reschedule,” she told him. “I have finals. I have to start studying at some point.” She hadn’t yet.

The girls began working toward healing on their own. Friedman seriously thought about staying home after winter break and taking the next quarter off. But she came back, and she built a safety net for herself, reaching out to her CAPS crisis counselor for help finding long-term therapy. “OK, I need to make these steps now,” she thought, “while I’m still kind of feeling a little bit stable, before things [can] get worse.’”

Kim wasn’t sure she’d stay at Northwestern at all. She walks by certain spots on campus and flashes back to the times she spent with Jessell – he’s still here, she says, in a way. She couldn’t tell if she was unhappy with the school itself or “clouded” by what happened with Jessell. “I just feel so helpless right now in that I can’t do both,” she says at the beginning of Winter Quarter. “I can’t be this sad, and I can’t be at this school.”

Spring sometimes feels empty to Kim – it was when she and Jessell had spent the most time together last year – but life, as a whole, is going well for her. Maria Mercedes Arias / North by Northwestern

Despite this story’s specifics, similar versions have played out on other campuses before. “It’s not a Northwestern thing,” says John Dunkle, executive director of CAPS. “It’s a national epidemic … a crisis.” Patterns emerge at schools nationwide: Among college students using counseling services, the self-reported rates of “threat-to-self” characteristics – non-suicidal self-harm, serious suicidal ideation and suicide attempts – has increased for eight years running.

All of this to say, Northwestern is just one piece of the national epidemic of suicide. An unprecedented 45,000 died by suicide in 2016. There is no clear cause, but Dunkle says a “perfect storm” of factors have come together in the U.S. today. “I think the world is scarier,” he says. “People don’t feel safe. Things are moving really quickly.” He suggests a community-wide, public health approach similar to what Dugo alluded to; the police, the Dean of Students Office and CAPS cannot be the only ones on board, he adds.

Now that Kim doesn’t think about what happened constantly, she’s twinged with guilt that she’s able to carry on with her life. And when grief does hit, she says, it hits hard. That’s when she wonders, “How is this supposed to get easier?” Especially during the nights, she says, when “you have nothing else to think about.”

If Kim got another email about “a loss in our community,” it would stir up many memories of Jessell. She’s not sure what exactly the university could do to change, but she doesn’t think campus talks about suicide – and how universities handles it – enough.

“It … makes me realize how disturbing it is that nothing ever changes when something like this happens,” she says. “That’s concerning, because that it means it’s just going to keep happening, if nothing changes.”

If nothing changes on a national scale – or, at least, if conversation doesn’t continue – suicide will remain the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. Yet while this problem affects Northwestern, it doesn’t define it.

Spring sometimes feels empty to Kim – it was when she and Jessell had spent the most time together last year – but life, as a whole, is going well for her. Friedman realized the other day that Jessell would be surprised by what’s changed in her life: getting a job, adjusting her career goals and growing closer to new friends.

Change, as we know, is good.

If you’re having thoughts of suicide or just need someone to talk to, call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 or text “HOME” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741.