I self-published my memoir The Beautiful Darkness: A Handbook for Orphans in October 2016 after spending more than 20 years working on one version of the story or another. The book’s name comes from two sources.

The concept of being an orphan, particular in the Black community, may seem jarring. We are, after all, known for taking care of one another even when we’re messy.

But even before my parents died – my father by suicide in 2010, my mother from cervical cancer in 2012 – I had been orphaned by them in many ways, largely because of untreated mental illness.

In Mira Bartok’s The Memory Palace, she wrote:

The Sami call the period from mid-November to mid-January the Dark Time, or Skabma Dalvi — the Beautiful Darkness. Most of the day, the sky is a deep indigo blue, even in the morning. It is so hard to know when to wake up, when to work, when to eat a meal.

The phrase the Beautiful Darkness stayed with me for a number of reasons: I’m a winter baby; I prefer cold weather to warm; I last saw my mother alive and forgave her for our hard times together during this time and it was the season in which she also made her transition.

The Beautiful Darkness, for me, is also a way of thinking about grief that has been helpful. It’s a time that can be disorienting in the way that Bartok describes, so that you feel lost. This can also be a gift, a way of learning new way.

These days, this season reminds me that we learn these things in order to share them.

Continue reading “Coping with Father’s Day as a Suicide Survivor in 2018” →