{"id":473121,"date":"2025-12-26T16:04:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T16:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/473121\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T16:04:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T16:04:16","slug":"embracing-life-in-the-worst-place-to-be-during-the-holidays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/473121\/","title":{"rendered":"Embracing life in the worst place to be during the holidays."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

On Nov. 17, Abdallah Hadian, a civilian imam, strode into a state correctional facility in New York with a firearm. Moments later, he went into the administration building and placed the gun to his head.<\/p>\n

Word of the 55-year-old imam\u2019s suicide traveled nearly as quickly as the bullet that took his life.<\/p>\n

In prison, no one bats an eye at hearing that an inmate killed themselves. This is especially true among fellow prisoners. Hearing that a fellow prisoner was stabbed to death, or overdosed, elicits a shrug, maybe a nervous laugh. Although we attribute such incidents to the violent and miserable nature of the place we inhabit, most people on the outside chalk these deaths up to the so-called mental health crisis inside correctional facilities, a phenomenon that gets significant attention. It adds to the unfair narrative of prisoners being bloodthirsty lunatics, a framing that benefits tough-on-crime politics.<\/p>\n

As a prisoner, though, when you hear that a civilian staff member who left their family every day to go to the awful confines of prison\u2014the same prison where Robert Brooks was murdered<\/a>\u2014took their own life in such a shocking fashion, it makes you wonder what we\u2019re doing wrong. More importantly, the question swings in the air: What might someone who is living in the free world but considering killing themselves learn from prisoners about hanging on?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been there. I\u2019m serving my 16th year for manslaughter. In 2009 a drunken argument with my girlfriend devolved into a physical altercation with deadly weapons. She stabbed me, I stabbed her, she died. I immediately attempted to end it all.<\/p>\n

Obviously, I didn\u2019t succeed. In the hospital, I soldiered through the physical misery of a collapsed lung. Then I wrestled with the shame and guilt of killing someone that I had loved, emotions that were all the more amplified when I was forced to relive the trauma in court. I\u2019d be lying if I told you that I hadn\u2019t contemplated every means of suicide.<\/p>\n

I believe that I Iived through that awful and tragic experience to be held accountable, not only by the victim\u2019s family but, less sympathetically, to the mirror. The pressures of life, which in that moment felt unbearable, proved bearable.<\/p>\n

In my role as a journalist, I found purpose and draw from that dark place when reporting stories about characters who have their own dark encounters. I think it has enabled me to develop as a writer who draws out the humanity of prisoners that the tabloids leave behind. In interviewing the subjects of my stories, I always find myself threading our shared experiences into narratives pegged to universal themes like parenting, drug use, and\u2014for obvious reasons a reoccurring motif\u2014the feeling of the walls closing in. But the experience of isolation in prison is not monolithic.<\/p>\n

Like most of the prisons I\u2019ve had the displeasure of living in, Eastern NY Correctional Facility during the \u201chappiest time of the year\u201d offers no gifts under a Christmas tree. No \u201cHappy Holidays\u201d decorations. Just yellowed suicide-prevention memorandums posted on the bulletin board. Guys live here under the weight of life sentences and have been away from their families and loved ones for decades. Other guys haven\u2019t gotten visits in years but still find reasons to wake up, to put both feet on the ground, and, oddly enough, even to smile.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t help but admire the resiliency of old-timers, some of whom have lost every family member, who have more time in prison than I have on this earth. They keep it simple, play Scrabble or spades and talk shit. Once able-bodied men, they walk with canes, one step at a time.<\/p>\n

It is the coping mechanisms of the prisoner, our survival under this added layer of extreme inhumanity, that may make us the most apt case studies for suicide prevention.<\/p>\n

One day this season, I overheard some of the GED students inside our school building tell the prison\u2019s acting educational supervisor, Nicole Cooke, that they didn\u2019t have anything to be grateful for during the holidays.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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\u201cI didn\u2019t like that,\u201d she told me from behind a large wooden desk. This gave her an idea.<\/p>\n

She had a tree painted on the wall, leaving the branches bare. Photocopied drawings of jars containing the words I\u2019m thankful for were distributed to everyone who wanted to decorate the tree. She told guys to write what they were grateful for inside the paper jars, which stood in for the tree\u2019s leaves.<\/p>\n

Although the gratitude tree remained on the wall for about a month, as I attended my classes I walked right past it without reading a single jar.<\/p>\n

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    The same day that I went inside the school building to finally put my own note on the gratitude tree, the jars had been taken down. I spoke with Cooke, and she removed them from her drawer and handed me the stack of paper jars. I sat down alone in the academic library and counted 82 altogether. I plucked through them one by one, reading their contents. Forty-six of them contained the word family or mi familia. Some included only a word or two, like mom or even Ms. Cooke. Suddenly, I realized that in my hands these small pieces of paper weighing next to nothing contained something so heavy and intimate\u2014people and things that gave my community a sense of hope and purpose, reasons for living. I felt a little wrong riffling through them, but I was inspired to witness a collective will to live. As Albert Camus said, \u201cRarely is suicide committed through reflection.\u201d<\/p>\n

    That\u2019s when I noticed that a handful of these jars had been filled out by staff, people who, like Hadian, the imam, get to go home every day. Their end-of-year reflections had been displayed side by side with the prisoners\u2019 jars on the tree: a shared message of thankfulness and hope displayed for everyone who took part or who bothered to look.<\/p>\n

    <\/p>\n

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