"Lay My Burden Down,"

A few days ago, while researching and writing a blog post on suicide, I came across a book called "Lay My Burden Down," by Amy Alexander and Harvard's Dr. Alvin Pouissant, available for four dollars at Amazon.com. In this book, Alexander, who lost a brother to suicide, teams up with Alvin Pouissant to explore the phenomenon of suicide among Blacks. Although the book says that Black suicide has doubled, it has probably increased many times more than that if you include cases of intentionally destroying oneself with drugs and, equally important, Black on Black suicide that Field Negro decries constantly in "Killadelphia".

Anyway, I hope this book will be a personal account of a struggle with the suicide of another and a very personal attempt to assimilate information in order to make sense of that family member's suicide.