Out of the Darkness Walk at Jones Beach promotes suicide prevention

Chris and Alex Tafone were smiling so wide you could see their teeth.

It was December 2013, and Christopher had brought his son, then 5, to celebrate Christmas with Christopher’s identical twin cousins, John and Thomas Reistetter. Alex tugged on his father’s hand as the four posed for a photo.

On Sunday, the Tafones posed for a new memory. They crouched on either side of a poster affixed to the side of the Jones Beach State Park boardwalk emblazoned with that photo, wearing gray T-shirts that read: “Walk to Fight Suicide.”

This time, they did not smile with teeth.

“That was hard,” Chris said. “I’m never going to see them again.”

John Reistetter died by suicide on June 7, 2021, at the age of 51. Thomas Reistetter died by suicide on Sept. 14, 2022. He was 52.

Chris and Alex, of Kings Park, joined about 3,000 others Sunday for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention’s annual Out of the Darkness Walk. AFSP raised $500,000 from Sunday’s walk, a spokesperson said. People carried posters and wore shirts and hats with the faces and names of loved ones they had lost. Some fought back tears as they approached the starting line. “Walking for my cousin” one shirt read. “The world needs you” read another.

Chris’s cousins, who were five years his senior, had been touched by mental health issues from a young age. Their father had died by suicide, as had their father’s brother.

“They never talked about the loss, they never talked about the way he died, they never talked about how they felt about it,” Christopher said. “Back in the day, [society] just treated it differently. Mental health was something you snapped out of, or you ignored it.”

Chris looked up to his cousins growing up, he said. They were athletic and charismatic. And they did everything together. They worked as lifeguards at the same pool. They graduated from City College of New York and became architects. They…