On September 21 at the Eufaula Cove Pavilion, locals will join together for the first Lake Eufaula Out of Darkness walk.

Onsite registration starts at 3 p.m, the walk starts at 4 p.m.

“We held a bingo fundraiser at the VFW and raised $2,382 towards our goal of $10,000,” Sharina Little said. “We still need sponsors, donors, any mental health and other agencies who would like to have a resource table set up. There are links on the AFSP site if anyone is interested in being a walk sponsor. There is advertising for different levels of sponsorship and everything is 100% tax deductible. Anyone wanting to join or form a team can visit the afsp. org website and locate the Eufaula walk to join. Though its free to sign up and participate, we are raising awareness and funds for suicide prevention and it’s encouraged for teams to do fundraising either through traditional ways like bake sales, raffles, etc…or by doing social media cam- paigns. There are prize incentives as you raise different increments through the AFSP.”

Sharina Little, who has seen enough loss, wants to bring awareness to the community.

“Suicide has never been a stranger to me. I’ve lost several friends to it. Usually I’d get mad at them but then I’d go on with my life. But suicide got really upclose and personal in October of 2018 when my 18-year-old nephew committed suicide just days before his and our daughter’ 19th birthdays.

“Any out of order death in a family is always hard, but living with the knowledge that this could have been 100% preventable rips my heart out at times. We will never know who he would have been as a man, a husband and even a father. I feel like our entire family got robbed because it could have been prevented. He wasn’t physically ill of a disease with no cure or some freak accident that took him from us. This mental health darkness is what convinced him that taking his life was the only answer. He was super smart, loved technology and gaming. He was such a polite young man who did track and graduated with honors just months before he made a really bad decision.

“The following year I saw a post on Facebook about an Out of the Darkness Walk being held in Woodward. Our family decided then that we needed to do this and we participated that year in Woodward. Then COVID hit and the 2020 walks had to be virtual, the same in 2021.

“When we moved to Eufaula my husband and I each made a poster and we walked along Highway 150 by the state park carrying our signs. It was just the two of us when we did the first walk, and we jogged the last ¼ of the distance because our nephew was a runner. I called him my ‘favorite superfast nephew.’ Now we do the Out of the Darkness Walk in his memory. It just seems fitting.

“In 2022, Tahlequah held their 1st walk, and it was the closest to us so Team Little In Memory of Brayden participated in that year and again last year. However, after all the recent suicides in our area, I decided to try to organize a walk at Eufaula. It’s the one cause of death that is preventable but something no one wants to talk about until it hits their family. But it’s here and we need to work to make things better for anyone fighting those dark thoughts.”

For confidential support in a suicide crisis call 988 to reach out for help.