In March 2018, four neighbors in the Whittier neighborhood lost a friend to suicide. He was thirty-four, a high-school teacher, and he had not told anyone what he was going through. The four neighbors didn’t know what to do, so they did the only thing they could think of: they organized a walk in May along the river, and they invited anyone who’d lost someone — or come close to losing themselves — to come walk with them. About sixty people came. That was the first Long Mile.