This Christmas
Vol. 1, Issue 41 | December 8, 2025 - December 14, 2025
CURATOR'S NOTE
Content Warning: This piece contains discussions of suicide and mental illness.
I fell in love with a voice that belonged to a dead man.
I didn’t know this at the time. Didn’t know that the man singing had been gone for years, that his voice was all that remained.
Christmas Eve 1982.
My mother’s blue-grey Pinto idled at a red light, the heater working against an unusually cold day. I was small enough that my feet dangled over the floorboard. I held the white pastry box from Worman’s Bakery carefully on my lap, counting the translucent spots where butter had soaked through. The car smelled like Douglas fir and roses. The centerpiece from Catanese Florist was already losing needles in the backseat.
The sky had gone gray. The kind that makes you forget the sun exists, even in a place like Florida.
The radio was set to the AM dial. At a stoplight, my mother’s hand left the wheel, searching. Static crackled between stations—a Christmas Eve mass, someone selling car insurance, more static. I watched her brilliant pink fingernails as she kept turning. Then stopped.
Brass. Horns, full. A snare.
Then sleigh bells.
A Fender Rhodes piano, electric and warm.
Then him, a voice that knew sorrow but refused to dwell there, singing about fires and families. About caroling through the night.
Smooth in places, rough in others. Singing about this Christmas. Not Christmas, in general. This one.
I stopped kicking my Mary Janes—scuffed on the inside from keeping time against each other. I listened to the man’s voice. The way children listen before they learn to split their attention. He was promising something I didn’t have words for yet. Not hope, exactly. Permission. To believe.
I didn’t know who was singing. Didn’t know he’d been gone three years. I just knew: this song made Christmas real.
Fall 1970. Audio Finishers Studio, Ontario Street, Chicago.
Two years after Memphis. One year after Chairman Fred Hampton.
Seven years of burying Black leaders. Medgar. Malcolm. Martin. Fred. The promise of freedom kept getting deferred, kept getting answered with bullets.
Donny Hathaway sat at the piano, searching for what Black people needed to hear in that moment. Curtis would give them protest. Marvin would ask what’s going on. Donny was making something else: a reason to believe Christmas could still be special.
The studio was full of friends. Ric Powell with drums, congas. Phil Upchurch on guitar, Morris Jennings, Willie Henderson. Black musicians making music the way they always had—in rooms that felt like church and family reunion and workshop all at once.
Someone at Jerry Butler’s workshop had asked: what’s left to say about Christmas?
But Donny heard a different question. He knew that a Christmas song for Black people in 1970 wasn’t the same as one in 1946.
Nat King Cole’s Christmas was beautiful, universal, safe for any American household.
Donny’s Christmas said: Black people deserve joy.
Musicians who were there remembered him upbeat. Alive. Conducting with his whole body.
And this Christmas will be a very special Christmas for me.
Will be. Future tense.
Three years later, something broke. Paranoid schizophrenia, doctors named it, but the name didn’t explain what happened when the sensitivity that let him hear the music meant he heard everything: the love and the threat, the music and the surveillance, all of it, all the time, no filter.
The same openness that created the melody meant he couldn’t close the door when the world became unbearable.
He started believing people were watching him. They were. Black geniuses have always been watched. But paranoia twists truth into torture. Sessions stopped mid-take. He’d disappear. Medications made him distant. The man who wrote about being together couldn’t trust anyone.
January 13, 1979. New York City.
Donny was recording with Roberta Flack. They’d reconciled after years apart, started working on a second duet album.
During the session, Donny started talking about machines stealing his music. About his brain connected to something draining him.
Producers cut the session short. Sent everyone home.
Hours later.
His body was found on the sidewalk.
He fell from his fifteenth floor hotel window. The door was locked from inside.
Investigators ruled it suicide.
Thirty-three years old. The song still playing everywhere that December, filling rooms with warmth he couldn’t feel.
February 2024, an Airbus hovering in the dark over the Atlantic.
I’m watching Roberta, the Roberta Flack documentary. I already knew how Donny died. What I didn’t know was what it sounds like to survive someone’s last day. For decades.
Roberta says she went back to the hotel with him after the session. Dropped him off. He told her goodbye, see you tomorrow.
Nothing in her voice changed. Decades had taught her exactly how to say those words without breaking, how to carry someone’s last day without letting it destroy you every time you spoke it aloud.
My grandmother had her own way of knowing this truth.
She said it every year. December, usually. Sometimes earlier. She’d be putting up the porcelain Santas in the living room—the ones she bought when my mother was a girl—and she’d stop: “So many people won’t see the new year.”
Not sadly. Not as warning. Just factually, the way you say something observed so many times it’s simply become true.
I thought she meant the natural attrition of age and illness. I didn’t know she also meant the ones who can’t survive December. Who look at the forced cheer, the mandatory gatherings, the relentless insistence that this is the most wonderful time of the year, and feel an unbridgeable gap between what they’re supposed to feel and what they actually feel.
November 2025. Marshawn Kneeland, 24. Monday Night Football. His first touchdown. Three days later, gone.
January 2022. Ian Alexander Jr., 26, on his birthday. Eight days later, Cheslie Kryst, 30.
Both in January, 43 years after Donny.
These made headlines. How many others went quietly and nobody noticed?
And still, every December, we sing it.
We’ve been singing his hope for 55 years.
Not his pain. Not his paranoia. Not the years of hospitalization or the sessions that were aborted. We sing what he gave us before it all broke. The hope. The promise.
James Cone wrote that spirituals were enslaved people singing toward freedom by creating joy inside suffering. That’s what Donny did. Made a song that says you deserve to believe this year will be different.
We sing it every year. At gatherings where everyone shows up smiling, not saying out loud that someone’s missing, that December feels heavier.
We sing about being together. He died alone.
The song that saves you came from someone who couldn’t save himself.
I hear it now.
The horns. The bells. The Rhodes piano. That voice promising this Christmas will be very special. The voice that made Christmas real.
I let it play. Not in spite of knowing. Because of it.
Because Donny Hathaway made something beautiful and deserves better.
—Khalilah L. Liptrot
Curator, The Black Third
If you or someone you know is in crisis, support is available. In the U.S.: Call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or text “HELLO” to 741741 (Crisis Text Line). International resources: findahelpline.com
FEATURED PORTRAIT
James Cone insisted that the gospel was inseparable from the struggle for Black liberation. [Read more]
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Achingly sorrowful and gratifyingly healing. Thanks for these tributes, beautiful sights and sounds, the sounds ring loud. ❤️
I remember when Donny jumped. Skipper was with Peabo at his place. They both were in Atlanta. They heard a scream that they couldn’t identify. Skip told me that the scream freaked him out because neither he nor Peabo could figure out where it came from.
Not long after the unidentified scream, Ed Howard (one of Donny’s co-composer’s) called and said Donny had jumped. Skipper said they heard that scream right around the time of Donny’s suicide. To this day that moment hit everybody hard.
Donny Hathaway was a genius and his death was a huge loss.