Out of the Darkness: 'P.S. I Love You Day,' Coming to Southampton, Shines Light on Mental Health Awareness

On a beautiful spring morning, Joseph DiPalma Jr. dropped off his 14-year-old daughter, Brooke, at Beach Street Middle School in West Islip.

“I love you,” he said, like clockwork. It was their daily tradition.

She hopped out. “I love you,” she responded, shutting the car door and running inside.

Hours later, her older sister, Jaimie, found his suicide note.

“I feel like when we first lost our dad, when people asked what happened to our dad, it was, ‘We lost our dad to suicide,’” Brooke DiPalma said on Monday afternoon, January 16, nearly 14 years after his death, during a video call that included her sister. “And now, when we tell people our story, we say, ‘We lost our dad to suicide — but we did something about it.’”

In honor of their father’s memory, the DiPalma sisters started “P.S. I Love You Day,” held annually on the second Friday of February. Every year, they ask its participants to wear purple in an effort to stand up against bullying, help end depression and, ultimately, prevent suicide.

Now entering its 13th annual celebration, the event — this year’s theme is “Love All Your Chapters” — is commemorated at over 500 schools, businesses and organizations across the nation. And, next month, it will come to the Southampton Union Free School District for the first time.

“Our goal, really, is to paint our town purple,” Southampton Elementary School Principal Nicole Fernandez said.

Starting Monday, the pre-K through fourth grade students will begin P.S. I Love You Day activities and crafts — like making purple hearts with messages and hanging them up around the building — in anticipation of a schoolwide assembly on February 9. Brooke DiPalma will speak to the students, who will perform a skit about kindness and belonging, and then quietly walk outside, form a heart in the field and sing a song together.

The festivities will continue on February 10 — which is P.S. I Love You Day — with a focus on connectedness and mental health, Fernandez said, noting that the messaging will not touch on suicide awareness, given the age of the students.

“We really do need to care more about everybody’s mental status and how they’re feeling because kids do have bad days, just the way adults have bad days,” Fernandez said. “Sometimes, just a quick check-in makes the difference of making sure that kids are available to learn.”

But the impact of the day does not end at school, Brooke DiPalma said. It is her hope that the conversation continues at home — and that her family’s tragedy is reborn as a movement.

“Maybe if I had someone celebrate this day, and I went home to my dad and said, ‘We celebrated this mental health awareness day, and we were talking about suicide and depression and really getting to know each other’s feelings and how you’re doing,’ who knows?” Brooke DiPalma said. “It’s a big question of, who knows?”

From the outside, Joseph DiPalma Jr. was a man who was quick to smile. A volunteer firefighter and retired NYPD officer, he was devoted to his family, friends and community. He was a hero, his youngest daughter said, and his family didn’t know how deeply he struggled with depression.

It was April 23, 2010, just one week after her 14th birthday, when the eighth-grader was called down to the principal’s office, where she was told to pack up her belongings and head home.

“I went downstairs and saw some family friends of ours picking me up, and they were hysterically crying, red in the face,” Brooke DiPalma recalled. “And when I got home, I saw the sight that was before me — tons of people coming to our doorstep, whether it be law enforcement figuring out what happened, or just so many family members and friends. The vibe in the entire community was complete shock.”

After Jaimie DiPalma found her father’s note, she said she called the police, but the rest of the day is a blur. She doesn’t remember it from that moment forward, she said. “It’s kind of crazy how the human body, when you have trauma, just kind of blacks out,” she said, “like it’s protecting you in a way.”

Once the initial shock passed, their lives moved forward — the older sister left for college at SUNY Cortland, and the younger entered her freshman year at West Islip High School. It was only then that her grief, and trauma, caught up with her, she said.

“I was taking a math quiz, and all the numbers blurred together, and I just lost it,” Brooke DiPalma said. “And so I started seeing a counselor, because a teacher encouraged me to, because she realized that I wasn’t doing okay — thank God for her. And then a few months later, I remembered the last three words that my dad said to me. They came to me: ‘I love you.’”

She found herself imagining a day when people could come together and feel “the love that our dad gave us, the empowerment and just how proud he always was of us,” and P.S. I Love You Day was born — celebrated for the first time in February 2011 at her school and on her sister’s freshman floor at SUNY Cortland.

Its growth, in the years since, has been exponential. “It’s positive and emotional, I guess you could say,” Jaimie DiPalma said. “Sometimes you sit there and you’re like, ‘Wow, this is coming out of all the loss that we’ve had,’ but then it’s also so empowering knowing that we are helping others.”

Brooke DiPalma recalled, in 2020, after giving a speech at a school, a student approached her and wrapped their arms around her, and didn’t pull away.

“I could feel — I’m starting to get emotional about it,” she said, pausing as her voice hitched. “I could feel the change that maybe my speech had made. Now all their teachers know that they were going through something, from the emotion that you could tell from this moment.

“That was their cry for help. That was their moment of change,” she continued. “I haven’t kept in touch with the student, but I certainly am changed from that student. It was something I’ll never forget.”

This year, Jaimie DiPalma, who is a teacher, will celebrate P.S. I Love You Day with her students at Cayuga Elementary School in Lake Grove, while her sister goes back to where it all began — West Islip High School and Beach Street Middle School, the place where she saw her father for the last time and, unknowingly, said goodbye.

“I think by sharing our story, it is our own personal therapy. It is our way of healing and it is our change maker,” Brooke DiPalma said. “It is our dad coming through us and, hopefully, leading the way to our new chapter in life — and I think that it’s when you feel most broken that beautiful things come.”