Suicidal Solitariness
It is an afternoon when the Golden Gate Bridge is swirling with sea mist, hiding the tops of the towers, north, and south.
It had been a turbulent flight from London into San Francisco International; the plane kept from approaching the gate for almost an hour longer. I’m tired and want to get home. It will be another four hours before arriving home in Mendocino, but that isn’t taking into account any traffic congestion along the way.
Forty-five minutes after leaving the airport, I’m driving toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Traffic is heavy but moving. A highway patrol car positions in front of me, weaving to and fro across the three lanes of traffic, slowing, then halting the traffic.
Such an action is called for when an obstruction on the bridge is causing a safety hazard, the most common of which is a ladder fallen from a truck. Today, not so. Today a young man is standing on the wrong side of the bridge railings. He is talking to police officers. I feel sick to my stomach. I’m watching a young man threatening to take his own life by leaping from the bridge.
I can only wonder, sitting in the comfort of my car, what are the forces of nature at work that motivate this young man, maybe he is thirty, no more, to take his own life? What loneliness and depression must result in the lead up for him to contemplate this act?
Is his agony something like my agony, only manifested less intensely in me? How many seemingly happy people do we meet on the street or in our work, where the thought of suicide is a silent alternative amid life’s reversals.
It is not an impulse that people commonly publicize regarding themselves. Hence one naturally imagines that few others experience it.
But let us not deceive ourselves by merely pointing to this condition as something we do not recognize, for we all share it to some extent.
Sympathetic friends typically regard a suicidal person as being an unfortunate victim — of blind chance, or other people’s thoughtlessness, or an unfair social system — or some combination thereof.
The man standing a foot from death, hanging on by one hand, stricken, is in the worst solitary frame of mind, usually accompanied by an inaccurate image of one’s self-worth.
What, I’m wondering, watching two officers plead with the man, is the difference between him and me? Well, we have separate bodies, minds, separate homes, separate lives, and separate ambitions. We want to make money, perhaps more money than other people make so that we can indulge our egos by having fancier cars, wearing more stylish clothes, living in larger homes, or sending our children to more prestigious schools.
Even if we don’t have such tendencies toward conspicuous consumption, we may put ourselves first more subtly by taking the largest piece of cake on the plate at a party, or by ‘disappearing’ taking the smallest, not wishing to be seen as greedy.
And then the officers are alone. One comforts the other.
Traffic is soon released, moving like a mechanical worm across the watery expanse.
What will people say at the young man’s funeral? That he was a strange man, someone never really got close to, even though people worked with him, enjoyed him, liked him? That for thirty odd years, the man didn’t have a sense of unity or brotherhood?
Five minutes later I’m driving through a tunnel, the Robin William’s Tunnel, dedicated to the wonderful actor who lived in nearby Tiburon. Driving down the hill, passing the beautiful Sausalito, the mist falling down the hillsides like a silken waterfall, I wonder what about the importance of the roles we play before attitudes change, when the chips are down, trapping us in a cocoon of self-pity or self-destructive desire for oblivion? All hope seeming to have fled. Nothing remaining but black despair. Could Robin Williams have felt this despair?
Typically, I assume we wish to end the pain by somehow drifting off into a pleasant, nebulous never-never-land where cares and sorrows are behind us forever. And, by the way, we do want our death to be painless. If we could handle pain, we wouldn’t be suicidal in the first place — hence the popularity of sleeping pills or the sudden-death methods.
The unwelcome truth about suicide cannot be communicated adequately through words at all. It must flow from the very marrow of our bones. There may need to be sleepless nights, flaming anger, tears by the pint, gnashing of teeth before we can slowly awaken from our nightmare of self-imprisoning solitariness or egoism.
A man is dead, a stranger to me, a son to another, leaping from a bridge.
1–800–273–8255
suicidepreventionlifeline.org
