Suicide and The Bridge
The other evening, my fetching girlfriend and I had dinner and a movie with two of our dearest friends. What makes them dear? They do.
We watched The Bridge, a documentary about the propensity that people have for choosing the Golden Gate Bridge as the launching pad to 98% success rate of fatality attempted suicide. It’s sobering, and I must admit my heart and mind were a bit numbed/stunned at what I had just seen. It made me angry and broken-hearted at the people who were interviewed because at some point they all expressed some weird form of acceptance of their son/daughter/friend’s choice to jump off the bridge. The kind of acceptance that contextually implied that they had done next to nothing to prevent this from happening. To be fair, not many of these people really took the jumpers seriously at the beginning. Eventually, according to their recall, they did realize the seriousness of their friend’s desire to end their life but of the few people interviewed it seemed that they were all adopting the stance of “Just say goodbye before you do it” or “It’s what he decided to do.” or “There was nothing we could do.”
I don’t understand it. One of the jumpers in the documentary is named Gene. He walked back and forth on the bridge for nearly three hours before making his final, fatal decision. His life had been described by his friends/family as somewhat of a disappointment. He wasn’t popular, but he was fun to be around. He didn’t enjoy effortless picking up of the women, or was successful financially, but he did care about his family and friends. What I didn’t get, and I didn’t get the whole story, was that it seemed that his family and friends had little to show for regret at losing their brother/friend. It seemed that as some kind of coping mechanism, they had rationalized his choice to end his life as simply that. A choice, and now he’s better off.
There’s a very small part of me that understands and can see how such a rationalization can be made. Aside from hari kari, suicide for the sole sake of “ending it all because life sucks” has never held a place of honor in any society to my knowledge. Naturally, this brings about many debates regarding the actual definition of death, the afterlife, etc…
It’s a hard discussion. Many religious circles believe that suicide is a sin, and damnable to Hell. Whether it is fear-mongering, or the truth, I do not know. Your mileage may vary. Suicide notes many times leave clear implications as to why someone ended their life. While the subject matter may complain about the selfishness of others, it sheds light on the selfishness and dare I say, whiny aspects of their character which were not strong enough to motivate or cultivate the desire for life. In short, in not knowing what to live for, they decided to not live at all. Were they too near-sighted to the point of hopelessness in the present in regards to their future? Were their ambitions and goals too lofty to the point of hopelessness in achieving them? What was it? It may have been both. The long-run didn’t look too hopeful, and the present didn’t look any better. If neither the present nor the future were hopeful, and the past confirmed this assessment… I think I’d feel depressed as well.
Some commonalities I noticed all dealt with the issue of acceptance. While these people had friends, relatives, and what I would consider close relationships, I noticed that according to the documentary none of the people they focused on had a romantic relationship, or at least one that was active concurrently with their choice to commit suicide. It seemed that even the parents who were interviewed were not close to their son/daughter. Granted, they acknowledged each other according to their perspective but there was an unspoken, subtle distance that I felt while listening to family members remember their son/daughter/sibling who jumped off the bridge. The relationship these people had came across to me as the kind where the parents felt obligated to be in relationship with their child up to a certain degree. Again, this is post-traumatic testimony regarding their loved one, I must leave considerable room for the rationalization that follows grief. That subtle distance I seemed to pick up on could be several things, all of which are assumptions:
A. Shame. The honor in suicide is never the kind of honor that brings happiness with acceptance. The accepting of someone having committed suicide is not a choice, but rather a forced decision. The person is dead, what choice do you have? It’s always sad, regrettable, non-sensical, and never joyfully preferred. Suicides are always a mystery even when a note has been left behind because the reasons themselves only produce more questions. The note usually lists things that answer “I committed suicide because of this, this, and this…” but it never answers the real question that we all would want to know. The question of “Why and how was death the answer to this?”
B. Regret. Perhaps the friends and family were forced to realize their shortcomings as friends/family, and this would tie into shame rather appropriately. I know I would. My friend and I both agreed that upon seeing The Bridge, that we felt compelled to pay better attention to the people in our lives. I’d say that he and I are afraid of regret in this regard. It’s not just “Call me if you need anything” but more like, “Wherever you are, I’ll be there, in person, in your face.” Who wouldn’t?
I once stood with a friend during a rather tumultuous time in his life. The kind of tumult that would make life seem not worth the effort. As the outsider, I could make sense of why killing one’s self would be counter-productive, but when I take a moment to empathize, the options presented, of which self-termination would be present, does somehow in some weird way make rational sense as a coping mechanism. The pain was great enough to warrant self-destruction. The pain was great enough to encourage giving up because hope was nowhere to be seen. My friend did indeed survive his tumultuous season, and I think that present situations allow him to be thankful for not taking seriously the option of self-termination. Did my outside perspective serve as that link to my friend that kept him connected with hope? Was it my objectivity and friendship during that time that gave him the needed support to maintain his sanity?
Did the twenty-four people who jumped during filming of The Bridge have that outside perspective to keep them connected to hope?
I think they didn’t. They died alone.





