Wow. In case you ever wondered?

[kyburg]

What if you actually tried to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge?

Quickly and without effort I am perched on the rail, left arm gripping the beam beside me, right hand on the rail below, feet slightly swinging over water. Nothing between me and water now. Everything between me and the water below. I am coaching myself in my head. Thirty more years of the same? Is that really what you want, Sam? Isn’t it time? And I am not unconvinced. But there is as if a wall, and I can no more break through it with my weak flesh and soft bone than I can slip off this rail into the air.

First part of five. Man. I have to give props to the blogger for just putting this to print.

Comments

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

I used to know a jumper who survived; he hit construction scaffolding/netting around a tower. I wish I could remember his story better. (Dude became a paramedic. He stopped on the highway in horrible weather to help at an accident and was hit and killed by another car. Damn waste.)

[forestcats.livejournal.com]

Vile.

[kuangning]

*wrysmile.* I had that moment. Not the Golden Gate bridge, but pausing over a freezing cold Maumee River and climbing onto the bridge deck, thinking that even if the fall wasn't enough to kill me the cold and wet would certainly do it... yeah, I've been there.

[djdig.livejournal.com]

I'm on part 4, reading through them all.

Thanks for sharing the link.

[christophine.livejournal.com]

2/15/05, around midnight twenty or so, a car was found abandoned on the Golden Gate, driver's door open, "Shine on you Crazy Diamond" by Pink Floyd playing on endless repeat. The driver was nowhere to be found. Some days later, her body was finally found, washed up out of the bay.

Her name was Jenna. She had been incredibly beautiful. Not just physically, but inside as well. Probably the most beautiful person in that way I have known. Her caring, compassion, empathy, and deep desire to make ease the burden of everyone around her seemed to come from an endless, inexhaustible well. She could make someone feel better just talking with them fifteen minutes, no matter what they'd been dealing with before she spoke to them. It was amazing. You'd never have even the slightest hint that she lived her life in immense physical pain. Not a sign of it ever showed. If I swung on both sides of the trapeze, I would probably have been madly in love with her. As it was, she was one of the friends I most adored. And when she married my pseudo adopted brother, she turned his life around. The rage that had always driven him disappeared, and he was, for the first time in his life, truly happy.

Characters in Dickens tales tend to be very polarized. There are few shades of gray. The good ones are too good to be true, even if beset with great difficulties. The bad ones tend to have few to no redeeming qualities. I thought that people like that could only exist in works of fiction. But then there was Jenna, who could have been one of the too good to be true ones out of the pages of a Dickens novel.

That article brought it all back, sharply, even now, almost six years after Jenna jumped from the Golden Gate in the last few minutes of Valentine's Day, or in the first minutes of the day after. It's not as if it happened yesterday. But it could have been just last year.

All of us who knew her still feel the hole she left in our lives when she jumped. But we also feel blessed to have known a woman as amazing as she, if not nearly as long as we would have liked.

Thank you for a link that brought it all sharply back into focus. Even the bad part of the way she chose to end her life. Someone like Jenna should always be remembered, and life has a way of blurring the lines, until something like this article sharpens them again.

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is an amazing series of posts.

It's got something Campbellian about it too -- it's as if she had to return to some horrid home-like environment to get that growth. It's the hero's journey, after a fashion.

[mdlbear]

Thank you -- a fantastically good series.

I haven't quite been there. Close. I'm a lot further away now, but it's good to be reminded.