I'm not certain I want my writing to remain public. I'm ready for the contents of my head to be off limits again. I won't make public posts anymore, for sure. I feel the public purpose of this blog has run its course. Whatever's left for me, whether it be a humiliating fall from grace, a silencing, or enlightenment, is best kept to myself, where it belongs.
I'll bury it, and take it with me.
I have an appointment with something someday that I intend to keep. When I go to meet it I'll leave quietly, and unannounced. This is a marvelously beautiful place, earth. It's also painfully ridiculous at times. Sometimes it numbs me.
"Never mind.."
Over the past year there were three local suicides involving youth, all from the same high school. Three. Three souls that made the choice to end. Or maybe they didn't, not really.
Along that same theme, I heard that a sustained net is being put beneath the Golden Gate Bridge to curtail suicide attempts. Since it was built in 1937, 1600 people have jumped to their deaths. That's an average of 20 per year for the first seventy-six years of the Golden Gate's existence. Last year, the seventy-seventh, claimed 46 jumpers, double the amount of any of the prior seventy-six. I don't know what I'm rambling about. I'm sure it's just coincidence. It just doesn't feel that way. It feels......bigger.
And I don't think I'm alone in feeling that way.
Tad Friends' article in the 'New Yorker' states that 26 people have survived the jump from the Golden Gate, and each of those 26 realized, within an instant of taking the leap, they did not want to die. He describes how one man readied himself by counting to ten, and then failing to leap. He counted to ten again with the same result. And then again. Finally, he managed to do it. According to Friend, the man said that the very instant his hands left the rail he realized that every problem he had that he'd seen as insurmountable, wasn't.
Why this tangent?
Kevin Hines.
Missing Pieces
Kevin Hines was one of those 26 survivors. I heard him interviewed on NPR last weekend, and he said something that's had a grip on me since.
When Hines jumped he was 18 years-old. He said he was experiencing an untreated mental illness that was creating voices in his head, and those voices were prompting him to take the leap. He followed them to the middle of the expanse where he turned, and faced the water. Then, he said, he waited.
He said he could tell that others were aware something was wrong. He could see it in the way they looked at him, and the way those who walked passed, slowed themselves as if they wanted to do something, but didn't know what. He said one man even stopped, and placed his hands on the railing by his, and slowly studied him.
That man, Hines said, knew beyond doubt what he was intending. He saw it in his face, and his eyes, he said. Then the man turned, and walked away. Just like the others.
What Hines said next is what I've been unable to put down. I'm not certain why I'm carrying it still, and I'm not sure what it wants outside of the empathy it evoked. I know I felt I had failed Hines, when I heard it.
Net Failure
Hines said he didn't want to jump, not really, but he couldn't silence the voices in his head that were telling him to. He said that if one person had asked him if he was alright he would have been snapped back to reality, and saved. He said there was no way he would have jumped if someone had shown him they cared.
He said he was clinging to the rail in the manner he was, and looking the way he did, the way that caused looks of concern from others, because he was waiting for someone to come along with that question. He said he was hopeful it would arrive, and when it didn't, he jumped. He said the first thought he had after he jumped was, "I don't wan't to die."
It wasn't until after he made his leap that help was offered, and it came in two, different forms, he said. The first was the form of a man leaning over the rail where he had jumped. The man called the Coast Guard, and then informed Hines of the second rescuing form. This one was ascending from the water beneath him.
Hines could sense it, he said, and he was certain it was a shark. He started to panic until he heard the man shouting down at him. From the bridge, the man could see that what was approaching Hines was a sea lion, so he shouted that down at him, and told him to remain calm. Hines did, and then he felt the sea lion beneath him, holding him up.
It held him up until the Coast Guard arrived,
then disappeared.
_______________________________________
Listening to Kevin Hines story made me shake my head. You couldn't make one up like the one he experienced.
Often, when someone does something as extreme as a jump like his, you hear a rumble of wondering why he never asked for help.
You know. "Well, I would have helped him if he had asked. I would have."
When you're stuck, and in deeper than any depth that's familiar to you,
you don't always know how to ask for help.
Or what you need it for..
Sometimes all you have left is enough to remain awake, and hope someone notices that you're fading. That's a form of asking for assistance. It's just not as obvious as the one we hope for.
It's like walking out to the middle of a bridge with internal conflict, and pain that's palpable, and posturing yourself to jump. It's like hoping someone responds, hoping someone asks if you're alright. It's the discovery when you jump that you received help from a sea lion before it was offered by another person.
Kevin Hines story is more about us, than him.
Time to go a little farther inward, a little farther south.
Time to reconsider expectations.
Time to put the words that rise, to rest.
