The Final Leap (14 page)

In 1975 David Rosen, a psychiatrist at the University of California San Francisco Medical School, published a study in the
Western Journal of Medicine
based on in-depth interviews with six of the eight people known to have survived a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, including Van Ireland, Tawzer, Robens, and Layton. He also interviewed one of the two people to have survived a jump from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Rosen hoped to find out why Golden Gate Bridge jumpers chose that location, why they wanted to die, whether their life flashed before their eyes as they fell, whether they lost consciousness, how they handled the experience afterward, and what the long-term effect of the jump was on their life.

Of the eight survivors of Golden Gate Bridge jumps, seven were male and one was female. They ranged in age from sixteen to thirty-six, with an average age of twenty-four. Six were single, one was married, and one was divorced. Three were receiving psychiatric treatment at the time Rosen interviewed them (Rosen sought and received permission from each person's psychiatrist to do the interviews). All six of the Golden Gate Bridge survivors Rosen talked to said that their suicide plan involved only the Golden Gate Bridge. They didn't have an alternate plan such as jumping from another location, shooting themselves, ingesting poison, or hanging. As one survivor put it, “It was the Golden Gate Bridge or nothing.”

Another survivor said that he chose the bridge because of “an affinity between me, the Golden Gate Bridge, and death. There is a kind of form to it, a certain grace and beauty.” A third survivor said that jumping from the bridge was “a romantic thing to do.” In addition, it promised “certain death in a painless way.” The symbolic association of the bridge with beauty and death was cited by every survivor. So was the bridge's easy access.

As for why they jumped, survivors expressed feelings of loneliness, worthlessness, and depression. Two said that they heard voices in their heads telling them to jump. Another two said that they were still debating about whether to jump when bridge employees yelled and rushed toward them. If these men had approached them more calmly and spoken in a gentle manner, the survivors said, they might not have jumped.

Although jumpers fall 220 feet in four seconds, only one of the survivors Rosen talked to described this descent as rapid. The other five said that it seemed to take “hours” or “an eternity.” This is consistent with the frequently reported phenomenon of people facing death for whom time seems to stand still—or to at least slow down a lot.

None of the survivors remembered life events or memories passing before their eyes during their jump. “One survivor,” Rosen noted, “did experience the phenomenon of seeing the image of his father in an approaching bridge employee. It was his [the survivor's] opinion that what he experienced was the feeling that his deceased father was coming for him and trying to communicate with him.”

Four of the six Golden Gate Bridge jump survivors blacked out before hitting the water or didn't remember hitting the water. All jumped feet first. One realized midway in his fall that he was heading toward a concrete piling. He was able to maneuver his body so that he narrowly missed it, and instead plunged into the water. Although he survived the fall, he almost drowned. The other survivor who was conscious throughout his jump said, “When I hit the water, I felt a vacuum feeling and a compression like my energy displaced the surface energy of the water. At first everything was black, then gray-brown, then light. It opened my mind—like waking up.” When he surfaced, he was ecstatic. “I felt reborn. I was treading water and singing.… In that moment, I was refilled with a new hope and purpose in being alive. It's almost beyond most people's comprehension.… Everything is more meaningful when you come close to losing it. I experienced a feeling of unity with all things and a oneness with all people.… Surviving reconfirmed my belief and purpose in my life.”

At the time that Rosen interviewed them, two of the six Golden Gate Bridge survivors were employed, two were planning to work, and two were receiving disability payments. All professed feelings of rebirth and spiritual transcendence immediately following their jumps, including one survivor who was a self-described agnostic before jumping and became a born-again Christian afterward. All six said that a barrier was needed to prevent others from jumping.

“It would discourage suicidal persons and it would enable people to think about it and possibly change their minds,” one survivor said. Another stated, “It would make it [the bridge] less accessible. Even if it saved one person's life, it would be worth it.”

The lone survivor of a San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge jump whom Rosen interviewed expressed many of the same sentiments. The thirty-year-old woman was upset because her children had been taken away from her recently. Feeling useless and depressed, the woman said that she drove to the Bay Bridge because it was the nearest bridge to her house. If the Golden Gate Bridge had been closer, she said, she would have gone there. She stopped her car mid-span, got out, and leaped with little or no hesitation. When she surfaced, she was angry and disappointed that she hadn't died. Her pelvis was fractured in the jump and she sent spent several months in bed. Six months after her attempt, she was treated for depression in a state hospital and released. Since then, Rosen said, she had not had a relapse and eventually she was reunited with her children. “I felt chosen because I didn't die,” she told Rosen. “I was thankful.” She recommended strongly that suicide barriers be erected on the Golden Gate Bridge and Bay Bridge to prevent future suicides.

Rosen concluded his study with the following:

The fact that the Golden Gate Bridge leads the world as a location for suicides should be knowledge enough for us to begin to
deroman-ticize
suicide [his emphasis], specifically as it relates to the Golden Gate Bridge. In addition to
deromanticizing
suicide and death, especially as they relate to the Golden Gate Bridge, these findings point to a need to do something practical in order to prevent further suicides from that structure. I underscore and concur wholeheartedly with the survivors' unanimous recommendation that a suicide barrier should be constructed on the Golden Gate Bridge.

In the thirty-five years since Rosen's study, twenty-four people have survived suicide attempts from the Golden Gate Bridge. Paul Hudner, the son of wealthy parents in Marin County, jumped in 1986 at age nineteen, thirty-three years after his grandfather, a forty-one-year-old San Francisco socialite and auto dealer, jumped from the bridge. Hudner hurtled the rail at virtually the identical spot as his grandfather, landing near a fishing boat whose crew rescued him.

Michael Guss jumped in 1990 when he was twenty-six. He had been taking lithium and other drugs to combat manic-depression, but when his mood swings became unbearable, the Golden Gate Bridge beckoned. Five years after his jump, the former Wall Street options trader told his story to the media. From his apartment in San Francisco's Marina District, it was a short walk to the bridge. That was part of the bridge's attraction. The other part was what it represented. “The Bay Bridge wouldn't have interested me,” he told a reporter. “It was more than just jumping off a bridge. It was jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.”

On the span, near the south tower, he paced anxiously for a few minutes. Then he put down his bottle of lithium, climbed over the railing, and with his back to the scenic wonders of San Francisco Bay all around him, he let go. Most people face out, toward the view, but Guss faced toward the bridge instead. He said later it was because he didn't want to watch.

Hurtling toward the moat surrounding the tower, he aimed for the water in the moat so that he wouldn't hit concrete. Still, when he landed in the water, it felt like concrete, he said. Despite multiple injuries, including a broken neck and collapsed lung, and despite not having his glasses on so that his vision was blurred, he was able to swim to the moat wall, pull himself up, and sit there until the Coast Guard arrived and rushed him to the hospital.

Following his jump, Guss moved to New Mexico. Still taking lithium, he told a reporter that anyone contemplating suicide should know that “there are people out there who want to help you. Once you have the bigger picture, it helps deal with the day-to-day pain you're going through.”

Ken Baldwin knew what day-to-day pain was like; he had battled depression since adolescence. In 1985 he was twenty-eight years old, married, with a three-year-old daughter. He felt overwhelmed by the responsibilities of fatherhood; moreover, he was stuck in what he perceived to be a dead-end job as an office clerk. Two years earlier he had tried to kill himself by driving to a remote spot, sitting under a tree next to a stream, and ingesting a bottle of painkillers with a six-pack of beer. To his dismay, he woke up several hours later, groggy but still very much alive. He ended up driving home.

This time, he thought, “I needed to do something definitive. I had to do something that was going to work. I did not want to use a gun or hanging because of the fall out that my survivors would have to deal with. That's why I decided on the bridge. The statistics were pretty good that I would die and never be found.” Another factor was that jumping from the bridge was something of a public statement. All his life Baldwin had gone unnoticed. He decided that he didn't want to be quiet about his death.

“Jumping from the bridge was going to force people to see me,” he told a reporter later, “to see me hurting, to see that I was a person, too.”

For days he agonized over when to do it. There was no question in his mind that killing himself was the best thing for everyone—that his family would be better off without him. When all you hear is an interior monologue about what a loser you are, he says, and it only gets worse because there's nothing to stop it, because it's a mental illness and you can't see it yet you're in the midst of it, you're not thinking straight. In your mind, you convince yourself that the people you love really will be better off if you're dead. They may be sad, but they'll get over it and ultimately their lives will be improved. Far from being selfish or self-centered, killing yourself is an act of supreme sacrifice. It releases those who love you from the burden of caring about you. This attitude doesn't make sense to individuals who think logically and rationally, but then the judgment of people who are suicidal is impaired.

Baldwin already had developed the capacity to make an attempt, as was demonstrated by his previous attempt. Now he just needed to choose a date. It turned out to be a morning in August. He woke up at 7
A.M.
and told himself, “This is the day.” He was relieved, almost euphoric. Many people don't understand that after a prolonged period of depression, suicidal individuals sometimes exhibit elevated mood swings shortly before killing themselves. The upbeat attitude is misinterpreted as a sign that the person is getting better, or that he or she is feeling more optimistic about life. In fact, suicidal people like Baldwin are upbeat because they've made a decision, they've taken control, and they believe that the end to their pain and suffering is near.

Baldwin told his wife, Ellen, that he was going to stay late at work to earn a little overtime pay. He hurried out of the house before she could ask any questions, got to work, sat fifteen minutes at his desk, then told his supervisor, “You'll never see me again,” and left. In a little more than an hour, he drove from his home in Tracy to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. After parking in a lot near the bridge, Baldwin started walking out on the span. Midway he stopped, looked over the railing, and counted to ten. He couldn't bring himself to jump, so he counted to ten again. This time he vaulted over the railing, afraid that his commitment might falter if he perched himself on the steel beam outside the railing. As soon as he was airborne, he knew he had made a terrible mistake.

“Everything in my life that I thought was unfixable was totally fixable,” he told
New Yorker
writer Tad Friend later, “except for having just jumped.”

The last thing he saw leave the bridge was his hands. “It was at that time that I realized what a stupid thing I was doing,” Baldwin says. “And there was nothing I could do but fall.” The memory of his hands leaving the railing is still vivid in his mind twenty-five years later. He thought of his young family, and suddenly wanted to live.

Baldwin doesn't know if he blacked out when he hit the water or before. He remembers tucking his body into a cannonball position, then the water rushing toward him. The impact tore the back pockets off the blue jeans he was wearing and ripped off his wedding ring. When he came to, he was in the water hoping someone would save him.

He told Dr. Mel Blaustein later, “It was incredible how quickly I had decided that I wanted to live once I realized everything that I was going to lose, my wife, my daughter, the rest of my family.”

He was plucked out of the water by the Coast Guard. On deck, a crewman leaned over him. “Do you know what you did?” the crewman asked. “Do you want to do it again?” Baldwin shook his head, amazed to still be alive. “No,” he said. “No, once is enough.”

He was taken to Letterman Hospital where doctors estimated that he had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving his injuries. Although his backside and feet took the brunt of the impact, causing major bruising, he didn't suffer any internal hemorrhaging or broken bones. He also didn't have any permanent injuries. When I asked him why he thinks he survived when so many others haven't, even though they, like him, probably regretted it the minute they went over the side, he says he has no clue. “I can never answer that question,” he says. “Dumb luck.” The fact that he had been a water polo player and diver in high school probably helped. Ironically, he had quit the school diving team because he was afraid of jumping off the highest platform.