21
So I take a study break. And as a man named Steven Butler takes a shallow, panicked breath and steps off the railing, I watch.
I come here a lot these days, to Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, just to help. I left so much heartbreak behind, I like to come and try to do my part. I can’t do much, but I try. As the suicide capital of the human world, this place does hold a certain mystique for those of us who have already left it. We are drawn to the crossover, the thing that swallows up souls and spits them out into the other side, and this place is smothered in death. I can even sense a bubble of doom over the place – it simply radiates with blackness, with the lives of so many humans having ended in its midst. But it is very different from the vibe of, say, a hospital or a nursing home, where people leave who were already on the way out. The feeling here is urgent and violent and almost menacing – it is an angry, regretful energy. These suicide committers were frequently young and vibrant and in the midst of a battle they viewed at the time as unwinnable, and it is not until it is too late that they usually realize how grotesquely wrong they were in this view. And the blaring seagulls and towering cliff vistas and rust-orange girders rising into the wispy morning clouds are scheduled to witness yet another death this morning.
Humanity is one of the only species I have ever observed that finds death more attractive than life. It is an impulse that other animals are just not capable of feeling. Imagine an eagle soaring through the air only to ram itself into a cliff: these things do not happen. What does it say about humans that they are pulled so strongly towards their own graves? Why has Steven Butler come here today to end his own life?
In his own mind, so much has led to this. His whole life, really. His alcoholic daddy and his mama who slapped him when she was angry and his girlfriend who had given birth to a baby who may or may not have been their neighbor’s. Steven had always been the sidekick, the also-ran, ever since his only friend, Herman, was chosen as the lead in their school’s Guys and Dolls production while Steven had been a bit player in the background. The world was stacked against him, it seemed, and nothing he did or tried seemed to matter. So to fight the anxiety and the depression he slipped into the numbing calm of alcoholism, just like his father, but all that did was make him even more dead to the world. So he stopped paying attention to his daughter, the apple of his eye no matter whose loins she had stemmed from, and he stopped showing up at his job until they fired him. These days it simply felt like he had nothing more to work towards anymore. Nothing helped. All his life, it seemed as he huddled high in the girders of the Golden Gate on that surprisingly clear morning, destiny had pushed him to this, this point he could not escape from. So he jumped.
It is both fascinating and heartbreaking to see the thoughts of the people who jump, because it all happens the same way. The funniest thing, if this were funny at all, is how clearheaded they suddenly become as they step off the Earth one final time and their stomachs fall out from under them and the ground starts rushing closer. Every one of them, even the most depressed and unbalanced humans, think the same exact thing in the seconds between their decision to jump and their deaths. Many people assume suicide victims would see flashbacks of their lives or visions of their families in those few split seconds, but in reality, all they think is this:
Oh my God. All of my problems were fixable. What in God’s name have I done?
And then they hit the ground.
It is almost humorous to them, what a permanent solution they have sought to fix such temporary problems. As Steven soars through the mist, suddenly the silliness of his issues comes flying at him – and they were all so solvable. He could have borrowed money from his aunt to cover his car payment. He could have asked his landlord for a delay on his rent until he got a job. Even if he was working at the corner gas station, it still would have been a job. And he could have written a heartfelt letter to his ex-girlfriend asking for more time with his daughter instead of alienating her with his drinking and his sour moods, ensuring precious little time with his baby. And even if all this wasn’t possible, even if Steven ended up broke and homeless and living on couches, he would still have his life. He would still have lungs and a heart and a body to call his own. He would still wake up every day and get the chance to either fuck it all up or start all over again. But not anymore.
And as he plummets towards a destiny he no longer wants, the wind roaring in his ears as his body acquires the most eerily beautiful weightless sensation he never could have imagined, one thought slams into him just as he himself prepares to slam into the rocks under the bridge:
My life is over because a bunch of stupid, fixable problems. I cannot believe I just did this. I am dead.
As I fall with these sad souls, many of them even turn around to reach up and grab at the safe haven they have just leapt from. But it is a safety they will never grasp, a ledge they will never reach. They cannot undo the decision to die. They were drawn to death because they saw it as a fix, but all at once they realize it was a waste, a mistake, a coward’s escape. And at the last moment, as they hit the ground and one explosion of pain rips through them before they are instantly silenced forever, this has always been the final truth: not one person I have ever fallen with has ever been happy with their decision.
Just before he does hit bottom, though, Steven does something funny: he wakes up.
He opens his eyes. His studio apartment surrounds him. His dusty blinds are still hanging by his bed. His whites are still strewn about beside his hamper, the remains of a laundry day that never happened. His phone is still on the floor by his charger, two days away from being cut off due to unpaid bills. He reaches down and feels his legs. They are intact, not splattered across the rocks of San Francisco Bay, as they would have been if he had jumped. His arms are still attached, not severed by a girder forty feet from the ground, as they were supposed to have been. His lungs seem to be working, not full of the Pacific, as they would’ve been had he actually leapt. His thundering heart finally descending to a more manageable rate, he looks over at the map he’d printed out of the route to the Golden Gate Bridge the previous night to carry out his deadly deed. He wipes his forehead and reconsiders.
Steven Butler will not die today. During what he chose to be his last night on Earth, I intercepted his thoughts while skipping through dreams, and inserted this vision into his brain to terrify him into submission and breathe a second wind into his lungs. Now that he has seen what will happen if he does step off that beautiful orange bridge in three hours’ time, he will not drive to Golden Gate Park like he had previously planned. He will not creep to the edge and look down. He will push himself out of bed in five minutes and press restart on his life. He will rejoin his Alcoholics Anonymous group and he will read a book for the first time in three years and he will wash his old Nissan with the dented bumper and look at it with new gratitude in his soul and he will hug his daughter with all the love in this world he has decided to stay in. He will start over for all the people who will never get the chance to wake up, for all the people who stepped off that ledge and had to die with regret wracking their brains.
And to you, the person reading this: if you ever do try to end your own life, don’t think of Steven, the man who got to open his eyes. Think of all the people who left the world with one single thought careening through their brains as they flew toward the Earth at lightning speed, limbs flailing, stomach dropping out, seconds from an unavoidable oblivion:
I could have fixed my life.
I urge you to never become one of those people.
~
After helping Steven deal with his snapping point, I rush to someone else I know who is on the edge again. Cooper’s daughter is leaving him for boarding school, and he is slipping down a slope. After I feel his distress, I slip into the air around the Nichols’ compound in Atlantic Beach. Yes, I said that correctly: compound. He did pretty well for himself, marriage-wise, at least. Several of Lily’s older relatives recently died, and they left her their trust funds. Cooper and Lily bought half a block of land near the ocean, walled it in, and built a six-bedroom mansion, guest house, gardens, and the most spectacular pool on any planet anywhere. Lily has taken the boys to a soccer championship in Alabama for the weekend, and he had to stay with SJ while she studied. He is writing a poem in his office. I read it from over his shoulder as he writes:
I wish I could re-meet you
Undo all this damage I’ve done
Pull back the wrecking ball,
Go back to when we had it all
When the smile on your face wasn’t so small
So bring me there again
Because lately
All this feels like
Is me sticking in the knife
He sinks into his sadness as he writes, making me wince. Then he goes out and tries to watch TV with SJ, but he is low, and soon she asks him why.
Cooper had always suspected he loved SJ more than his own boys, and it made him feel both guilty and warm. Her whole life, SJ could climb into his lap, look into his eyes, and know exactly what he was feeling. But she was about to leave him for a boarding school in Connecticut – Lily’s ancestral school – and he was terrified. What would he do without her, without this little bawl of comfort he crawled to whenever his marriage hit the rocks?
“I can’t believe you’re leaving,” he says. “It felt like yesterday that I found you in that crib, and now…and now…”
SJ sits taller. Her cleft lip was repaired almost perfectly, but a faint scar still snakes across the skin above her lip. She is magnificent regardless. “Dad, what is it? Are you crying?”
And right then and there, he bursts like an afternoon raincloud. And it makes me burst, too, because as much as I am trying, he isn’t happy. And I can’t figure out why.
As she lets her father cry onto her shoulder, SJ becomes confused. Who was this person? She had never really considered until now that her father had been a different person, and had a different life, before she came along. She knew about me, of course, as the sphere of my death had always had a presence on the edges of her father’s life. But I had been presented to her as “dad’s good friend who died,” and nothing more. That explained why Chase (and his new wife) were sometimes around, and why Cooper had remained close with my mother. But now SJ wasn’t so sure. That someone you know and love has a whole mystery life simmering under their eyes: never was there a bigger shock.
So she scoots closer. “What is it? What is it, for real, Dad?”
And I smile, because this is by far the favorite name I have ever heard Cooper be called: dad. It makes me love him too much, actually, and I have to look away. Because I wish SJ knew about me – the real me. I wish she knew that someone else named Summer had also loved her father just as much as she had, so many seasons before her, and in such a different way. I wish she would kiss him every single day in my place, since I didn’t have the option. But mostly I just hoped she would shine. If that girl deserved anything, she deserved to sparkle. Forever.
“I just…I have trouble letting go, baby,” he says. “I’ve never been…good with goodbye.”
Oh, God, she thinks. Sometimes she wondered why her dad was like this, where he disappeared to when he’d stare off into the distance. She’d never wondered that hard, though, because he was just Dad to her, and she didn’t want to think about much else beyond that. But he simply wasn’t there sometimes, and that was clearer than heartbreak.
“You’re not letting me go,” she says, and I love her even more. “You’ll never let me go, Dad. You’re just…sending me on, I guess.”
He wipes his nose. SJ was usually the only person who could ever bring him back with her words, but even she was having trouble. “Yeah…yeah. You’re right. That’s true. I’m okay, I guess.”
But he is not okay. And she can feel it. He almost looks twenty-five again, he is so sad.
SJ sits up straighter. “That’s it. I’m staying. I’m going to Bolles. It’s only twenty minutes away.”
He looks over, looking lifted somehow. “No. No, SJ. You’re not changing your life for me. You need to go move on and make friends and, you know, do what your mother did.”
She settles into the couch in a happy sort of way. “Okay.”
He frowns, as he’d wanted more of a protest. His marriage was falling down a hill and he felt like an alien in his own life and he wanted his daughter to beg him to stay. But still, he could feel her love, and that was enough – for now.
I watch him and think about how much people can change, when they are allowed to. He isn’t my casual surfer boy anymore, he is a father and a husband and a member of the Atlantic Beach Chamber of Commerce. He even speaks differently now – sort of out of the corner of his mouth, like a turtle within a shell. He has calmed a bit, and his eyes have sunken in. But he is still Cooper. My thoughtful, stunning Cooper.
Then I think about legacy. The point of life is to outlast time, right? To create a thing or idea that will outlive your very frail and mortal body, therefore achieving immortality through the second life of something you have left behind. Humans go about leaving money and mansions and statues and accomplishments behind because they do not understand that love is a “thing,” too, and that leaving love behind is as valid a legacy as any dictator who ever set his name in stone. Love is stronger than a black hole, more vibrant than the sun, larger than Jupiter itself. I learned all this in my Lovehall. Any human who leaves love in the heart of at least one person will live on in the eyes of history, because that love will physically inhabit the soul of that person when they leave, and stay there. So forget about the trophies and the monuments: a little old woman who lived the smallest life the Earth has ever seen, who inhabited the furthest corner of the planet, will rise into the sun and live forever if she sparks love in the heart of just one fellow human.
God knows I didn’t leave behind a child, but I hope to still leave a legacy through love. All you have to do is pass on what you’ve learned, make at least one human feel a little less cold in the big bad world they find themselves in. And as I watched them I felt that maybe just by bringing them together, by joining Cooper’s path with SJ’s, I was in that room, too. I was there. Humans will never know how much of their lives are decided by the dead, how much of their paths are built by us. And so I look at the creamy curtains, the elegant furniture, the ten-foot fireplace, and I think to myself: I built this house, too. I’m here.
And then I feel Cooper’s thoughts: for some reason, he’s thinking of me. He’s picturing the last time a girl named Summer left him. He’s that boy again, standing alone in a hospital room, abandoned.
“SJ?” he asks, his eyes filling with clouds and waves and glowing seawater.
“Hmmph?”
“I just want you to know that I’m gonna love you forever, even if you leave. Okay?”
She gives him a crazy look. “Okay, Dad.”
And right there, in a dim living room in some forgotten corner of Northeast Florida, a father of three rises into the sun and becomes immortal.