In the experimental and deeply personal essay-documentary The Joy of Life (2005)—a work of grief, drift, and creative synthesis—filmmaker Jenni Olson explores the lengthy and disturbingly busy history of people taking their own lives by leaping from San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. One fact leaps out at me above all others: though only a very tiny number of people have ever survived the plummet and impact, they all unanimously report that on the way down they wished they hadn't jumped.
At a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility in San Clemente, California, in 2006, one of the inpatients had concealed a credit card upon admission and one night not too long into his stay in residential treatment he left—shortly after sunset—and got some beer and whisky and went to go kill himself in a hotel toilet. The truly chilling thing was that he died in the hotel lobby...trying to get help.
I overdosed on heroin in 2003, turning blue and the whole deal, so I know how easy and unfussy a way to go that is...should they fail to resuscitate you. I feel like guns are much worse than intentional drug overdoses. With a gun you really can kill yourself so fast you almost don't even have to think about it. I am not ever going to own a gun though we did have them when I was growing up (my father was fastidious about storage protocols). And I've been mostly off hard drugs since 2003. I wouldn't know where to cop smack for the life of me. I'd have to go hang out outside the homeless shelter where I used to work and wait for an Artful Dodger to lead me down the emerald path.
What the world really actually needs is prayer and meditation, with also actually means tenderness, care, and the daily interrogations of ones own presumptions and prejudices that allow one to grow and foster better connections, even if just at the level of the nerve fibres. It's mostly the former drunks and dopers who go to great lengths to live this way, unreservedly, on a daily basis. Yes, they have a second lease on life, the twelve-steppers, but it is conditioned by abyssal foresight and grievous suffering. Hope and wonder will keep a soul alive and drawing breath, come what may. I bet on it, and not any more lavishly than does my main motherfuckin' man, Blaise Pascal, may he rest in power.
