I Saw a Man Take his Own Life Today

By: Erik Rittenberry

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“Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank — but that’s not the same thing.”

― Joseph Conrad

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By mid-afternoon, the heat had risen well into the nineties. I’m looking up in the blistering sun on a blue-sky summer day. Above me, about 35 feet or so, is a young man in his early 20s standing on a ledge. He seems calm despite his daunting circumstances.

Perhaps I should tell you that I’m a firefighter by trade. That’s what I do for a living. We were requested by the police to “standby” for a psychiatric patient who was threatening to jump to his death. We staged with all of our medical equipment near the area he would potentially land if he decided to go through with it.

The negotiators were up there near the desperate man, trying to convince him out of his desperate hour.

The young man stood on the cement ledge, looking down at the hard, graveled earth, almost in a trance. Occasionally, he took a sip from his water bottle. Occasionally, he put his face into both hands. I saw his mouth moving. I don’t know if he was talking to God, himself, or the negotiators.

As time went on, he gained more courage and became less calm.

His right hand, which helped stabilize him on the ledge, left the wall. He tossed his empty water bottle down to the earth. I saw the soles of his shoes gradually inch over the edge. He slowly swung his arms back and forth as one would do, preparing for a high dive in a pool.

My heart ached for this human. What unimaginable anguish he must be enduring. Something eternal was happening to this man on an inconceivable level. “You don’t know if the roof is leaking,” it’s been said, “unless you live on the inside.”

But sometimes, out of our smug ignorance and lack of understanding, we tend to judge suicides quite harshly and perhaps unfairly. “Cowards,” we like to call them. “I don’t understand how anyone could do this,” we sneer. It is impossible to see and comprehend things unless you first have a notion of it.

Perhaps we condemn so sternly because we have never been there. The fear of death haunts us so deeply that to see someone voluntarily partake in it is quite unthinkable to the healthy-minded.

But in truth, no one is exempt from the possibility of one day arriving at such a desperate hour.

Each and every one of us could be just one tragic event, one head injury, one traumatic episode, one family breakup, one financial collapse, or one immense heartbreak away from being in this man’s shoes.

In due time, the world will break everyone. Suffering and anguish are inevitable for the living, and we can’t escape it.

Some cope with booze and drugs. Some become workaholics or TV/entertainment addicts. Some retreat into the “loving arms of religion” or take up some cause. Some become artists and creators, creating out of an aching sense of discontentment in an attempt to remake the world in a more sensical and orderly way. “Art is born,” Tarkovsky tells us, “out of an ill-designed world.”

In our own way, we aim to bring a little order to the chaos of existence. We find clever ways to weaken the agony of being a self-conscious creature who so happens to be uniquely aware of its looming fate.

Albert Camus once said, “The literal meaning of life is whatever you’re doing that prevents you from killing yourself.”

Staring up at this man on the ledge, the words of the great American writer David Foster Wallace came flooding into my head. Unfortunately, he wrote this profound passage not too long before he took his own life in 2008. He writes:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing.

The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows.

Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant.

The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.

And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

As I stand here in the hot summer sun, I gaze up at this man and try to focus in on his face, wondering what’s truly going through his mind at this moment in time. What brought him to the point where the terror of life now outweighs the terror of death? What was “the thing” that shattered all hopes, all values, all alternatives?

A few times, he almost slipped and then caught himself. He was hesitant to go through with the ultimate act, which gave me hope for a few minutes. Perhaps he just needed attention. That’s all. He didn’t want to end it—no, not at all. He just wanted to remind people that he was alive. He wanted to make a scene. He just wanted a little acknowledgment, a little love, someone to beg him not to do it.

My hopes quickly faded.

He put his phone to his ear and briefly conversed with someone on the other line. Then, he nonchalantly tossed the phone down to the earth.

His arms were now swinging faster. His focus on the earth below was unwavering. His breathing increased. I saw it in his face. I knew the dreadful moment was here.

Like a slow-motion video, I watched this man lean forward to an unrecoverable position. Every cell in my body was screaming “NOOOOO” as his body left the safety of the ledge. He dropped swiftly, and my face winced. I closed my eyes until the heavy thud of his broken body pierced my heart.

Beneath the beautiful blue skies of a sad, sad world, I hoisted the medical equipment over my shoulder and made my way toward that woeful, unforgettable sound.

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