During a photo shoot yesterday, I was driving back into San Francisco with some friends and we all started to talk about jumpers. I suppose it’s an interesting topic, if anything, based on the attraction of the city’s landmark. I even knew a classmate from grade school who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. Though after reading a 2003 article from the New Yorker about Golden Gate Bridge suicides. What is interesting is the psyche and allure to the bridge as a symbol of mortality. In reality, the allure is trumped by the gruesome truth of physics.
In the four-second fall from the bridge, survivors say, time does seem to slow. On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, “I must be about to hit,” three times. But the impact is not clean: the coroner’s usual verdict, suicide caused by “multiple blunt-force injuries,” euphemizes the devastation. Many people don’t look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. “It’s as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up,” Ron Wilton, a Coast Guard officer, once observed.
What’s interesting to read is the study on what happens after a would-be suicide is prevented.
Dr. Seiden’s study, “Where Are They Now?,” published in 1978, followed up on five hundred and fifteen people who were prevented from attempting suicide at the bridge between 1937 and 1971. After, on average, more than twenty-six years, ninety-four per cent of the would-be suicides were either still alive or had died of natural causes.
It’s quite frightening how little it might take for some to jump, but I would imagine the moments right after you decide to let go of everything to be even more terrifying.
“I was like, ‘Fuck this, nobody cares,’ ” he told me. “So I jumped.” But after he crossed the chord, he recalls, “My first thought was What the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.”
This great article from the New Yorker also inspired the 2006 documentary about suicide jumpers, The Bridge.
UPDATE: The SF Chronicle has a diagram of all the reported suicides.
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