Held to answer

Suicide is a tough sell, even in Oregon, which has a death-with-dignity law.

Everybody wants to save a life.

“We will help you cross this bridge,” says the signs on the Vista Avenue Viaduct in Portland. A phone number to a suicide prevention hotline is posted.

Portland has 11 bridges crossing the Willamette River, and they occasionally attract suicides. But it’s the historic Vista Bridge in the city’s southwest hills, overlooking Jefferson Street and a MAX train line, that has become known as the “Suicide Bridge.”

If you jump from the Vista Bridge, you will make the news – and not just a brief, either.

This past weekend, the body of woman who jumped from the Steel Bridge (as ordinary as its name), washed up on the banks of the Willamette River. In early accounts, the news brief even misspelled it the “Steele” Bridge.

Had this woman taken TriMet Bus 51, which stops near the Vista Bridge, she could have made an easy leap and won the attention of the Goose Hollow Neighborhood Association. No doubt there would have been demands to move the bus stop.

It’s roughly a 12-story drop from the Vista Bridge to the ground below, and so far this year five persons have jumped and died. The signs didn’t deter them.

Neither did trained volunteers patrolling the bridge. One of them watched helplessly as a 51-year-old man climbed over the side and ended it all.

Portland city officials this summer spent $236,000 to install a temporary nine-foot, chain-link fence along the bridge’s short railing to act as a barrier.

A few weeks ago a man found a way to bypass it. He leaned out from the old railing, threatening to jump for 12 hours while police negotiated with him.

City Commissioner Steve Novick considered the barrier a success.

“Time is our friend in these situations,” he said. “It allows people to think twice.”

Eventually, the suicidal man was taken to a hospital. Will he sue the city for erecting the barrier, saying it was an attractive nuisance? Will he try to sue The Oregonian for excessive coverage of Vista Bridge suicides, enticing people like him – with “the disease of mental illness” – to attempt a jump? Or will he return to the bridge, kill himself and then have his family sue the city for failing to erect a better barrier?

None of those scenarios seem far-fetched in our efforts to save everyone from suicide.

An honest discussion about suicide would recognize that there can be legitimate reasons for wanting to end your life. Death will happen to all of us, and suicide may be preferable to letting nature – or the medical establishment – take its course.

An honest discussion would also recognize that some suicidal subjects are worth saving more than others.

When I worked at a 24-hour crisis hotline in Spokane, Wash., the first suicidal caller I took was from a woman who told me, “Call my husband and tell him if he doesn’t apologize, I’m going to kill myself.”

We were trained to take all suicidal callers seriously, and there was an established protocol on how to keep them on the line and how to trace a call if someone had overdosed.

This woman sounded sober and angry. She seemed to know the protocol better than I did. After I completed the form we used for suicidal callers and handed it to one of the Mental Health Professionals, he looked at it and said, “Oh, her. She calls here all the time.”

By the time I left Spokane for Portland a year later, I had talked to several callers who resorted to extortion-by-suicide threat. Denied drugs or motel vouchers, they would lash out: “I’m just going to do it!”

Many people who call crisis hotlines are serious about killing themselves but want to find a way to live.  They may be bi-polar, or alcoholic, or drug addicted, or financially destitute, or severely depressed or in emotional pain from a break-up or job loss. The list is infinite. Take away the problem, and they would want to live. They call a crisis hotline looking for an answer.

Then there are people like my 69-year-old uncle who, on a spring morning in April 1991 in Huron, S.D., got up, drank his coffee, read the newspaper and then, while his wife went next door to visit a neighbor, put a gun to his head and shot himself.

His obituary simply said he “died at the Huron Regional Medical Center.” He didn’t bother calling a crisis line. He probably knew they couldn’t give him back his health. He knew he didn’t want to quit drinking. He made his choice.

To me, his cause of death was nothing to be ashamed of. It made sense.

When I told a friend about it, though, his reaction was indignant: “He left a mess for someone else to clean up!”

Yes, my uncle did leave a mess, just like most people. Unless a person dies in such a way that his body disintegrates, somebody will have to take care of it.

While my uncle’s suicide was not tragic, the recent suicide of a former coworker was.

Isamu Jordan was 37, a newspaper columnist, a musician, a teacher – and the father of two young boys.

When I worked at The Spokesman-Review, Jordan was so good-natured and hard-working I don’t recall anyone ever saying anything negative about him – an extraordinary accomplishment in a newsroom.

According to the Spokane County Medical Examiner’s Office, he died from combination toxicity of ethanol and diphenhydramine. That likely means a combination of Benadryl and alcohol.

While it doesn’t get the attention of jumping off a bridge, it’s more common than people realize. The amount of Benadryl involved is a giveaway that it wasn’t accidental.

Jordan left a mess that can’t be tidied up with soap and water. It’s hard to understand how – no matter how depressed his friends said he was – that he couldn’t seek a way to live for his two children.

He was the kind of guy that police, crisis hotline volunteers and Mental Health Professionals dream of saving.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

The Crisis Next Door