Mark Morford has a column at sfgate.com—the online presence of The San Francisco Chronicle, which in the daily-delivered flesh is getting frighteningly anorexic—about your average Golden Gate Bridge jumper. A single 40-ish male, just like him. Mark always writes beautifully:

I do know that when I cross the GG Bridge these days, I tend to glance over at those guard rails and safety wires with a different sort of appreciation, awareness and sighing sense of wonder.

… as do we all. I suddenly remembered, in my case, why. One day some years ago I opened the paper to find that someone I knew had gone off the bridge. My first therapist. A brilliant, tortured soul, who, much like David Foster Wallace, could not, despite ongoing heroic measures, find relief. It was a terrible and vivid shock, all the more because of an unwanted vision—of him, in the water—and an unwanted thought: now I am a real Californian.

Here is this astonishing architectual icon set against one of the most beautiful backdrops in the world, all teeming with life and movement and possibility, and all quietly underscored with a dark thread of sadness and depression and death.

Several years before I had a consult with a psychiatrist whom the therapist also happened to have seen. This doctor expressed the cheerful opinion that it was too bad the therapist had not succeeded at his then-current suicide attempts. The doctor was such a nice man, I was so taken aback that I fell silent. And still wonder what he meant. A would-be suicide is a pain in the ass? To his psychiatrist? To his family? I shall never know; I never saw the doctor again.

Tags: california, david foster wallace

§ One Response to “A Real Californian”

• annie says:

  18 September 2009 at 2:42 PM

  wow. i loved morford’s words, natch. was also touched by yours and they remind me that i need to write about my experience with a jumper. i didn’t know him, but i watched him climb up and jump. that experience is with me every time i cross the bridge, even though it was 29 years ago. his home made shirt read: “death’s poet.” (according to the newspaper report the next day.)