Leaping

I live close to a wonderful tall building in Baltimore called the Belvedere. It's an old hotel near the top of the hill that Charles Street runs up, and it's one of my favorite places. Its top floor has one of the best views in town.

This week someone jumped off the Belvedere.

All week I'd seen signs around the neighborhood--"have you seen this man? MISSING"--with a picture of a good looking fellow in black tie. My friends and I constructed elaborate fantasies about what kinds of trouble a kid that good looking could get into in our gaybourhood.

We were way off. He got fired from work, walked out, and jumped off the Belvedere to his death. No one even knew what happened to him, because he fell into an old abandoned office space behind the hotel. Only when a security guard happened to look out a window and see a hole in the roof below did they clue in. This man died horribly, and he died alone in an old storefront church.

I've never understood suicide. My father attempted to take his own life a few times as the result of depression, but thankfully never succeeded. I convince myself that this is because he really didn't want to die. It's incredibly difficult for me to comprehend the level of despair that sends you out of your workplace and up to a rooftop on a lovely spring day in order to fling yourself off.I cannot fathom the convincing sense that the world will not miss you, and may indeed be better off without you.

My response to incredible negativity is absolutely to internalize it, but I still have never reached the point where I think that removing myself from the equation permanently is going to help. It's something innate, I think. Something instilled in me by parents who, in spite of hating themselves, figured out a way to make me a little different. I never once think that the world would be better without me, even when I'm sure a party or a dinner or a date might benefit from my absence.

So when I was bitching about my dissertation and sweating over spacing and citations up in my aerie that faces the same street at the Belvedere, a young man, whom I will always envisage in black tie, took his complaints to his grave. I'm sorry I couldn't tell him that it would get better. I don't think he would have believed me anyway.