Tag: jumpers

The Holidays Are Even Harder This Year

You aren’t alone.

Depression can be debilitating, especially in the wintertime when you can go weeks without seeing the sun. And it’s even worse this year, because this pandemic is isolating all of us. It almost seems like the final insult when there’s all this extra financial and emotional pressure during the holiday season. Everyone is expected to be constantly merry, and if you tend toward depression, that gives you this sense of failure on top of everything else. It can be draining.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a bridgetender and I love my job. Opening drawbridges is such a delight. I feel lucky that I’m someone who actually enjoys going to work.

But this job does have a dark side, and it is ramped up at this time of year. I get to see a lot of attempted suicides on my bridge and on other bridges nearby. Most of the ones I see have, thank God, been thwarted. First responders, in my experience, are very good at talking people off of railings. And some people make the jump and survive.

But there is a certain percentage who make good on their attempts, and it’s heartbreaking to bear witness to that. It happens a lot more often than the public realizes. These things often go unreported because the community doesn’t want to have copycats.

Jumpers are people in a great deal of pain, attempting to take control at a time when the rest of their lives seem so out of control. It’s sad to say that choosing whether or not to remain alive is the one power we all can exercise. These people, for whatever reason, cannot see beyond their despair, so they don’t realize the heartbreak and trauma they cause with their actions. Suicide doesn’t only impact the families and friends. It also impacts the first responders and everyone who gets to witness the suicide.

I know I’ve shed more than a few tears for people who have leapt off my bridge over the past 19 years. Tears flow for the jumper, for their family, and for me, because I couldn’t do anything to prevent the act. And also, selfishly, I shed tears because I know the image of those final moments will be forever etched in my mind. I carry many such images with me, and they feel like Marley’s chains in a Christmas Carol.

But I didn’t really intend to make this about me. What I wanted to say was that if you’re reading this and you’re in despair, there are people who can help you. You aren’t alone. If you are feeling hopeless or helpless, visit the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, or call them at 1-800-273-8255.

You matter. Your life has value. I promise.

I put some lights in my bridge tower window in the hopes that someone walking by on some cold, lonely winter night will look up and see that he or she is not alone.

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Mid-Month Marvels: Knits for Nature

Who doesn’t love a penguin in a sweater?

A recurring theme in this blog is the celebration of people and/or organizations that have a positive impact on their communities. What they do is not easy, but it’s inspirational, and we don’t hear enough about them. So I’ve decided to commit to singing their praises at least once a month. I’ll be calling it Mid-Month Marvels. If you have any suggestions for the focus of this monthly spotlight, let me know in the comments below!

I absolutely love it when a solution to a problem is also fun, and in this case, cute as all get out.

Knits for Nature came about because the Penguin Foundation on Phillip Island in Australia was struggling to save area penguins from multiple oil spills. It seems the oil would coat their dense feathers, and the penguins would preen, ingest the oil, and die. Heartbreaking.

The foundation did its best to wash the oil from these poor creatures, but it’s a painstaking process, and a little penguin line would inevitably form. While they waited, they preened and… well, you get the picture. So someone got the idea that if they wore little penguin sweaters while they waited, they wouldn’t be able to get to their feathers, and they’d be kept warm to boot. Brilliant.

So now you can actually volunteer to knit a sweater for a penguin. These sweaters must be a specific design, and not have any adornment that a penguin could swallow. If you’re a knitter, you can download the sweater pattern here.

Needless to say, the Penguin Foundation receives a lot of sweaters that won’t fit or are potentially hazardous, so they came up with yet another brilliant idea. Why not put those sweaters on penguin plushies and sell them to raise money for the cause? So now they do that, too, and you can buy one, here, along with indulging in all your other penguin-loving needs.

It makes me wish I had the time and talent to knit these jumpers myself. It’s really heartwarming to go to the website and see a photo of a man who lived to be 110 years old who provided them with many a jumper. Good for him.

It’s sad that Knits for Nature is needed in this world, but having said that, how cute and fun is this project? I ask you, who doesn’t love a penguin in a sweater?

Knits for Nature

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Positively Inspiring

Paige Hunter, I predict great things from you! Thank you!

There is a reason I haven’t given up all hope for the future. It’s that I keep coming across so many amazing young people who identify a problem and then come up with brilliant ideas to try to solve it. One such person is Paige Hunter, of Sunderland, England.

Paige has gone through some hard times herself, so she started to think about those people in despair who choose to jump off bridges. As a bridgetender, I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about them, too. But Paige turned her concerns into positive action.

Some of the messages she attached to the Wearmouth Bridge, along with the phone number to a support hotline for people in emotional distress, include:

  • If you end it now, you will be so deeply missed.
  • Even though things are difficult, your life matters. You’re a shining light in a dark world. Just hold on.
  • When things go wrong, don’t go with them.
  • You matter, you are loved, and people would be worse off if you died.
  • Fight with all you have. Tomorrow is always a better day.
  • Hope is enough (even if hope is all you have.)
  • If you’re reading this, I want to tell you how amazing you are.
  • You have the power to say, “This is not how my story will end.”
  • Look how far you have come… and then keep going.
  • Don’t you dare give up on this life. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
  • Step back. You’re worth it.
  • Pause. Stop. Breathe. There are better options, and so many people love you.
  • This isn’t how it ENDS.
  • Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start now and make a brand new ending.
  • It will be better. Please hold on.
  • It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you DO NOT STOP

What an amazing young lady. Due to her efforts, she got a commendation from the Northumbria Police Department. And this has created a great deal of media attention.

Due to that attention, she decided to do yet another positive thing, and raise funds for mental health. I’ll say it again: what an amazing young lady! Won’t you join me in contributing to her GoFundMe campaign? It’s in British Pounds, but your credit card will figure it out. Lets keep this positivity going!

Paige Hunter, I predict great things from you! Thank you!

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Helpless Stress

Sooner or later, every train engineer will have someone step in front of his or her train as a way to permanently solve a temporary problem. That must be a heartbreaking experience. You want to stop, but you know you can’t. I suspect that all you can really do is close your eyes, swallow really hard, and get ready to fill out a boatload of paperwork.

No doubt this sometimes happens to bus drivers as well. And I’m sure ferry captains have their fair share of jumpers, just as we bridgetenders do. I can’t even imagine what first responders deal with on a daily basis. It’s a part of these jobs that no one wants to talk about. Helpless Stress.

It’s that feeling of being completely out of control. It’s that desire to save someone, and not being able to do so. It messes with your head. It’s the kind of vicarious trauma that people don’t quite understand until they’ve experienced it themselves.

The most frustrating thing about it is you know you’ve been through something big, but you’re not physically hurt. Nothing shows. Your wounds are on the inside, where no one can see them. So your friends and loved ones often expect you to “snap out of it.”

If you have experienced helpless stress, I urge you to take it seriously. Talk to a professional; someone with experience in crisis or grief counseling. Don’t try to simply power through. What happened is not your fault, but if you choose to not cope with it, that can compound the problem.

You’re not alone. Help is out there. Please seek it out.

Helpless Stress

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The Perfectly Wrong Thing

Without a doubt, the absolute worst part about being a bridgetender is the jumpers. When I see someone attempting suicide, it leaves me feeling sick at heart. I truly believe that life is precious, and that no matter how awful it can sometimes be, the pendulum is bound to swing back the other way sooner or later.

But you can’t work on a drawbridge without seeing someone standing on a railing at some point. I have a theory that people who choose manned drawbridges as their place to end it all are doing so as a cry for help. After all, there are plenty of fixed and unoccupied bridges out there, and they’re usually higher. Why choose one that comes with a bridgetender?

This happens a lot more often than the public realizes. Fortunately, in the vast majority of cases, help arrives in time and they’re able to talk the person out of making this final, irreversible decision. Because the first thing I do, of course, is dial 911.

You see, I’m not a trained first responder. I’m not a mental health professional. And even though I have given it a great deal of thought, and have even written a post about what I’d say to a jumper, it’s the most important moment in that person’s life. Here’s someone who has decided that he or she feels completely out of control, and the only power left is to choose to stop living. That’s the last person on earth who needs to hear my ham-handed opinions.

So generally I call 911 and then gaze out the window, saying “Don’t do it… don’t do it… don’t do it” under my breath, like a prayer. I leave it to the professionals, and hope for a happy ending. And then I feel sick and jumpy until the end of my shift, and often vomit out the adrenaline when I get home. Talk about a bad day at the office.

But there was this one time. A time when I did everything wrong. I still have very mixed emotions about that incident.

I had been having a really bad day. I mean, one for the record books. I can’t even remember what the situation was, but I was kind of at the end of my rope myself. And then I looked out and saw a guy on the railing. Great. Just great.

And all of a sudden I got really, really angry. I guess it all became too much. And I thought of someone I loved who had died recently, and I know if he had been given a chance to live he’d have grabbed it with both hands and never let go. And yet here was this guy on the railing, about to throw it all away.

The last thing you should do when someone is contemplating suicide is yell at them. But I was seeing red. My ears were ringing. And before I even knew what I was doing, I threw open the window and shouted, “Do I need to call 911, or are you going to get your ASS off my RAILING???”

This could have ended very, very badly. This could have turned into something I would regret for the rest of my life. This was an extremely stupid thing for me to do. I still can’t believe I did it.

But just like that, he looked at me, meekly said, “Yes, ma’am,” hopped back down to the sidewalk and left. (When did I become a ma’am?)

All’s well that ends well, I suppose. But I guarantee you I will never, ever do something like that again. It was the wrong thing to do. It just happened to turn out all right that time. The bridge gods must have been watching over both of us.

I hope he got the help he needed.

long-way-down

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Why are Characters Drawn to Drawbridges?

The other day I was walking up the bridge to work and I saw the Barking Man. I immediately slowed my pace to assess the situation. The Barking Man is a guy who likes to fish off the bridge on mild evenings. When he’s on his medication he’s quite friendly, and we’ll exchange pleasantries. When he’s not, he’ll often lunge at me and do the best imitation of a Pit Bull with Rabies you’re likely to see in your lifetime. He barks. He slobbers. He growls and shakes his head rapidly from side to side. The first time he did that, after months of cordial conversations, I nearly soiled myself. He’ll never actually make physical contact, but to say it can be disconcerting is putting it mildly. And the worst part about it is you’re never quite sure who you’re going to get. Every once in a while at shift change, the oncoming bridgetender will have to tell the offgoing one that the Barking Man is out there and he’s off his meds. That at least gives the person who’s leaving for the night a heads up. But he’s not the first person on a drawbridge to be barking mad, and he won’t be the last.

crazy

Another time, I got stuck on the South end of a vertical lift bridge with the Preaching Man. The bridge went up, leaving me stranded on the roadway with this guy who kept his distance, but was shouting scripture at me. He was very adamant about it. I got on the radio to the guy who was driving the bridge and said, “You better lower this thing as fast as you can, ‘cause I’m out here getting saved whether I like it or not.” The scary thing about the Preaching Man is that I can easily imagine him deciding that one of us is the devil incarnate who needs to be dispatched, and when you’re working the South end, you’re a captive audience.

Same bridge, different day: I’m walking on the sidewalk, clearing traffic and pedestrians so the bridgetender could do a lift for a very large barge. The vessel was bearing down on us, and everyone was cooperating except this one homeless guy. When I told him he had to get off the bridge for an opening, he looked at me suspiciously, turned around and walked back the way he had come. That works for me. I don’t care where you go as long as you go. But just as he was about to step off the part of the bridge that goes up, he looked back at me and turned back around. Shit. Shit. Shit. I got on the radio and told them we had an uncooperative pedestrian, so they couldn’t open the bridge just yet. But meanwhile there’s this barge, he’s coming with the tide, and can’t exactly stop on a dime. And the river is too narrow for him to paddle in circles. We were all starting to panic. Then the guy stopped in the middle of the span, emptied his pockets and threw all his loose change into the river, then ran away. We got the bridge open with only inches to spare.

One night we heard a loud crash. We looked out and saw a car at the end of the bridge angled across both lanes. We ran down to see if anyone was hurt, and it was the strangest thing. There was only one car. The entire back hatch was shattered. And there was no one inside. Or outside. Or…anywhere. We called 911, and in an uncharacteristically prompt response, before we knew it there were cops everywhere. And then a helicopter with a spot light. Then divers. Nothing. They went to the address of the vehicle’s owner, and he was sitting on the couch drunk as a baboon on fermented fruit, and he says, “Oh yeah. I forgot to report that my car was stolen this morning.” Uh huh. Sure it was.

These are just a few of the millions of stories I have about oddballs and drawbridges. We get our fair share of crazies, drunks and jumpers on a regular basis. I’d tell you more but then what would I do the next time I can’t come up with a topic for this blog?

But I’d love to know what it is about drawbridges that seems to draw these people in.