Every time I walk over the Mass Ave Bridge, I wonder what would happen if I jumped.
I’m not suicidal, nor am I particularly morbid. I’m just curious. As far as bridges go, this one – which crosses Boston’s Charles River and links the city’s Back Bay with the academic institutions of Cambridge – is not very high. Certainly it’s higher than any diving board I’ve ever leapt from, but it’s nowhere near Golden Gate Bridge high. There are no barriers to prevent anyone from tossing themselves into the Charles – that once dirty, now relatively clean water of Boston lore – and people occasionally do. But jumping off the Mass Ave Bridge isn’t a death plunge, generally speaking. It’s probably more of a cry for help.
If I jumped, would I be able to swim to shore? How cold would the water be? How deep is it? The length of the bridge is approximately three tenths of a mile; there was a time when I could swim that distance easily. I haven’t swum in a long time, either for exercise or for fun, and definitely not for distance. Would I get through the water to the shore, or would something in the water get me first?
I rarely stop walking when this thought strikes me. And it never comes up when I’m walking over the Longfellow Bridge, another iconic city landmark that unites Boston and Cambridge. Just the Mass Ave Bridge.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been afraid of bridges. Gephyrophobia, it’s called, although it’s not a debilitating fear for me. I don’t avoid bridges, in general the fear only strikes when I’m driving over a bridge rather than walking, and it’s more pronounced when I’m crossing long, high suspension bridges. In my irrational mind, a suspension cable is much more likely to break than a road is to suddenly crumble into the river. That’s what I tell myself. Driving over the Mass Ave Bridge into Cambridge is child’s play compared to crossing, say, the Sagamore Bridge onto Cape Cod, over which I regularly find myself thinking that if it were to somehow fall to pieces, there would likely be no escape. My car would plunge into the Cape Cod Canal and that would be that; no amount of signs advertising the good deeds of the suicide prevention organization The Samaritans, which are featured prominently at both ends of the Sagamore, would be able to save me.
I never worry about bridges collapsing when I walk over them. This, in spite of knowing for a fact that most of the bridges in Massachusetts are in a sorry state of disrepair, and have been for years. My friend’s husband works for the branch of the state government that oversees the upkeep of bridges. When I learned this, curiosity got the better of me.
“So how safe are the bridges in Massachusetts?” I asked her.
“How do you feel about bridges?” she countered.
Touché. “I hate them,” I responded.
She didn’t hesitate before answering.
“They’re fine.”
I’ve never forgotten that conversation. But I still cross bridges. You can’t stay on one side of the river just because you have an irrational fear of something that will very likely never come to pass.
I’ve imagined my own death. Hasn’t everyone? It’s never a specific demise – always abstract: a Camille-like passing on a fainting couch, where I bravely but tearfully leave this world. It’s fleeting. I’m here one moment and gone the next, but in that brief passage I know I’ll be mourned. I imagine those who loved me will lament my departure, and those who wronged me will realize all too late that their chance for my forgiveness (I never consider what transgressions they may have committed against me) has passed them by. I am beautiful, if not magnanimous, in my parting.
When I was in junior high school, we were required to take swimming in gym, usually for a six-week period twice a year. Even though no one was exempt from the experience, it was – like so many things in junior high school – a twice weekly mini social death. You could escape that death on some level if you had seventh period gym. You wouldn’t be spared the humiliation of wearing a bathing suit, but at the end of the day it didn’t matter if your teal mascara ran or your Aqua Net underwent a chemical reaction when it combined with chlorine.
But if you had first period gym? Forget it. You had to arrive at school outfitted for the day in full hair and makeup. People would see you in homeroom and during the daily pre-homeroom promenade through the halls, when young people who were “going out” walked hand in hand with each other, and students lingered by their lockers before the four-minute warning bell dispatched them to homeroom.
All that makeup and hair spray was for naught once you hit the pool. No matter how much time Mr. Smith – the sometimes sarcastic / sometimes sadistic swim coach – gave us at the end of the period, it was never enough for a flurry of thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls to reassemble their 1980s hairstyles and faces. Total social annihilation, all before 9am.
I bring up swimming not because I hated it – quite the contrary. I enjoyed it. It was one of the few areas of physical education in which I truly excelled. What I remember most vividly about the experience is not the act of swimming, but a poster in the locker room, slapped on the heavy door leading to the pool.
It takes nine minutes to drown, the sign warned. It went on to describe exactly what went down in each of those nine minutes: the panic, the thrashing, the taking in of water, the eventual passing out and succumbing. The message was clear: drowning was painful and slow, and those who fell victim to it had the misfortune not just of dying, but of having enough time to understand that they were dying. Unless they were lucky enough to be knocked unconscious first, those who drowned generally knew they were drowning.
It’s not a pleasant way to go.
That poster struck a nerve with me the year I was fourteen. A minister at our church drowned that spring in a canoeing accident. Tom had been a chaplain at my camp the previous summer. In his 30s, he’d been a hit with the junior high set – kids who wanted to believe in God but were at an age where they were beset by angst and skepticism and rebellion. Tom had connected – hell, he’d canoed and rowed and sailed and swam with us – and now he was gone. And here was a poster in the girls’ locker room, letting me know in no uncertain terms just how he'd died.
I hated that poster.
That was the year I decided that when death came for me, it would be quick. No prolonged nine minutes of agony for me. Don’t get me wrong – I would fight it – but if the fight was destined to be one I lost, then by God I would lose it quickly and with dignity.
I sometimes think about Tom when I cross the Mass Ave Bridge. He had gone canoeing on a lake in the Berkshires after several days of heavy rain, wearing fisherman’s boots that were probably quick to fill with water and drag him down, Virginia Woolf-style, to the lake’s dark depths. His canoe was found a day or two before he was, and while it was never overtly said – at least, not that I can remember – it was believed he’d taken his own life.
I couldn’t fathom that. I had bad days, but I never wanted to die. And yet, during some of those dark junior high moments when girls can be cruel and the smallest slight can feel like the world is ending, I remember thinking, “If I died tonight, would those who wronged me today be sorry tomorrow?”
I wonder if Tom knew how sorry we all were in the tomorrows immediately following his death. If he’d taken his own life, then hadn’t we all somehow wronged him?
When I was a freshman in college, a friend’s sister was murdered in our hometown. The act was brutal and unbelievable and remained unsolved for nearly thirty years, despite occasional leads and clues and promotion on shows like Unsolved Mysteries and Dateline. It happened over Easter weekend, and one of my college friends, a particularly religious boy who meant well and was more of a believer then than I will ever be, said to me, “She’s in a better place now.”
A better place. How had being raped and murdered and left for dead in a field at the age of 24 brought her to a better place? She was supposed to be on Earth, beginning her life.
A better place? I didn’t think so.
An unsolved murder in a place where you’ve always felt protected – stifled, even – is an odd thing to comprehend. I mourned for my friend and her loss, but I felt guilty for mourning. What right did I have to feel sorrow over a tragedy that wasn’t mine? I think what I really mourned was the loss of the sense that my hometown was a safe place. However much I wanted to leave it, I didn’t want it to lose its innocence.
I didn’t want to lose my innocence.
The thought of jumping off the Mass Ave Bridge always hits me at the same spot: just beyond the walkway leading down to the Esplanade, the path by the river. It’s Pavlovian. I simply think, “I could jump.” I wonder if anyone would stop me. Would they notice the woman staring into the water, or would they remain entrenched in their own little secluded universes, kept secure with iPhones and earbuds and the little walls we put up, walls that protect us from strangers, but maybe not from ourselves.
This contemplation never lasts more than a few seconds. I think, I glance down at the water, I keep walking. Sometimes I study the city skyline, the view of this place I’ve called home for almost three decades. Sometimes I snap a photo of the sun just as it sets over the river, or the moon on one of those autumn nights when it seems to take up the entire sky, before I continue on my way.
I won’t jump off the bridge. I’d rather keep leaping into life.
Katie DeBonville is a writer and professional arts fundraiser who lives in Boston. Her works have been published in The LifeWrite Project’s The Corona Silver Linings Anthology, The Stonecoast Review, and Sad Girls Club literary blog. Katie is a January 2023 graduate of Lesley University’s low-residency MFA program in creative writing. In addition to writing, her interests include going to concerts, reading, and spending time with friends. Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/kdbonville