I volunteer for a suicide hotline. Been there. (Hold on.) Here's one I wrote for Ashley McKliness at America (great editor, wonderful human being).

By Gary Gately

America: The Jesuit Review, September 23, 2019

On Christmas Day 2011, I am clutching the railing of the George Washington Bridge, staring into the cold, black waters of the Hudson, into the face of eternity itself. I forgot I am so afraid of heights. The wind blows stiff and cold. The signs read: “If you’re in crisis, call 1-800...” and “Take5toSaveLives.com — How to spot the signs of suicide.” Police call boxes appear every few hundred feet along the bridge’s concrete walkway.

Here come two lovers, hand in hand. In another life, I was one of them. We were them. We ambled through Manhattan at midnight, long before the brilliant September Tuesday when the world changed, down there where the red and green lights now bathe the top of the Empire State Building, where the angels blow their horns and the skaters glide across the rink at Rockefeller Center and throngs fill St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which smells of votive candles lit with plaintive pleas in hope and desperation. The cityscapes in the store windows imitate life, life at least for the beautiful people.

So maybe it is true: Your life really does flash before your eyes in your final moments.

The shivers course through me. I think of bungee jumpers and classic manic depressive, high-risk, thrill-seeking behavior, and the shivers are not because of the cold but because the prospect is so tantalizing. Somersaults? A triple jack-knife dive? A spinning plunge? What is the difference, really? I have pondered it so many times, longed for it, prayed for it, played it over and over in my head. I had received the sacrament of the anointing of the sick from Jesuit priest Bill Watters, who is my father-confessor, my spiritual director, my conscience when I could no longer trust my own. I did not tell him of my plans.

Now the precipice awaits.

“Depression is like being sentenced to be alive.” — Mike Wallace

For seven years, I had kept those desperate moments on the GW Bridge a secret from all but family and close friends. Do not go public with it, some told me. Your kids will never live it down. Publishing that, one editor warned, would be, well, career suicide.

Then, Anthony Bourdain killed himself.?Tony Bourdain —a man who seemed to relish squeezing from every moment all the life he could and savoring it. If this darkness could take from us Bourdain and Kate Spade and before them Robin Williams and Ernest Hemingway, why should I keep my secret any longer? And so I feel compelled to share my story. Perhaps others may find solace and suspend disbelief just long enough to imagine not hating being alive.

They are not emotional cripples or immoral people who fail to recognize life for the gift it is, not evil people, not sinners who seek to violate the commandment “Thou shall not kill.”

Many of us are on social media much of the day and too much of the night, yet lonelier than ever.

All these things I had long associated with suicidal people.

This is an American epidemic of people suffering, so often in silence, suffering not a moral failing or emotional weakness but mental illness.

Suicides have surged 30 percent since 1999 in the United States and now claim an average of 202 Americans a day, more than 2.5 times as many lives as homicides. The young have become the most vulnerable: More teenagers and young adults die by suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, influenza and chronic lung disease combined. In a single year, 1 in 5 American high school students seriously contemplated suicide; 1 in 10 attempted suicide.

I think of the words of the newsman Mike Wallace, which played on a video during my first stay in a psych ward, in 2003: “Depression is like being sentenced to be alive.”

But again and again, I ponder the question I cannot answer: Not so much what drove me to the brink—depression, addictions while self-medicating, a marriage that disintegrated, but instead: What kept me from jumping? Why did life triumph in those desperate moments? What enables us to choose to continue?

For me, it is a sunset, my son’s whispers echoing, “I love you, Dad,” and a ghost, that of an editor who died in 2010, Anne Zusy. Sunset over the Hudson paints Englewood Cliffs all oranges and crimsons and purples, and I just gaze at it, savoring the beauty of last light.

Suicidal people are not emotional cripples or immoral people who fail to recognize life for the gift it is, not evil people, not sinners who seek to violate the commandment “Thou shall not kill.” This is an American epidemic of people suffering, so often in silence.

Then I look to the Manhattan skyline, and my mind meanders to interning at The New York Times. I hear the voice of Annie, echoing through the decades. Annie, the Times editor who had hired me and mentored me and saved me so many times, is saying: “Look, don’t worry, O.K.? Have some fun. You’re not meant to be miserable. God loves you, and he wants you to be happy.”

With that, I walk down the winding concrete pathway of the bridge to the subway at 181st Street, take the A train, then board the Megabus back home to Baltimore.

What saved me? No simple answers or solutions exist. People in the throes of deep depression cannot see a tomorrow of bright sunshine and love and joy. We see blackness, the sun blotted out of the sky, and can imagine only more darkness ahead. While antidepressants have been life-saving for many individuals, they have not slowed the suicide epidemic. Advances in psychiatry and better understanding of the mysterious workings of the brain have not. Being connected via screens has not. We are both more and less connected: Many of us are on social media much of the day and too much of the night, yet lonelier than ever.

People in the throes of deep depression cannot see a tomorrow of bright sunshine and love and joy. We see blackness, the sun blotted out of the sky, and can imagine only more darkness ahead.

People in the throes of deep depression cannot see a tomorrow of bright sunshine and love and joy. We see blackness, the sun blotted out of the sky, and can imagine only more darkness ahead.

Only light can pierce this darkness, and only love can shine that light. That means people who care—even when you have given them every reason to conclude you cannot be saved—can reach you: family, friends, loved ones, a priest, a coach, a volunteer on a suicide hotline, a therapist who recognizes that you do not snap out of depression that makes you want to die but that there is a path out.

Love is the answer. Nothing else could have saved me when I could no longer save myself.

Others, their love, their words, even words spoken decades ago, gave me enough hope to choose life over death.

Gary Gately is an award-winning Baltimore journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Baltimore Sun, United Press International, Youth Today, National Catholic Reporter and numerous other publications.

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