LY #106 Jumper

(c)Justin Sullivan Getty Images from Slate

In mid-February 1976 I was thinking about calling Sally and asking her how she was doing.  I was living in Pocatello at the time, had been married for three years, and was in the last semester of my undergraduate career.  I'd heard, I'm not sure from where, probably in a letter from Mom, that my oldest was feeling down again.  But I'd been putting contacting her because I hate talking on the phone.  I had written to her.  I preferred and still prefer writing letters to live non-f2f communication because the phone doesn't offer enough nonverbal cues to the Other's meaning.   I also found interactions with my older sister difficult because her state of mind wasn't predictable.  Sometimes her thought processes weren't completely intelligible to me.  Even when she was completely lucid her conversations could fly around multiple topics, mixing theories of psychology and metaphysics at a far higher level of understanding than I possessed.  And most important she, like other members of my family, could evoke deeply uncomfortable shame response in me even without trying.

So I thought, "Well, I'll call her on Valentines Day.  That would be a good time."  But I didn't. 

Two days later, on February 16, 1976, I got a call from my mother.  She began the conversation as usual.  "Hi, dear.  How are you?  And how's Will?"  But there was something wrong with her voice, some flatness, in spite of her attempt at normality.

"It's Sally, isn't it?"  I asked.

And it was.  She had finally succeeded in her five year attempt to kiss death.  She had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.  My father had been required to identify the body.  She had already been cremated.  There would be no funeral.  No need for me to drive home.

No funeral.  Who made that decision?  Was it Dad, afraid of what the neighbors and his colleagues would say?  Or Mom?  She always hated funerals, saying in a disgusted voice that they were for the living.  I think I actually heard her mourn my sister only once, and that was almost 15 years later just before her own death.  I believe that one of the reasons for the burst blood vessels that killed her was my mother's generational commitment to repressing the terrible.

But I could not be silent.  I did go back to Los Gatos where I held a couple of private ceremonies of my own.  I walked on the beach twenty miles from our home and poured wine into the sand and water.  I also contacted an old friend of hers and we mourned her together.  Then I returned to Idaho where I spent two weeks wearing a black armband.  I also told the story to anyone who would listen and wrote poems and essays.  Like my Dad, I am someone who usually manages the dark by bringing it into the open, saying "Look at this ball of darkness I hold -- consider its weight and size."

But it's small, was always small, considering the heavy ball of darkness carried by my parents,  Mom until her death at 73 in January, 1991, and Dad until 2004 when he passed into the elsewhere at age 90.

Sally Jane Hanson Death Certificate 1976