‘I did things in the war, things I can’t live with anymore. There are things I can’t talk about, things I’m not allowed to. But now that I’m dead it’s time you all knew. It was a covert operation on a Saturday morning in Saigon. I was in a café and I shot a woman dead, single shot to the head. She was going to blow the place up; least, that’s what I thought when she came through the doors. Turned out I was wrong. She never had a bomb, never had one at all.’
He stops for a moment, his faced clenched up. A tear drops on the page, smudges the ink.
‘Jan, you’re wonderful, you’ve been great in my life, same with Terry and the kids. You put up with my nightmares and moods, and I’m sorry for that. I understand why you divorced me. And I’m glad we stayed friends. But Norm, you let me down, and you, Tom, you did too.’
Richard looks up, lowers the page.
‘That’s where I got to when you ambos came in. What d’you think?’
‘Why don’t you finish it, Richard?’ I say. ‘Finish and send it. Mail it tomorrow when the post office opens.’ Then I think of a line John loves to use. You don’t need to take your life to make people listen.
Richard nods and agrees to come with us. As we drive him up to the hospital for counselling, I think of John’s words about making people listen. I hadn’t thought of writing a note when I was standing at the banister earlier in the day. It never occurred to me. Using Kaspia’s scarf would’ve said enough, I’m sure. But why say something in death that can be said in life? What’s the point in Kaspia finding out how much I really love her only once I’m dead and gone? She needs to know it now. She needs to know that I want to make a life with her, that our separation has beaten me. I want her to forgive me for my carelessness with what we had.
After my night shift I stay in bed and sleep until midday. I wake to the smell of my favourite soup and the sound of my brothers and sister in the kitchen. My parents must have told them I was doing it tough and invited them for lunch. Their concern is appreciated, but all I want to do is eat and go back to bed. I could sleep for a week, the way I feel now. The emotion of yesterday, on top of the shiftwork and sleep deprivation, has left me exhausted.
The person I really want to talk to is Kaspia; I don’t care about the agreement. But I have to be rested and clear-minded for that, and I don’t feel either of those things right now.
I stay another night at my parents’ house, then tell them I’m feeling more positive and drive back to mine. I may be in a better place emotionally, but my energy’s sapped. I feel like I’ve picked up a virus, maybe from one of my patients. So much for the paramedic’s super-immunity.
Late on Friday morning on the eleventh of January, I’m woken by a phone call. I see it’s Jerry. Damn it! Didn’t I promise to call him to see how he was going after our patient beat him up? Consumed by my own emotional crisis, I haven’t been looking anywhere but inward. I feel selfish and guilty.
‘So sorry, Jerry, I meant to call you. How are you?’
But Jerry ignores me. His tone is flat and serious. Is he still in shock from his assault?
‘Did I wake you?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, but no worries. You okay?’
Jerry clears his throat.
‘I’m really sorry to tell you this, but it looks like John went off The Gap late yesterday.’
I’m silent for a moment, not sure if I heard him right.
‘What do you mean?’
‘They found John’s car near the lookout. People saw a man go over. He landed on the rocks and a wave washed him out. There’s no body yet, but we’re pretty sure it was him.’
I can’t talk, can’t reply. I hang up the phone and get off the bed. The room is spinning. My breathing quickens and my heart thuds like it wants to escape. I walk in circles, gripped by anger. Then a surge of grief crashes over me. I don’t know what to do.
A few minutes later I pick up the phone and call Trevor, the area supervisor, to get more information. Like so many relatives I’ve broken bad news to, I feel as if I’m inside a dream, a nightmare. I need someone else to confirm it.
But I’m choked up and Trevor has trouble understanding me.
‘Okay, buddy, I can hear you’re upset, I’m staying on the line until you’re ready. Take your time. I’ve been on the phone all morning with other people crying too. Are you there?’
When I manage to get some words out I ask Trevor what happened. He confirms that witnesses saw John fall from The Gap, after which the police found his car in the no-stopping zone. He’d left it unlocked, his wallet with paramedic ID on the dash. An ambulance crew from Randwick was passing by and the police hailed them down and asked the paramedics if they knew the officer the wallet belonged to. Everyone in the area knows John well, loves and respects him. The two paramedics were understandably distressed by the sudden realisation of what must have happened.
‘Listen,’ says Trevor, ‘I’m sending a peer support officer over. She won’t be long. Sit tight.’
I pace around for a while until I calm down enough to phone Jerry back. He tells me police helicopters have been circling Watsons Bay all morning. Unfortunately the winds are high, the ocean churned up, the waves eight foot. The weather is rotten for aerial searches. But the police are carrying on in the riskiest of conditions.
‘We openly talked about suicide,’ says Jerry. ‘He told me he’d never do it.’
Recipients of tragic news are often numb and distant. I feel detached from everything around me now, as I try to grasp this turn of events, how it came to pass, how we all could have missed it.
John was displaying unmistakable signs of depression, but after his nephew took his own life, after seeing how hard the death was for his sister and parents, John swore he’d never put them through his own suicide. I can only imagine that all rational thought must have left him in the hours before his death, that he spiralled out of control on the afternoon he died, an afternoon when I was sleeping.
Barely a fortnight has passed since I last worked with John. Even though I was his paramedic partner at the beginning of his breakup with Antonio, even though I listened to him share his troubles with me before he shut himself away, like Jerry I never thought he would take his life. He went on helping strangers with their burdens at work, despite his own hardships. He could pick others up, but not himself. He’d counsel the depressed and suicidal with compassion, yet tell me in private he wished they’d ‘pull themselves together and quit complaining’. Perhaps it’s also what he said to himself, what many of us say to ourselves, quietly, on the inside. Pull yourself together, quit complaining. Why else are we so bad at seeking help? And what happens when we can’t pull ourselves together anymore, but won’t ask for help? What then?
This?
The peer support officer who knocks at my door is Mandy from the train job. I’m relieved it’s her because she’s kind, and we’ve always clicked.
‘Did you get the chewy off your pants?’ I ask.
‘Eventually,’ she replies, smiling. She gives me a hug and I make her a cup of tea, and we sit together on my balcony and look at the cloudy skyline over the city.
‘How are the others?’
She goes through the names of everyone at the station, one by one, as well as those who’ve recently left. Mandy tells me Donna’s inconsolable and is spending time with Antonio. Tracy collapsed on hearing the news, but she’s all right now. Matt couldn’t stop swearing. Others cried or hung up after finding out and haven’t been reachable since.
‘I’ll be visiting quite a few people today,’ she says.
Mandy was a friend of John’s too, and I suddenly feel bad it’s me being counselled. But she’s here in uniform, professionally, putting her own grief on hold to support the rest of us.
‘If only he’d called me,’ I tell her. ‘He asked me to call him and every time I did, his phone went to message bank and he’d never ring back.’
A depressed person, let alone a depressed paramedic, is not good at reaching o
ut. They’re much better at pushing away.
‘He did go to St Vincent’s a couple of times,’ she says, confirming what Lisa, his nurse friend, had told us. ‘They knew he was in a dark place, but he never alluded to suicide. He knew the proper things to say, right? He was smart, he could lie. Everyone’s shocked.’
John’s the seventh paramedic I’ve worked with whose life has ended this way.
Mandy says the Health Minister is well aware of the concerning rates of suicide in the industry. But what can be done? No one understands how we work, and the impact the work has on us. We’re like a counterculture, living on the fringes. Most other city folk go about their days and nights oblivious to the suffering, the psychological and social crises we engage with. From where we stand, our view of the world is pretty bleak. Black comedy and camaraderie sustain us for a while; so too does the easing of our patients’ pain. But the stress accumulates. We harden ourselves to the trauma, we harden the fuck up, but in doing so become hardened to ourselves. The high walls we have built for protection can block our emotional expression. They keep our suffering on the inside, and when something goes wrong, some of us implode.
It’s time to call Kaspia, to break the agreement. I need to talk. Life’s too short, too fragile not to act. I don’t care about those boots I saw in her house, a man’s boots. Kaspia has the right to do what she pleases, as do I, if I wanted to. But in the wake of John’s death, our uncertain relationship status doesn’t seem so important. She’s the one I can talk to, the one I’ve always talked to, with a heart the whole world could fit into.
She answers my call immediately.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me.’
‘I know. You okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m sorry to call.’
‘It’s fine.’
I’m relieved she doesn’t sound angry that I’ve broken our pact. I ask her how her show went and she says it was a sellout, a real hit with the crowd.
She asks me how my Christmas and New Year’s was.
‘No good without you.’
‘Of course you’d say that,’ she says with a laugh.
‘Happy New Year, by the way.’
‘Same to you,’ she says. ‘Is everything okay? Has something come up?’
She’s always had good instincts, Kaspia. She can read my voice as well as my face.
‘Yeah. It’s John. He took his own life.’
‘He what?’
‘He took his own life, up at The Gap.’
I can hear her voice breaking. ‘Oh, darling … I’m sorry.’
‘I wish he’d just called me.’
‘There’s no point in wishing, not now.’
I hear her sadness: for John, for us, for me. Her voice is reassuring, warm and comforting. The love I feel for her blocks the grief out, if only for a moment.
When she invites me over to her place in Balmain I want to say yes, that I’ll be there in an hour. But instead the fool in me replies, ‘You might have company, a date or something …’
‘A date or something?’
‘Yeah, like you did after your show.’ I try to explain, but dig myself deeper: ‘I was in the area and wanted to drop in, but saw a bloke’s boots through your window.’
‘You serious?’ she asks me, laughing. ‘You didn’t recognise the boots? They would’ve been Russall’s!’
Of course: no one wears boots like that in summer except our friend Russall the director. I’ve seen those boots a hundred times. And in my state the other morning, I’d forgotten that he lives up the coast and crashes in Kaspia’s spare room after shows.
I feel the tension in my body dissolve.
‘You really aren’t thinking straight, are you?’ Kaspia says.
‘I guess not.’
‘So, then, are you coming over?’
It’s a tempting offer. But I don’t want her to think that I’m using John’s death to garner sympathy, or try to win her back. And, as she rightly pointed out, I’m not in the best frame of mind, not yet. So I tell her I’ll give her a call, maybe in the next few days.
Our managers are arranging time off for everyone at the station, whoever needs it. But odd as it might seem to others, when my next shift comes round I go back to work. Matt’s there too, filling in for Donna. Maybe I’ve returned because I’m still in disbelief. When I go up the station stairs I see John’s pigeonhole full of payslips and letters, and when I go into the change room I touch for a second the cold metal door of his locker. In the lounge area, Trevor is waiting for us with coffees. As with the families we counsel after loved ones die, he patiently answers all of our questions.
‘How do you know it was John? How are you sure?’
Trevor says that the witnesses who saw John leave his car described him with precision. After John went over, a tourist on the clifftop somewhat morbidly took a photo of his body on the rocks below, before the waves washed him off. The police were able to examine the picture and show it to Antonio and a couple of John’s best friends for identification. When they fully zoomed in, it was unmistakably John, says Trevor. He was lying on his side, in shallow water, a unique tattoo visible on his leg.
‘It’s only a ten-minute drive to there from his place,’ says Matt. ‘You’re dead in twelve minutes.’
He’s right. When caught in the vortex of self-annihilation, it’s almost impossible to get out in twelve minutes. Research shows that when people decide to suicide, nearly half of them make an attempt straightaway. We all suspect John was intoxicated too, perhaps making it harder for him to resist the current he was in. His death sounded impulsive rather than planned, but it’s hard to be sure.
Suicide deaths nearly always leave behind loved ones wracked with guilt who wonder if they could’ve done more. The dreaded if-onlys are inevitable. We’ve heard them a thousand times. If only I’d come home earlier. If only I’d listened to her. If only I’d answered my phone. It’s a normal reaction, but one usually based on false assumptions, and our appropriate response as paramedics is to tell them they did all they could, that it was out of their control, that it would’ve happened anyway. We say these things lest their guilt become a crippling affliction. But even if guilt is overcome, the sadness never goes away.
Now it’s me who wonders if I did enough for John. At work he was distant, dishevelled, disinterested, as I’d never seem him before. The changes were dramatic, the signs of a man whose strength was fading. I should have known where those signs were headed. I’m trained to know, and I failed to act. Depression is treatable and I didn’t do the best I could to connect with him in his final weeks, especially in his final days. I was so caught up in my own world I didn’t recognise how much lower he had got. I never considered his depression could be fatal. But heartbreak is a psychological injury, and John was bleeding out.
There’s a bunch of flowers on the table in the station courtesy of Rose Bay Police. Matt tells me he accepted the flowers earlier from a junior constable who dropped them over. According to Matt, the constable said, ‘Here are the flowers for the guy who topped himself.’
Matt gives a short laugh. ‘Can you believe the cop said that? Crazy shit.’
Clearly the officer has more to learn about how to describe suicide and deliver condolences. But we’re grateful for the police response, the flowers, and especially the search. The Rose Bay Police have always been our partners at The Gap. It’s our tragic meeting place.
‘How long was John in the job for?’ asks Matt.
I think for a moment. ‘Twenty years or so.’
‘He would’ve talked down a heck of a lot of people in that time, wouldn’t he?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Who knows. Eighty? A hundred?’
‘Geez,’ he says, shaking his head.
For every person who dies at The Gap, many more are persuaded not to. Some by the police or police negotiators, some by paramedics, some by locals like the elderly Don Ritchie, who lives in a house opposite Jacobs Ladder on the southern side, a man
known to talk people down then invite them home for tea. I’m confident, in the end, that many of the people John rescued from the edge found hope and love, meaning or redemption, God or enlightenment, happiness or peace, in the land of the living. Some might even remember John, that gentle man who helped them see some reason as they stood at the brink, the point of no return.
But where were we when John was standing there? Our friend, our brother?
Before we pull out for our first job of the night, I can’t help thinking about John as another of the many lives I’ve had a chance to save, but failed to.
It doesn’t take Matt and me very long to figure out we’re not in a state to be working. We’re here, but our minds are not. Even my own sadness about Kaspia has been overshadowed by my intensifying grief. I can only imagine what John’s family, his parents, brother and sisters are going through right now, and what Antonio must be feeling.
It’s raining steadily and we drive staring quietly at the swishing windscreen wipers, lost in thought.
After a while Matt says, ‘Donna and some others went up to The Gap earlier today and put flowers on the fence. Tied ribbons to the wire at the place he went over.’
Given John’s affection for us, his was perhaps the most considerate method of suicide. Even so, while John might have spared us the trauma of discovering his body, he overlooked the fact that every call to The Gap henceforth will make us think of him.
The controllers go easy on us today, and for that we’re grateful. A thirty-six-year-old woman with numb hands; a man with mild back pain; another with an earache. Could a roach have crawled inside? He needs to know. The other night I welcomed non-emergencies as useful distractions, but now the patients grate on me. I’m tempted to share our loss with them, bring perspective to their ingrown toenails.
Then at 3 pm, much to our dismay, we’re off to The Gap.
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