her husband’s dinner, getting ready to go to work as usual, then suddenly realizing: There’s no point.
In other words, the suicide that appears impulsive to outsiders is often the result of inner preparation that may have been going on for a long time—perhaps even, as Albert Camus suggests in his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, unconsciously: “An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps.” Survivors of suicide attempts that they themselves describe as “impulsive” may be unaware of how often and how deeply they may have been thinking about the act (which is not to say that such acts are necessarily preceded by any obvious warnings). We are generally unaware of our habitual ruminations, prior notions, and mental rehearsals, and the suicidal in particular often develop habits of secrecy and duplicity. If the survivor of a suicide attempt describes their unsuccessful effort as “impulsive,” this may simply mean that they were not conscious of their motive at the time, or that they are ashamed to tell the truth. As Douglas Kerr remarks in his book Forensic Medicine, “The most unlikely people sometimes take their own lives, and their behavior immediately before the act frequently gives no indication of their intentions.”
In short, no one can know exactly what goes through the mind of a person who takes his or her own life. They may have been struggling with suicidal feelings for many years for unknown reasons. They may have barely been managing to maintain balance for weeks, perhaps months, before something finally tips them over the edge. It could be anything or nothing: a look, a gesture, a toothache, a headache, an unpleasant word, a fleeting, transient thought.
After the suicide of Dr. F. from the Tobin Bridge, local residents suggested that antisuicide barriers should be installed, as they have been on other bridges and landmarks known to attract suicidal jumpers. Such arguments are usually overruled on the grounds of expense, the fact that such barriers spoil the “life-enhancing” view (and may themselves even inspire thoughts of suicide), and the “common knowledge” that anybody wanting to kill him or herself will do so in the end, one way or another.
But every human mind is different, and each case is unique. Some people have a constant and profound desire to die that only grows more intense over time. Others may be genuinely suicidal, but if they have no opportunity to act, their feelings may gradually change. The suicidal impulse may manifest itself again when the chance to act arises, but it may not. It may appear in another form, or it may fade away altogether.
The idea that “anybody wanting to kill himself will do so in the end” was disproved at least thirty years ago by the British “gas suicide study,” which found evidence that between 1963 and 1975, the annual number of suicides in England and Wales showed a sudden, unexpected drop at a time when suicide was on the rise in most other European countries. This abrupt decline in suicides, it turned out, correlated with the progressive removal of carbon monoxide from the domestic gas supply, as the government had discovered that natural gas was much cheaper to use. The reduced suicide rate was an unanticipated and accidental consequence of this conversion, proving that most of those unable to kill themselves in the kitchen did not, eventually, look for different keys to Death’s private door.
Rey Rivera may have had good reason to be in the neighborhood of the Belvedere when he went missing, since the offices of Agora are in Mount Vernon, the historic district north of downtown where the former hotel is situated. He may even have been meeting someone in the Belvedere’s Owl Bar, which is open to the public, although bar staff have no recollections of seeing the conspicuously tall, handsome man that day. Still, even if he went to the Owl Bar, there was no reason for him to be anywhere else in the building, especially not on the roof, which is out of bounds even to condominium owners, who are legally entitled to access all the residential floors. And those who knew Rivera describe him as reliable and responsible, not the kind of person who was prone to spontaneous acts, of which jumping off a fourteen-story building is perhaps the embodiment.
Among the ranks of suicides, those who leap to their deaths have a special place. They are widely agreed to be the most impulsive. All you need is somewhere high. There is no need for any preparation—the gun, the noose, the car in the garage, the plastic bag, the razor blades, the right amount of medication. Most suicide methods hold the promise of pain, but high places are dizzying, intoxicating; with the sight of sky comes the idea of flight and final deliverance. In this regard, gravity is your friend. “To the mouse and any smaller animal,” writes J.B.S. Haldane in his essay “On Being the Right Size,” “gravity presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft.” But as the saying goes, the bigger they come, the harder they fall. “A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.” Those who leap from high buildings into public places are, even if they are not conscious of it, angry with somebody, or perhaps everybody. They want to make an impact. They want to ruin your day.
The Owl Bar, date unknown
In a 1914 article on the many causes of human fear, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall described those who are afraid they will suddenly jump from a high place with no reason:
Very common is the impulse, usually very sudden, to hurl oneself down from towers, windows, roofs, bridges, high galleries in church or theater, precipices, etc., and not a few grew rigid, livid, clenched their hands and teeth, clung almost convulsively to railings or bystanders, or had to be held by their friends from plunging off in order to escape the tension by “ending it all” or “to see how it would feel” to fall or get the “beautiful sensation” of it. . . . The pure suicide motive in these cases is often a sudden eruption, it is a good opportunity to die and have it all over in a moment. There is little doubt, however, that this jumping off instinct in the young and old may lead to death without any real plan of suicide.
For many years, the Belvedere was one of Baltimore’s tallest buildings, and accessible to anyone with enough money to book a room for the night. Unsurprisingly, it has had its fair share of jumpers. For example, on February 22, 1954, thirty-three-year-old Dr. Marvin Alpert registered at the hotel with his twenty-seven-year-old wife, Lorraine. The couple had been married for just over five years, and had a young daughter. Normally, they lived at the Park Drive Manor, a large apartment-hotel in Philadelphia, but the previous October, Lorraine had been admitted to the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins, suffering from depression.
Dr. Alpert, a respected ophthalmologist at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, arrived in Baltimore that morning and went directly to the clinic to pick up his wife to spend the day with her. The weather was chilly, and Mrs. Alpert was in no mood for sightseeing, so it makes sense that the couple spent their conjugal visit at the Belvedere. Dr. Alpert was planning to stay overnight in Baltimore and to return to Philadelphia the following morning. Lorraine had to be back at the clinic by six p.m. About an hour before her curfew, Dr. Alpert left his wife in their fifth-floor room while he went to make a purchase at a nearby drugstore. When he returned, the room was cold, and his wife was nowhere in sight.
The window was standing open. Alpert ran to it, looked over the edge, and saw Lorraine lying unconscious on the roof of the hotel kitchen four stories (about fifty feet) below. An ambulance was called and a crowd gathered. Mrs. Alpert was barely conscious when medics retrieved her from the kitchen roof; they took her to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she was found to have two broken legs and a fractured skull. She died two hours later.
Mrs. Alpert, with her history of depression, was clearly at risk, but on the whole, jumpers rarely show the usual warning signs associated with suicidal behavior. Compared to those who use other methods, jumpers are less likely to have known histories of mental illness. They have fewer previous suicide attempts. Jumping from a high place offers ease, speed, and the certainty of death, all of which encourage impulsive action. In general, however, perhaps because it is so resolutely final and demands a certain steely bravado, jumping accounts for only 2 percent of suicides worldwide. In the United States, firearms are the method of choice for men, and overdoses for women. In Europe, where firearms are more difficult to come by, the noose, for