Free The Final Leap by John Bateson Page B

she began walking across the bridge. Midway, she laid down her purse, climbed over the railing, and stood on the chord. Before anyone could stop her, she placed her cell phone on the girder and jumped. A bridge worker found the phone and pressed the home number on it. When Dave Hull answered, the bridge worker asked him if he’d lost his cell phone on the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge worker also told Dave that Kathy Hull’s purse was found on the bridge. Hull and his wife sat in stunned silence. A short time later, a police officer called. Kathy’s car had been found in the parking lot at Vista Point, on the Marin side of the bridge. That night, the Hulls were notified that their daughter’s body had been retrieved by the Coast Guard after someone on the bridge had seen and reported it.
    Dave Hull’s world stopped. For weeks he didn’t shave, get haircuts, tend to his garden, or report to work. He ate because he was told to, showered and brushed his teeth mindlessly, and didn’t want the world to go on. “It was as if I could be closer to her if nothing changed,” he says. “It was Joan Didion’s magical thinking; just a few hours separated me from Kathy alive. That’s not much. Isn’t there something I could do that would change that?”
    The year before Kathy died, Dave walked 120 miles on the Pacific Crest Trail, from the high desert to Mt. Whitney, the same path conservationist John Muir had followed. Dave planned to walk another section of the trail the following summer, and Kathy had asked to come along. He doesn’t know if he’ll ever make the trip now. “The Japanese have a saying,” he says. “ ‘White hair should go before black hair.’ ” In other words, grandparents should die before parents, and parents should die before children. “Losing a parent is shocking,” he says. “Losing a child is unspeakable.” His voice chokes on the words.
    Following Kathy’s death, Dave and his wife took eight weeks off work, spending much of the time walking through the redwood park above their home. “We ‘walked in beauty,’ as the Navajos say,” he says, “and every glimpse sliced and ached because Kathy loved the outdoors, the natural world, the plants and animals. Each glimpse of beauty, Kathy would never see.” Dave remembers trying to trick himself: “Well, Kathy won’t see this,” he’d say, “so I’ll have to enjoy it twice as much, for her.’ ”
    After eight weeks, Dave returned to work. He was employed by the National Park Service as the principal librarian at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park. It was a position he held for 38 years, until he retired in December 2010. From his office window he could see the Golden Gate Bridge. “I hated the words, ‘move on,’ ” he says. “It felt like a denial of Kathy, a forgetting of her, an erasure. I hated the words, the concept, the world’s evidence.” Instead, he ruminated over memories he had of her, agonizing over things he believed he should have done, but didn’t. The recriminations were so brutal that he contemplated suicide himself, believing—as many people do who have lost loved ones this way—that he was partly to blame. By not protecting his daughter, he was in some degree responsible for her death.
    â€œOf course I did not kill my daughter,” he says today. “Kathy jumped off the bridge. But in those first few weeks I conducted an excruciating accounting, attempting even to put percentages of responsibility upon everyone.” He ticks them off: upon himself and his wife; upon the mental health clinic at school where Kathy, four days before she jumped, sat for three hours waiting to see a particular therapist, but finally had to leave for class without seeing him; upon Kathy’s roommates and friends who might have heard