Even the most lethal methods of suicide have their survivors. In How Not to Kill Yourself Clancy Martin talks about people still alive after gunshot wounds to the head, massive ingestions of drugs, jumps from bridges. One of the fears of a person contemplating suicide is failure, ugly failure. If you survive a shot to the head you will be badly wounded, perhaps permanently disabled. How could life be better that way? Yet Martin reports on at least one man who survived the bullet and is glad to be alive.
What could be more lethal than a fall from the top of a skyscraper?
Elvita Adams, at age twenty-nine, in poverty and despair, leaped from the observation deck of the Empire State Building, eighty-six floors above the street below — and was blown back by a gust of wind onto a two-and-half-foot ledge on the eighty-fifth floor. She was pulled through the window by a security guard and taken to Bellevue, with a fractured pelvis.
When I read that, my jaw dropped. I had to read it to friends.
“The universe likes to play such jokes on suicidal people,” Martin says.
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