A Not-So-Lighthearted Blog Post

I was walking to class. It was the route I take every day. But this day was different. I approached Ponte Garabaldi, the bridge I cross to get to school. It was lined with people, all looking over the edge into the Tiber river. Curious as usual, I wanted to know what was happening. I stood on my tiptoes, leaned to one side and another, and eventually crouched down to find a window between all of the legs. It was five o’clock. There was a raft in the water, carrying two men. “A woman jumped at three,” I heard someone say. And then I realized what I was seeing. The men in the raft were trying to salvage the body of a woman who jumped off the very bridge I was standing on. From the whitewater then emerged, face down, the waterlogged corpse. She was wearing a white coat and a scarf, but you could see that her skin had turned blue from the cold water. For what seemed like hours, the men tried to grab hold of her, each time missing by just an inch. She kept appearing and disappearing beneath the rough waters, lost amongst discarded trash and lost soccer balls. Everyone waited, holding their breath. Finally, they captured her lifeless body and hoisted it onto the raft. She was limp and heavy. The police waiting at the edge of the river struggled to lift her up, and immediately covered her with a white cloth, though one leg was left dangling over the river. The crowd dispersed. I stayed to watch as nothing happened for the next many minutes. The police officers stood around the body like it wasn’t there, smoking cigarettes and chatting. No one had the decency to place her leg under the cloth, or even to acknowledge that a human being had just taken their own life. The mere fact that someone had killed themselves was mortifying enough, but the fact that it took them two and a half hours to salvage her from the time she jumped is almost worse. I still don’t know quite how I feel about the experience, but I don’t feel good about it. For someone to do what this woman did, and in such a public way, is just as upsetting as it is infuriating. I walked away nauseous and quiet, thinking about all the lives I have in my life that mean so much to me. Who was this woman’s family? Did she have kids? Friends? What was her story and why did she feel that this was her only way out, and why this way?