The Bridge

Bill Brent published my husband Hew Wolff’s fiction in his magazine Black Sheets and his anthology Best Bisexual Erotica. Years ago Bill co-founded a recurring literary erotica salon (with Carol Queen) in which Hew and I performed (our literary work, for crying out loud!) We were scheduled to read there again this fall. Instead, we’re going to his memorial. Week before last, Bill Brent jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Last night I read Liz Highleyman’s obituary for him in the Bay Area Reporter.

I had my first back operation in medical school. For twenty-three years now, I’ve felt like someone poured molten lead down my left hip, buttock, leg, outer ankle and foot. I’m not talking sciatica, people. I’ve had that. This is much more severe and unremitting neuropathic pain in the distributions of L4, L5, and S1 spinal nerves.

In the middle of my medical residency, going to work at the hospital felt like hitting concrete at terminal velocity. I'd wonder if I could just jump off a bridge into the freezing Charles River instead. The thing was, by the time I reached the bridge I'd be late to work, and I can't stand being late, so I'd just go to work.

Still, I kept an IV needle connected by plastic tubing to a big syringe in my bottom dresser drawer. If I killed a kid by accident on the wards or just couldn’t bear life for one more minute, my plan was to give myself an intravenous air embolism. Once the hell that was my medical training was over, though, I didn't want to jump off anything anymore and was glad I had survived.

Five years after I left the practice of medicine, I’d had two more back surgeries. Bed-bound for months on end, I wished I had bought a gun before I became dependent on other people so that I could shoot myself. By the time I started to feel better physically, I no longer wanted a gun. There are ways to make chronic pain more bearable and alleviate the depression that almost always accompanies it, even if I can't be "fixed."

It unnerves me that a man as talented and kind as Bill Brent, a man only a couple years older than I, a man loved by so many, a man who made it easier for Hew and me to be who we are, despaired and committed suicide. Not being inside his head or his life, I can't judge whether it was right for him or not. From my window, though, it looks like tragedy.

If you have chronic pain, see a pain management doctor. See a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist or get a CBT-for-pain book or do CBT-for-pain exercises online. Meditate. It will raise your pain threshold and make it easier for you to cope. Take the stupid antidepressants--even if they don't lift all your depression, they'll help up-regulate endogenous opiate receptors in a part of your brain involved in pain processing.

Then if you still want to off yourself, that’s your right. The truth is, your chronic pain may never go away. Your pain probably won’t ever get completely better. You, yourself, though, might get better. I’ve survived twenty-three years. If you can stand it long enough, life gets better.

Bill Brent was a bridge. He connected people. Now that bridge is broken. He burned it. He’s dead. I hang over the smoking, splintered edge, looking down at him. He’s lost his beautiful Hawaiian tan. His face looks white as a shroud. Nothing I can shout or write can touch him.


Bill Brent