Fractured from the Fall

The Coast

In the summer of 1996 a beautiful woman with long blonde hair and blue eyes stood on the edge of a cliff along the California Highway 1, deciding whether or not to jump. Or so it appeared. In truth, she had already made her decision and was, in fact, trying to determine whether the fall was great enough to kill her on impact or if it would leave her painfully clinging to life for hours before someone would finally find her dead bloated body. Her greatest fear was not the fall itself, nor her impending death, but more the idea that if not done properly, she might wind up a quadriplegic being fed through a tube. As mundane and troubled as her life seemed, she could think of nothing worse than being a vegetable for the rest of her days.

She found the largest boulder she could lift and tossed it over the edge watching it smash into pieces on the rocks below. While her form of suicide may have seemed a bit melodramatic to some; she felt there was no better way to leave this world than to have her last sight be that of the ocean she had always longed so dearly to live near. It was not an accident that she had asked her husband to plan their vacation this year to California, but instead a calculated measure on her part to die with the Pacific as her final resting place. It may have seemed an odd ending to those who knew her well for she had always been slightly terrified of the ocean. Its immensity and power both frightened and fascinated her. However, she felt there was a tragic beauty about being carried out to sea into the abyss. In her last moments she pondered why it had taken her so long to come to the decision to end her life. For as long as she could remember she had suffered from depression. She often wished that she could deal with her mental illness the way most people did by numbing the pain with alcohol or drugs. It would have been simpler that way. She had been a teenager in the 1980's after all. It wouldn't have been difficult to get her hands on just about any drug. But that wasn't her style. In her teenage years she drank just once and smoked marijuana twice. It only took those three times for her to quickly realize that mind and mood-altering substances weren't her cup of tea. She figured her head was messed up enough on its own; she didn't need anything else to make it worse.

The rocky cliff that she stood upon rose above the ocean to a height of nearly 100 feet. If it were situated further out over the ocean than it would have made a lovely spot for daring cliff jumpers. But the jagged rocks below kept people away. At one point the city thought of putting a guard rail in after a near fatal drunk driving incident, but the community objected on account of it being an eye soar and obstructing the view of some of the wealthier citizens' seaside homes. It wasn't unusual to see a passer-by, standing at the top, contemplating life or taking in the view, which is why no one pulled over to stop her as they cruised down the PCH or why no one even noticed when she tumbled over the edge.

It didn't take long for her to make the decision to jump. She had always been definitive in her choices and when she committed to something, she followed through. It was a characteristic that she had often been praised for in school and she found it somewhat ironic that it would now be the reason she would follow through with her suicide.

She closed her eyes and simply stepped forward letting gravity take over and do the rest. She didn't scream. In fact, there was a quiet dignity to her last moments as she fell freely through the air before her young body was sprawled out upon the boulders below. Her long blonde hair draped over the rocks, almost as if she had laid her head down for a nap. The waves pulled it back and forth, covering and uncovering her tear stained face. Somehow her head had not splattered on impact, which would later mystify the coroner's office. The rocks cradled her cracked skull, leaving it perfectly intact. One police officer was later quoted for the paper as saying, "her face looked eerily perfect, like that of a porcelain doll." "Only in the OC would someone look so perfect in death," said one local, although some felt it too callous a comment to print.

She lay there sprawled out on the sand like some sort of Shakespearean tragedy, yet her death was far from the most tragic element of the tale. Perhaps the most heartbreaking part of the story was not the suicide itself, but that her young daughters had been the ones to find her mangled body twisted among the rocks. The tide had gone out and left with it the remains of their mother. The two small girls had been skipping along the seashore, hand in hand, searching for shells when they stumbled upon her lifeless body.