What a plunge!!! Was it worth it?

It’s not something we hear that much of – a suicidal jump off the Chicago Skyway into the Calumet River.

That's quite a plunge from bridge to river. Photographs by Gregory Tejeda

We’re more likely to hear of someone taking a plunge into the Chicago River – where the pollution likely would infect them with something more deadly than exposure to icy-cold water.

PART OF IT is that the Skyway is 10^th Ward – that far southeastern corner of Chicago that often feels ever so isolated. Plus there’s the fact that getting onto the Skyway isn’t that easy without a car. And even with one, there really isn’t a place to park it before jumping – you’re likely to get hit by a motorist somewhere along the 7.8 mile stretch before you can take the leap.

Unless you want to stop off at the McDonald’s franchise on the Skyway near the Illinois/Indiana border. How depressing would it be for one’s final image of life to be Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar? Or to learn that the particular McDonald’s franchise has gone out of business. No final glimpse of “Mayor McCheese” for you, bud.

So it is with that premise in mind that I read the news report from the Chicago Sun-Times about the person who got onto the Skyway, then took a plunge into the Calumet River.

Which for all I know is even more contaminated with industrial waste than the Chicago River ever was.

The Calumet River, a place where salt and sludge are stored openly

OF COURSE, CONSIDERING that the Chicago Skyway toll road is nearly 200 feet in the air, that would be one heck of a plunge – one that theoretically could kill someone before being exposed to the Calumet River water.

I was surprised to learn that the person who jumped Monday afternoon was actually still alive when pulled from the water by Chicago Fire Department rescue crews.

Taken to Advocate Trinity Hospital, the person was listed in critical condition initially, but then later died. Officials were not immediately willing to identify the woman, but said it is an apparent suicide.

Now I don’t know anything more specific about this incident other than what the Sun-Times was able to publish on their web site. I don’t know anything about who this individual was – or why she felt that life wasn’t worth living any longer.

The area bridge most people know - the Blues Brothers

ALTHOUGH IT WOULDN’T shock me to learn in the future that some of my cousins, aunts or uncles who still live on the Southeast Side may well have come into contact with this individual at some point in their lives.

Neighborhoods like South Chicago, the East Side, South Deering and Hegewisch do have the feel at times of isolated rural towns – feeling cut off from the rest of the city and sometimes even from themselves.

I do sympathize with this person, wishing they could somehow have found something in life to make them realize just how much it is worth living.

I know in my own case, the recent death of my brother has had me pondering more often in recent weeks about what the afterlife, if there is any, is truly like.

Truly an isolated part of Chicago

BUT IT ALSO has me convinced of the need to make what is left of the rest of my life as worthwhile as possible.

Because I suspect if there is an afterlife and I am destined to meet up with my brother again, he’ll be waiting for me and would pound the living daylights out of me if I were to let my loss of him totally devastate me into accomplishing nothing else with my time alive on Planet Earth.

I’d like to believe that the most significant thing I accomplish in my life has yet to be done. That’s the best way I can think of to pay tribute.

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Life way too short for some people

My belated condolences to Illinois Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno, R-Lemont, who this week lost her daughter, Lisa – who suffered a massive pulmonary embolism.

RADOGNO: Our condolences

What makes her death particularly tragic was not because of who her mother was. Or even her boss – she worked on the D.C.-based staff of Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill. It was her own age, or lack thereof.

SHE WAS ONLY 31. Lisa should have had a full life ahead of her.

Although the real question is to wonder what exactly constitutes a full life. It can be so short, or so long, or anywhere in the middle. And nobody knows exactly when their “end” will come. We truly have to appreciate every single minute.

Personally, I’m a little more sensitive to this issue these days on account of my brother, Chris. My younger brother has actually spent this week in an area hospital (we think he might wind up being released on Friday).

I had my own scare this week thinking there was a chance I could lose my little brother (he’s barely 44), even though every time I’ve seen and spoken with him this week, he’s claimed he felt fine – not at all out of the ordinary.

YET WHEN, BY pure chance, he had his blood pressure taken at a clinic on Monday (he was hoping to get some sort of medication for a sty that had developed on his eyelid), it registered way up around 240-something.

That’s hypertensive crisis territory. That’s where someone calls the ambulance and insists you go to the Emergency Room because they’re afraid you can’t drive yourself to the hospital.

He wound up spending a day in intensive care, and has since been put in a regular hospital room where he spends his days watching trashy television programs and reading the newspapers to keep up on happenings of the world.

While also complaining about how out-of-his-skull bored he has become, yet can’t go anywhere.

NOW DON’T GET the impression that I’m comparing my brother’s situation to that of Lisa Radogno. She died suddenly, while it seems my brother’s potential for a life-threatening situation was caught right at the exact moment before it became a stroke or a heart attack or something that could have caused me a lot more grief.

In fact, when I happened to be visiting him at the hospital on Thursday, I was present when a nurse took his blood pressure yet again, and it came out at a level that almost constitutes normal and healthy by American Heart Association standards.

 

Not ready to lose my brother yet

I’m fortunate. I’m likely getting my brother back – and suspect I have to be on call Friday to pick him up from the hospital when he’s finally discharged.

But if I think about it too closely, it becomes a near-miss. My brother isn’t ready to depart this realm of existence at age 44. Actually, I don’t think anybody is.

THEN AGAIN, LIFE isn’t fair. I know people I went to high school with who died at ages 19 and 22 – the former when his car was struck by a drunken driver and he went flying through the windshield because of the impact, and the latter because police said he was impaired while driving from having smoked too much marijuana.

It makes me think how they had too much still to do in life, just as my brother is in need of many more years of life to ensure he accomplishes all he wants to do.

Just as we’re going to wonder how much more Lisa Radogno would have accomplished with the extra 40 to 50 years that statistics indicate she might have had a chance to experience.

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