# data[].attributes.body
While researching the topic of housing, I decided to review some poems I had written during my time at UWE to see if I could expand on anything I had written before, as we were also looking into memory and the emotions of moving home (which happens frequently throughout university due to the nature of student housing). This is when I came across a short descriptive piece about a woman named Joyce Carol Vincent who passed away in her home and was not found until 3 years later after bailiffs came to evict her. Joyce's story was turned into a documentary by Carol Morley, reflecting on her life and relationships through interviews and recreations.

It feels like a eulogy - a dedicated memorialisation of a woman who was forgotten but will live on forever through this film. I’ve linked the trailer here: Dreams of a Life Official Trailer (2012) - HD Movie

Doing further research into her life and re-watching the documentary inspired me to continue to freewrite about her bedsit, and how it must have looked during those years. I then rewrote it into a more structured fly-on-the-wall piece, taking information from the documentary and news articles to spin it into a gruesome description of time moving on around Joyce’s body.

I titled the piece Kodokushi which translates to ‘lonely death.’ It is a Japanese phenomenon of people dying alone and not being discovered for a long time, attributed to the increasing elderly population. The first nationally reported case was in 2000 when a man was discovered three years after he had passed away in his home. “Finally, after his savings were depleted in 2000, the authorities came to the apartment and found his skeleton near the kitchen, its flesh picked clean by maggots and beetles, just a few feet away from his next-door neighbors”. (Onishi, 2017)

As I was re-reading and composing the script for Send Him My Love, I decided to cut down and rewrite Joyce’s section as it felt somewhat insensitive to talk so vividly about the life that continued on around her. This allowed me to focus more on the scenery and being descriptive about the state of decay that evolved during those three years as opposed to trying to be gross and crass about cockroaches and mouse droppings.

My heart breaks for Joyce, and it's clear that other people's hearts break too as demonstrated in this article by Peter Walker in 2015 for The Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/mar/27/the-film-that-makes-me-cry-dreams-of-a-life

He goes over how deeply haunting Joyce's story is, and how Carol Morley emphasised that the fear of being forgotten is not irrational as it happens more than we think it does...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dreams of a Life Official Trailer (2012) - HD Movie

# data[].attributes.body
Send Him My Love is a project created from my personal experience of grief. It is a story that has been told by someone who is grieving, for others who are grieving. The process of grieving is certain, much like death itself. It is impossible to experience love without experiencing grief afterwards.

"Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go" (As The Lights Wink Out. . . – All My Loose Ends, 2014)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is a story about a dog and as it goes on it turns out it's not really about a dog at all.

A few weeks ago, my Dad's old bulldog Max came to stay with us. The nature of why is personal, but Max needed a safe space for a while and Big Daddy and I agreed. We'd been debating getting another dog for the dog (long story) and both of us loved Max.

Max was recovering from tumor removal, which Big Daddy and I were all too familiar with, and he had some swelling and infection going on. A trip to our vet found us trying to sneak fourteen pills a day into food Max would eat. For a while, things were going well. Max was himself. He was ornery and greedy and we couldn't get enough of his funny bulldog faces.

I debated drawing eyebrows on him.

But, Thursday Max began to refuse to take his pills and by Sunday he was doing poorly. You know the end of this story, of course. Max was 10.5. He weighed 115 pounds. He was a big dog and an old dog. Big Daddy and I took Max to the vet on Monday and we didn't bring him back home.

Max, you see, was the rotten little brother. He stole toys. He knocked people over. He may or may not have peed on people's legs. At one point, he stole the Princess's beloved teddy bear and tossed him into the air over and over again with glee until Mom caught him and took N-N away. He was annoying and funny and we all loved him.

Max was my Mom's last dog and over the years the pets that lived with her at her end have all gone on; crossed the rainbow bridge or wherever pets go. If there is heaven, they must go there because how could it be paradise without a cat in your lap or a dog at your feet? But, I'm digressing. First it was Sylvester and then it was Jasmine and then just Max was left as the old guard. And now he, like the others, has gone.

Grief, I've learned, is really love. It's all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you loved someone, the more you grieve. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.

It's taken me seven years to realize that my grief is my way of telling the great vastness that the love I have still resides here with me. I will always grieve for my Mom because I will always love her. It won't stop. That's how love goes.

When my Mom first died, it was easy to find touchstones to draw me back to her. The car she drove was my sister's and was still parked in the driveway. The place she worked was still busy and I could catch a glimpse of her desk through the swinging doors whenever I wanted to. Sylvester was really her cat and spending a few minutes petting the patch of white hair on his chest connected me again. We found great value hammock and stand sets so we bought her and Dad the hammock that was strung between the two trees at their place Up North. All those things; these beings and people and places are like a connect the dot puzzle. They draw the line backward. Mom worked here, the little lights whisper. Can't you see her standing over there? Mom sat there, the little lights whisper. Remember the little visors she bought the Princess so they could drive with the top down? But one by one, over time, those little lights start to wink out. The car is gone. So is the place Up North. The home we grew up? A thing of the past. The place she worked? It's gone too and so are Sylvester and Jasmine and now Max. The lights wink out over and over again and she moves farther and farther away to a place where she's not easy to touch and to find anymore.

I won't say it's the worst. That wouldn't be true, but it's hard every time another light winks away. Max's light is just another light in the line of lights that have already gone dark. Mom petted him. Mom walked him. Mom yelled at him and gave him treats and played with him.

Wink.

In the end, it was Max's big heart that was his undoing. Scientifically, the vet explained how these things happen and what they see in big dog's like Max, but while I understand all the words that isn't it, exactly. Max had a big heart inside his big body because he loved us. His heart was big because he was joyful and playful and protective. It wasn't a flaw or a fault of old age, just a good old dog who loved his family.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is a story about a dog and as it goes on it turns out it's not really about a dog at all. A few weeks ago, my Dad's old bulldog Max came to stay with us. The nature of why is personal, but Max needed a safe space for a while and Big Daddy and I agreed.

# data[].attributes.headline
BOJACK HORSEMAN - The View from Halfway Down

# data[].attributes.subject
BOJACK HORSEMAN - The View from Halfway Down

# data[].attributes.body
The View from Halfway Down is by far my favourite episode of BoJack Horseman, inspired by Top Girls by Caryl Churchill and Edward Albee's Three Tall Women. Both plays about women reflecting on their own lives as well as the lives of others. The episode touches on themes of loss, suicide, indecision, and regret. It tells the tales of characters who had passed away, sitting together at dinner and eating their last meal before they died.. A bucket of drugs, ice cream, a can of rations, and nothing at all. The title comes from a poem, which is recited in the episode, about commiting suicide by jumping off of a bridge and regretting your decision. As Secreteriat is reading the poem, a door behind him looms closer and closer until it swallows him as water would a jumper.

I've linked a clip of the poem below. The image of the door inspired my penultimate drawing of an open door leading into blackness before the closing image of the performance - a closed door with flowers resting on them.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The final half-season of BoJack Horseman, which dropped on Netflix in January, saw the titular equine antihero spiral away from the redemption arc of the season's first half. BoJack, a recovering alcoholic, former sitcom star, and frequently terrible person (or horse), saw the sins of his past exposed to all of Hollywood, became a pariah, and relapsed, ultimately confronting death in the series' haunting penultimate entry, "The View from Halfway Down." Here, episode scribe Alison Tafel explains how the BoJack writers cracked one of the year's most acclaimed half-hours of TV.

TV episodes often begin as notecards on a board. "The View from Halfway Down" began as one.

For years, BoJack Horseman writer Alison Tafel says, showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg had had an idea that BoJack ( Will Arnett) would somehow end up at a dinner party with all of the show's characters who had died, and a notecard representing the idea-reading simply "dinner party"-"floated around" the entire time the writers' room was planning season 6.

"We knew that we wanted it to maybe happen this season, and then when we realized it was the last season, it was like, 'Well, it has to,'" Tafel tells EW. "Eventually, it landed on being the penultimate episode, which I think was really fitting."

Each season, BoJack Horseman fans would await the penultimate episode with bated breath. Though widely considered some of the series' best entries, those episodes reliably delivered the show's darkest moments and most bruising gut-punches: BoJack trying to sleep with an old friend's teenage daughter, his former costar Sarah Lynn's death, a journey through his elderly mother's dementia-stricken memory. As literally and figuratively the penultimate BoJack episode to end all penultimate BoJack episodes, "The View from Halfway Down" would be no exception.

Over the course of the episode, BoJack slowly realizes he's dying, drowning in his pool while on a bender and experiencing a surreal vision as his brain shuts down. But first, he and the other characters-Sarah Lynn ( Kristen Schaal); his mother, Beatrice (Wendie Malick); his old friend Herb Kazzaz ( Stanley Tucci); his Secretariat costar Corduroy Jackson-Jackson (Brandon T. Jackson); his uncle Crackerjack ( Lin-Manuel Miranda); and Zach Braff (yes, that Zach Braff)-gather around the dinner table and discuss their lives, the point of existence, and what true goodness looks like.

The episode "burst open," Tafel says, once the central concept "changed from being a dream to, 'What if [BoJack] is in this limbo of, is he going to wake up from this or not?'"

"That really created the driving force of what the episode was about," she continues. "From there, it then became a fun kind of one-act play [with] philosophical discussions of what it means to live a good life, and what it means to be a good person. Because I think those are the things that everybody grapples with, but especially if you're dealing with your possibly impending death."

Heavy material, of course, but as always on BoJack, it's leavened with humor. The dinner party eventually gives way to a talent show, with the characters performing various acts-a song, a dance, a roller skate routine-and the dialogue is peppered with the series' characteristic wit. (Says Zach Braff, listing his regrets, "I never got to license the Zach Braff Short Stack Breakfast Attack at Shake Shack!")

"We were combing through and finding places where there could still be humor, so it doesn't feel like we're talking like we just read philosophy books for the first time, you know?" Tafel says with a laugh. "There was no way it was not going to be funny, because this is how comedy writers touch upon darker things. This is just what happens when you ask a group of funny, funny people to talk about something serious and dark."

The writers also scattered elements of surreality throughout the episode, from nods to BoJack's reality outside of the dream-a perpetually dripping ceiling, bottled water tasting like chlorine-to more esoteric touches. (Tafel refuses to explain the bird in the opening minutes: "I love all the different theories; they're all right and they're all wrong at the same exact time.") For instance, when BoJack's father, Butterscotch (also voiced by Arnett), arrives midway through the episode, he appears as BoJack's hero Secretariat with Butterscotch's voice.

"That was Raphael's idea from the get-go," notes Tafel. "I feel like it's really relatable-we've all had those dreams where you're like, 'I was with my mom, but my mom was Dolly Parton.' And then there's something about Secretariat being this male figure that BoJack has really idolized throughout the show, and a father who was aloof and not a good father. Combining them, I think, was really fitting, talking about the father you wish you had versus the father you had."

In one of the episode's standout moments, this Secretariat/Butterscotch hybrid recites a poem called "The View from Halfway Down," a reference to Secretariat's suicide by jumping off a bridge. The poem was penned in real life by Tafel (with Bob-Waksberg adding two stanzas), who initially pitched a joke where Secretariat would start to read a poem and get cut off.

"I didn't have any intention to have a poem in the episode," the writer says. "I put it in the outline, and Raphael read it and he was like, 'Where's the poem? Alison, you can't set up a poem and then not have a poem.'"

"I always get really nervous when you see art in art," she continues. "The example I always give is, you know in She's All That how Rachael Leigh Cook's supposed to be this great painter, and then you finally see her painting at the end of the movie, and it's really terrible, but it's supposed to be quote-unquote good? So I was really nervous about writing a poem, because it's like, 'Do I try for it to be good, and then it's actually bad, and that's embarrassing, or do I purposely make it bad because it's comedy?'"

Bob-Waksberg offered his input, suggesting the title and the concept, of writing the poem from Secretariat's perspective as he falls from the bridge-"To which you go, 'Oh, great, so you have to try to make it good,'" Tafel says. "You can't write a bad poem that's about such a serious topic." And she got an extra dose of encouragement from her husband, who "wrote me a poem just to say, 'Anyone can write a poem,' which was really sweet of him, but also annoying, because he's not a professional writer," she adds wryly.

Like most TV shows, BoJack was written collaboratively in the writers' room, with all of Tafel's colleagues contributing jokes and story points, but eventually, she went off to pen the episode script by herself. "My favorite thing about working on BoJack was, Raphael really allowed you to feel ownership of your own episode, meaning you did feel like it was your script," she explains. "However, you also felt very taken care of, very supported by all of the amazing writers throughout the process."

Bob-Waksberg gave Tafel two plays to suggest the tone and style of the episode, Top Girls by Caryl Churchill (about several dead historical figures having dinner together) and Three Tall Women by Edward Albee (about an old woman reflecting on her life). "They're very experimental in how they write dialogue," Tafel says. "I think [Bob-Waksberg] was just wanting me to feel the influence of that style of dialogue overlapping, for me to then infuse into the episode. Which I tried to, and then he took it and made it much better."

Director Amy Winfrey and the show's animators also contributed plenty of their own touches, embellishing and adding to Tafel's script. "For the talent show I just wrote, like, 'Beatrice dances,' 'Sarah Lynn sings a song.' So all of the choreography and the visuals for the talent show were all a big surprise," Tafel says. "Also, when [BoJack] went outside to talk to his father-slash-Secretariat, I just had that they were on a porch, and [the animators] changed that to being the bridge, which I thought was also very wonderful."

It all added up to an episode that received immediate and near-unanimous praise, earning the series its second Emmy nod for Outstanding Animated Program and landing in many a roundup of the best TV installments of the year. For Tafel, though, the most meaningful responses have been the reactions to the poem shared with her on social media.

"Not a day goes by that I don't get like a message from somebody telling me how much that poem means to them," she says. "That has been the craziest part of this experience, because I was just happy it didn't suck. I think it really resonates with people, and I'm really proud that it's a positive message about regret, about changing your mind. I've had so many people say to me, 'This poem really helped me change my mind about doing something myself.' That's incredible." That's the power, as the poem says, of knowing about the view from halfway down.

Related content:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Best of 2020 (Behind the Scenes): How 'BoJack Horseman' showed us 'The View from Halfway Down'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here's how the 'BoJack Horseman' writers cracked the show's haunting penultimate episode, 'The View from Halfway Down.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Bojack Horseman: "The View from Halfway Down" Poem (S6 EP15)

# data[].attributes.body
The View from Halfway Down is also (strenuously) inspired by an article called Jumpers (2003) by Tad Friend for The New Yorker. This article also inspired a documentary called The Bridge about suicides at Golden Gate Bridge in Chicago - the number one suicide spot in the world. I found and watched this documentary, taking notes as I went.

It was morbidly fascinating, watching people debate extending or ending their lives by teetering over the edge of a 250-foot drop. The tragedy for me is that they installed a suicide-prevention net to deter people, yet jumpers land on the net and take that second leap towards the waters below.

This article by The New York Times outlines the impact that the installation of the net has had on suicide attempts at the bridge, and how effective it has been in preventing them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231105151047/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/us/golden-gate-bridge-suicide-nets.html

Contrast between sightseers peering over the edge and jumpers assessing the drop.

Children climbing up railings to get a better view while adults climb over to throw themselves off.

Catching suicide on video seems invasive

Interview with kite surfer who almost died after a jumper fell close to his board. Harrowing and traumatising. Impact of suicide on bystanders and family.

Lowest point of someone's life vs high point of adrenaline with diving.

Bridge overlooks Alcatraz - notorious for being almost inescapable. Juxtaposition to lack of suicide prevention on bridge.

Man on railings stood facing traffic, spread his arms and fell into the water below. Liberating.

Vanishing. Two unrecovered bodies.

Employees of the bridge and tourists last people to see them.

"It happens all the time.."

Interviewing families of jumpers seems invasive yet I want to hear more.

Family witnessed jumper smiling and laughing loudly as she went over the edge

"A glorious way to draw attention to oneself!"

Incredible pain to think the water below would be better than continuing to suffer

An act of freedom and release

Parents fully understand the pain that their child was going through through the death of that child

Experiencing suicidal ideation

Felt the suicide was eventual

Unable to really help

Third attempt at suicide, thoroughly researching others who had done the same at the bridge

They were fully prepared to die and let their parents know.

Drivers honking to stop them

Nervous, joking to tourists it's a long way down

State of disconnect from filmmakers to jumpers

The regret of being halfway down and unable to stop

The miracle of living through it

Seven seconds to fall. Seven seconds to change your mind and try to save yourself.

Loving the idea of being famous for jumping

Friend of jumper felt angry and yet relieved to know that they were free of mental distress

"I don't have answers for why he did it, just a bunch of anecdotes."

"I don't know why he jumped. Maybe he wanted to fly."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Shortly after ten-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, March 19th, a real-estate agent named Paul Alarab began hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge. Midway along the walkway, which carries pedestrians and cyclists between San Francisco and Marin County, he stopped and climbed the four-foot safety railing. Then he lowered himself carefully onto the bridge's outermost reach, a thirty-two-inch-wide beam known as "the chord." It is on the chord, two hundred and twenty feet above San Francisco Bay, that people intending to kill themselves often pause. On a sunny day, as this day was, the view is glorious: Angel Island to the left, Alcatraz straight ahead, Treasure Island farther off, bisecting the long gray tangent of the Bay Bridge, and, layered across the hills to the south, San Francisco.

Alarab turned and looped a thick rope over the railing, then wound it around his right wrist five times and grabbed it with his gloved right hand. His weekday attire usually consisted of a business suit with a "Peace" T-shirt underneath, but today he wore black gloves, black shoes, black pants, a black T-shirt, and black sunglasses. Through the palings of the bridge rail and the rush of traffic, he could see the mouth of the Bay to the west and the Pacific beyond. Clasping a typed statement to his chest with his left hand, he leaned backward, away from the railing, and waited for help to arrive.

Alarab, a forty-four-year-old Iraqi-American, was a large, balding, friendly man who kept a "No Hate" sign in his office at Century 21 Heritage Real Estate in Lafayette, across the Bay. The day before, he'd told a co-worker that the prospect of civilian deaths in Iraq made him sick to his stomach. Alarab had chosen this day, the first of America's war against Saddam Hussein, to make a statement of opposition.

Responding to a "10-31," bridge code for a jumper, four uniformed California Highway Patrol officers soon arrived at the rail, joined by three ironworkers who had been repairing the bridge. Alarab told them that he wanted to speak to the media. As it happened, a number of TV crews were at the south end of the bridge, filming standups about heightened terrorism precautions. A Telemundo crew came out, and Alarab began to read a declaration about Iraq's defenseless women, children, and elderly. "Wake up, America!" he said. "This war will be known as 'the war of cowards and oil' across the world!"

As a Coast Guard cutter idled in the fifty-five-degree water below, the bridge's guardians tried to talk Alarab into coming up. "When CNN gets here, I'm back over the other side of the railing," he promised. One Highway Patrol officer said, "Hey, don't I know you?" Alarab squinted, and said, "Oh, sure!" They had met during Alarab's previous adventure on the bridge: in 1988, seeking to publicize the plight of the handicapped and the elderly, Alarab had climbed down a sixty-foot nylon cord into a large plastic garbage can he'd suspended beneath the bridge. His weight proved too much for the apparatus, and the can broke free with him inside. "It seemed like the fall lasted forever," Alarab said afterward. "I was praying for God to give me another chance." The fall broke both of Alarab's ankles and three of his ribs and collapsed his lungs, but he lived-becoming one of only twenty-six people to survive the plunge from the Golden Gate. "I'll never put my life on the line again," he said at the time.

Survivors often regret their decision in midair, if not before. Ken Baldwin and Kevin Hines both say they hurdled over the railing, afraid that if they stood on the chord they might lose their courage. Baldwin was twenty-eight and severely depressed on the August day in 1985 when he told his wife not to expect him home till late. "I wanted to disappear," he said. "So the Golden Gate was the spot. I'd heard that the water just sweeps you under." On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. "I still see my hands coming off the railing," he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, "I instantly realized that everything in my life that I'd thought was unfixable was totally fixable-except for having just jumped."

Kevin Hines was eighteen when he took a municipal bus to the bridge one day in September, 2000. After treating himself to a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles, he paced back and forth and sobbed on the bridge walkway for half an hour. No one asked him what was wrong. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. "I was like, 'Fuck this, nobody cares,' " he told me. "So I jumped." But after he crossed the chord, he recalls, "My first thought was What the hell did I just do? I don't want to die."

Paul Alarab never told his colleagues about his first experience on the bridge. He didn't even tell his wife, whom he married in 1990 and divorced in 1995. The only hint of his fascination was his business card, which he resisted changing despite his boss's complaint that it looked unprofessional. The card featured a photo of Alarab on the shore of the Bay; behind him lurked the Golden Gate.

On that March morning, facing the camera, Alarab read an ambiguous handwritten addendum to his statement: "I would sacrifice myself as a symbol of children that will die. If you are antiwar, e-mail me at alarabpaul@hotmail.com." After forty minutes, CNN had not arrived and it seemed that Alarab had done all he could. It was 11:33 a.m. He bent to put his statement on the bridge, then placed his cell phone on it. He then unwound his wrist from the securing rope and stepped off the chord. The officers on the walkway craned their necks in a horrified line, watching him fall.

At a 1977 rally on the Golden Gate supporting the building of an anti-suicide barrier above the railing, a minister, speaking to six hundred of his followers, tried to explain the bridge's power. Matchless in its Art Deco splendor, the Golden Gate is also unrivalled as a symbol: it is a threshold that presides over the end of the continent and a gangway to the void beyond. Just being there, the minister said, his words growing increasingly incoherent, left him in a rather suicidal mood. The Golden Gate, he said, is "a symbol of human ingenuity, technological genius, but social failure."

Eighteen months later, that minister, the Reverend Jim Jones, who had decamped with his People's Temple to Jonestown, Guyana, ordered his adherents to kill themselves by drinking grape Kool-Aid mixed with potassium cyanide. Nine hundred and twelve of them did.

Every two weeks, on average, someone jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the world's leading suicide location. In the eighties, workers at a local lumberyard formed "the Golden Gate Leapers Association"-a sports pool in which bets were placed on which day of the week someone would jump. At least twelve hundred people have been seen jumping or have been found in the water since the bridge opened, in 1937, including Roy Raymond, the founder of Victoria's Secret, in 1993, and Duane Garrett, a Democratic fund-raiser and a friend of Al Gore's, in 1995. The actual toll is probably considerably higher, swelled by legions of the stealthy, who sneak onto the bridge after the walkway closes at sundown and are carried to sea with the neap tide. Many jumpers wrap suicide notes in plastic and tuck them into their pockets. "Survival of the fittest. Adios-unfit," one seventy-year-old man said in his valedictory; another wrote, "Absolutely no reason except I have a toothache."

There is a fatal grandeur to the place. Like Paul Alarab, who lived and worked in the East Bay, several people have crossed the Bay Bridge to jump from the Golden Gate; there is no record of anyone traversing the Golden Gate to leap from its unlovely sister bridge. Dr. Richard Seiden, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Public Health and the leading researcher on suicide at the bridge, has written that studies reveal "a commonly held attitude that romanticizes suicide from the Golden Gate Bridge in such terms as aesthetically pleasing and beautiful, while regarding a Bay Bridge suicide as tacky."

Unlike the Bay Bridge-or most bridges, for that matter-the Golden Gate has a footpath adjacent to a low exterior railing. "Jumping from the bridge is seen as sure, quick, clean, and available-which is the most potent factor," Dr. Jerome Motto, a local psychiatrist and suicide expert, says. "It's like having a loaded gun on your kitchen table."

Almost everyone in the Bay Area knows someone who has jumped, and it is perhaps not surprising that the most common fear among San Franciscans is gephyrophobia, the fear of crossing bridges. Yet the locals take a peculiar pride in the bridge's notoriety. "What makes the bridge so popular," Gladys Hansen, the city's unofficial historian, says, citing the ten million tourists who visit the bridge each year, "is that it's a monument, a monument to death." In 1993, a man named Steve Page threw his three-year-old daughter, Kellie, over the side of the bridge and followed her down; even after this widely publicized atrocity, an Examiner poll that year found that fifty-four per cent of the respondents opposed building a suicide barrier.

The idea of building a barrier was first proposed in the nineteen-fifties, and it has provoked controversy ever since. "The battle over a barrier is actually a battle of ideas," Eve Meyer, the executive director of San Francisco Suicide Prevention, told me. "And some of the ideas are very old, ideas about whether suicidal people are people to fear and hate." In centuries past, suicides were buried at night at a crossroads, under piles of stones, or had stakes driven through their hearts to prevent their unquiet spirits from troubling the rest of us. In the United States today, someone takes his own life every eighteen minutes, and suicide is much more common than homicide. Still, the issue is rarely examined. In the Bay Area, the topic is virtually taboo. One Golden Gate official told me repeatedly, "I hate that you're writing about this."

In 1976, an engineer named Roger Grimes began agitating for a barrier on the Golden Gate. He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said "Please Care. Support a Suicide Barrier." He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. "People were very hostile," Grimes told me. "They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, 'Jump!' "

When Paul Alarab was pulled from the Bay at 11:34 a.m., he was unconscious and badly bruised. The impact had ripped off his left glove and his right shoe. The Coast Guard crew, wearing their standard jumper-retrieval garb to protect against leaking body fluids-Tyvex biohazard suits, masks, gloves, and safety goggles-began C.P.R. Half an hour later, Alarab was pronounced dead. Gary Tindel, the assistant coroner of Marin County, who examined the body on the dock at Fort Baker, at the north end of the bridge, observed that "massive bleeding had occurred in both ears, along with apparent grayish brain matter in and around the right ear." Tindel brought Alarab's antiwar statement and his cell phone back to the coroner's office in San Rafael. Soon afterward, the cell phone rang. It was Alarab's ex-wife, Rubina Coton: their nine-year-old son had been waiting more than two hours at school for his father to pick him up.

"May I speak with Paul?" Coton asked.

"I'm sorry," Tindel said. "You can't." Tindel explained that he was with the coroner's office and suggested that Coton call back on his office phone. When she did, he told her that her ex-husband had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge.

"Please don't joke," Coton said.

Tindel described Alarab's outfit, but Coton didn't recognize the clothes. Then he told her that the corpse wore a yarn necklace. And she recalled, suddenly, that their daughter had made such a necklace for Paul.

Jumpers tend to idealize what will happen after they step off the bridge. "Suicidal people have transformation fantasies and are prone to magical thinking, like children and psychotics," Dr. Lanny Berman, the executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, says. "Jumpers are drawn to the Golden Gate because they believe it's a gateway to another place. They think that life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they'll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver."

In the four-second fall from the bridge, survivors say, time does seem to slow. On her way down in 1979, Ann McGuire said to herself, "I must be about to hit," three times. But the impact is not clean: the coroner's usual verdict, suicide caused by "multiple blunt-force injuries," euphemizes the devastation. Many people don't look down first, and so those who jump from the north end of the bridge hit the land instead of the water they saw farther out. Jumpers who hit the water do so at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch. Eighty-five per cent of them suffer broken ribs, which rip inward and tear through the spleen, the lungs, and the heart. Vertebrae snap, and the liver often ruptures. "It's as if someone took an eggbeater to the organs of the body and ground everything up," Ron Wilton, a Coast Guard officer, once observed.

Those who survive the impact usually die soon afterward. If they go straight in, they plunge so deeply into the water-which reaches a depth of three hundred and fifty feet-that they drown. (The rare survivors always hit feet first, and at a slight angle.) A number of bodies become trapped in the eddies stirred by the bridge's massive stone piers, and sometimes wash up as far away as the Farallon Islands, about thirty miles off. These corpses suffer from "severe marine depredation"-shark attacks and, particularly, the attentions of crabs, which feed on the eyeballs first, then the loose flesh of the cheeks. Already this year, two bodies have vanished entirely.

On December 17, 2001, fourteen-year-old Marissa Imrie, a petite and attractive straight-A student who had planned to become a psychiatrist, left her second-period class at Santa Rosa High School, took a hundredand-fifty-dollar taxi ride to the Golden Gate, and jumped to her death. Though Marissa was always very hard on herself and had lately complained of severe headaches and insomnia, her mother, Renée Milligan, had no inkling of her plans. "She called us 'the glue girls,' we were so close," Milligan told me. "She'd never spoken about the bridge, and we'd never even visited it."

When Milligan examined her daughter's computer afterward, she discovered that Marissa had been visiting a how-to Web site about suicide that featured grisly autopsy photos. The site notes that many suicide methods are ineffective (poison is fatal only fifteen per cent of the time, drug overdose twelve per cent, and wrist cutting a mere five per cent) and therefore recommends bridges, noting that "jumps from higher than . . . 250 feet over water are almost always fatal." Milligan bought the proprietor of the site's book, "Suicide and Attempted Suicide," and read the following sentence: "The Golden Gate Bridge is to suicides what Niagara Falls is to honeymooners." She returned the book and gave the computer away.

Every year, Marissa had written her mother a Christmas letter reflecting on the year's events. On Christmas Day that year, Milligan, going through her daughter's things, found her suicide note. It was tucked into "The Chronicles of Narnia," which sat beside a copy of "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teenagers." The note ended with a plea: "Please forgive me. Don't shut yourselves off from the world. Everyone is better off without this fat, disgusting, boring girl. Move on."

Renée Milligan could not. "When I went to my optometrist, I realized he has big pictures of the Golden Gate in his office, and I had to walk out," she said. "The image of the bridge is everywhere. San Francisco is the Golden Gate Bridge-I can't escape it." Milligan recently filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on behalf of her daughter's estate against the Golden Gate Bridge District and the bridge's board of directors, seeking to require them to put up a barrier. Her suit charges, "Through their acts and omissions Defendants have authorized, encouraged, and condoned government-assisted suicide." Three previous lawsuits against the bridge by the parents of suicides have all been dismissed, and the bridge officials' reply to Milligan's suit lays out their standard defense: "Plaintiffs' injuries, if any, were the result of Plaintiffs' own actions (contributory negligence)." Furthermore, the reply says, "plaintiffs cannot show that Ms. Imrie used the property with due care for the purposes it was designed."

As Joseph Strauss, the chief engineer of the Golden Gate, watched his beloved suspension bridge rise over San Francisco Bay in the nineteen-thirties, he could not imagine that anyone would use it without due care for its designated purpose. "Who would want to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge?" he told reporters. At the bridge's opening ceremony, in May of 1937, Strauss read a statement in a low voice, his hands trembling. "What Nature rent asunder long ago man has joined today," he said. The class poet at Ohio University, class of '91, Strauss also wrote an ode to mark the occasion:

As harps for the winds of heaven,

My web-like cables are spun;

I offer my span for the traffic of man,

At the gate of the setting sun.

Three months later, a forty-seven-year-old First World War veteran named Harold Wobber turned to a stranger on the walkway, announced, "This is as far as I go," and hopped over the rail. His body was never found. The original design called for the rail to be five and a half feet high, but this was lowered to four feet in the final blueprint, for reasons that are lost to history. The bridge's chief engineer, Mervin Giacomini, who recently retired, told me half seriously that Strauss's stature-he was only five feet tall-may have been a factor in the decision. Known as "the little man who built the big bridge," Strauss may simply have wanted to be able to see over its side.

In May, 1938, Strauss died of a heart attack, likely brought on by the stress of seeing the bridge to completion. A plaque dedicated to him at the southern end of the bridge a few months later declared the span "a promise indeed that the race of man shall endure unto the ages"; at that point, six people had already jumped off. And at the dedication ceremony A. R. O'Brien, the bridge's director, delivered a notably dark eulogy. Strauss "put everything he had" into the bridge's construction, O'Brien said, "and out of its completion he got so little. . . . The Golden Gate Bridge, for my dead friend, turned out to be a mute monument of misery."

In the years since the bridge's dedication, Harold Wobber's flight path has become well worn. I spent a day reading through clippings about Golden Gate Bridge suicides in the San Francisco Public Library, hundreds of two- or three-inch tales of woe from the Chronicle, the Examiner, the Call-Bulletin: "police said he was despondent over domestic affairs"; "medical discharge from the army"; "jobless butcher"; "the upholstery still retaining the warmth of the driver's body"; "saying 'goodbye' four times and looking 'very sad' "; " 'sick at heart' over the treatment of Jewish relatives in Germany"; "the baby's cries apparently irritated him past endurance"; "footprints on the fog-wet girders were found early today"; "using his last nickel to scratch a farewell on the guard railing."

The coverage intensified in 1973, when the Chronicle and the Examiner initiated countdowns to the five-hundredth recorded jumper. Bridge officials turned back fourteen aspirants to the title, including one man who had "500" chalked on a cardboard sign pinned to his T-shirt. The eventual "winner," who eluded both bridge personnel and local-television crews, was a commune-dweller tripping on LSD.

In 1995, as No. 1,000 approached, the frenzy was even greater. A local disk jockey went so far as to promise a case of Snapple to the family of the victim. That June, trying to stop the countdown fever, the California Highway Patrol halted its official count at 997. In early July, Eric Atkinson, age twenty-five, became the unofficial thousandth; he was seen jumping, but his body was never found.

Ken Holmes, the Marin County coroner, told me, "When the number got to around eight hundred and fifty, we went to the local papers and said, 'You've got to stop reporting numbers.' " Within the last decade, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Association of Suicidology have also issued guidelines urging the media to downplay the suicides. The Bay Area media now usually report bridge jumps only if they involve a celebrity or tie up traffic. "We weaned them," Holmes said. But, he added, "the lack of publicity hasn't reduced the number of suicides at all."

The Empire State Building, the Duomo, St. Peter's Basilica, and Sydney Harbor Bridge were all suicide magnets before barriers were erected on them. So were Mt. Mihara, a volcano in Japan (more than six hundred people jumped into it in 1936 alone); the Arroyo Seco Bridge, in Pasadena; and the Eiffel Tower. At Prince Edward Viaduct, in Toronto, the site of nearly five hundred fatal jumps, engineers just finished constructing a four-million-dollar "luminous veil" of stainless-steel rods above the railing. At all of these places, after the barriers were in place the number of jumpers declined to a handful, or to zero.

"In the seventies, we were really mobilized for a barrier at the Golden Gate," Dr. Richard Seiden, the Berkeley suicide expert, told me. In 1970, the board of the Golden Gate Bridge Highway and Transportation District began studying eighteen suicide-barrier proposals, including a nine-foot wire fence, a nylon safety net, and even high-voltage laser beams. The board's criteria were cost, aesthetics, and effectiveness. In 1973, the nineteen-member board, most of them political appointees, declared that none of the options were "acceptable to the public." (The laser-beam proposal was vetoed because of the likelihood of "severe burns, possibly fatal, to pedestrians and personnel.")

In 1998, a company called Z-Clip suggested that one of its livestock fences serve as a barrier. The seven-foot-tall mesh of wires had originally been used in Chile to keep cattle out of pine-seedling plantations, and would cost a mere $2.3 million to $3.5 million. The bridge board would not approve it, however. Barbara Kaufman, a board member, said that the fence resembled the "barbed wire at concentration camps."

Tom Ammiano, a leading candidate for the mayoralty of San Francisco this fall, is among the bridge's most liberal supervisors. He says that a barrier is no longer being actively considered, and that only he and three or four other board members favor one. "There's a lot of white Republicans on the board who resist change," Ammiano told me. He laughed darkly, and added, "The Golden Gate is an icon, my dear."

The most plausible reason for the board's resistance is aesthetics. For the past twenty-five years, however, three hundred and fifty feet of the southern end of the bridge have been festooned with an eight-foot-tall cyclone fence, directly above the Fort Point National Park site on the shore of the Bay. This "debris fence" was erected to keep tourists from dropping things-including, at one point, bowling balls-on other tourists below. "It's a public-safety issue," the bridge's former chief engineer, Mervin Giacomini, told me.

Another factor is cost, which would seem particularly important now that the Bridge District has a projected five-year shortfall of more than two hundred million dollars. Yet, in October, construction will be completed on a fifty-four-inch-high steel barrier between the walkway and the adjacent traffic lanes which is meant to prevent bicyclists from veering into traffic. No cyclist has ever been killed; nonetheless, the bridge's chief engineer, Denis Mulligan, says that the five-million-dollar barrier was necessary: "It's a public-safety issue." Engineers are also considering erecting a movable median to prevent head-on collisions, at a cost of at least twenty million dollars. "It's a public-safety issue," Al Boro, a member of the Bridge District's board of directors, said to me.

A familiar argument against a barrier is that thwarted jumpers will simply go elsewhere. In 1953, a bridge supervisor named Mervin Lewis rejected an early proposal for a barrier by saying it was preferable that suicides jump into the Bay than dive off a building "and maybe kill somebody else." (It's a public-safety issue.) Although this belief makes intuitive sense, it is demonstrably untrue. Dr. Seiden's study, "Where Are They Now?," published in 1978, followed up on five hundred and fifteen people who were prevented from attempting suicide at the bridge between 1937 and 1971. After, on average, more than twenty-six years, ninety-four per cent of the would-be suicides were either still alive or had died of natural causes. "The findings confirm previous observations that suicidal behavior is crisis-oriented and acute in nature," Seiden concluded; if you can get a suicidal person through his crisis-Seiden put the high-risk period at ninety days-chances are extremely good that he won't kill himself later.

The current system for preventing suicide on the bridge is what officials call "the non-physical barrier." Its components include numerous security cameras and thirteen telephones, which potential suicides or alarmed passersby can use to reach the bridge's control tower. The most important element is randomly scheduled patrols by California Highway patrolmen and Golden Gate Bridge personnel in squad cars and on foot, bicycle, and motorcycle.

In two visits to the bridge, I spent an hour and a half on the walkway and never saw a patrolman. Perhaps, on camera, I didn't exhibit troubling behavior. The monitors look for people standing alone near the railing, and pay particular attention if they've left a backpack, a briefcase, or a wallet on the ground beside them. Kevin Briggs, a friendly, sandy-haired motorcycle patrolman, has a knack for spotting jumpers and talking them back from the edge; he has coaxed in more than two hundred potential jumpers without losing one over the side. He won the Highway Patrol's Marin County Uniformed Employee of the Year Award last year. Briggs told me that he starts talking to a potential jumper by asking, "How are you feeling today?" Then, "What's your plan for tomorrow?" If the person doesn't have a plan, Briggs says, "Well, let's make one. If it doesn't work out, you can always come back here later."

The non-physical barrier catches between fifty and eighty people each year, and misses about thirty. Responding to these figures, Al Boro said, "I think that's positive, I think that's effective. Of course, you'd like to do everything you can to make it zero, within reason."

Despite the coroner's verdict, Paul Alarab's loved ones insist that he didn't jump off the Golden Gate. Having viewed the Telemundo tape, they believe that when Alarab was putting down his antiwar statement he slipped and fell. An accident is easier for friends and family to accept, whereas suicide leaves behind nothing but guilt. It's impossible to know whether any one suicide might have been prevented, but many suicidal people do indeed wish to be saved. As the eminent suicidologist E. S. Shneidman has said, "The paradigm is the man who cuts his throat and cries for help in the same breath."

Those who work on the bridge learn to cope with the suicides they can't prevent by keeping an emotional distance. Glen Sievert, an ironworker who has often helped rescue potential jumpers, told the Wall Street Journal, "I don't like these people. I have my own problems." Even Kevin Briggs, the empathic patrolman, was surprised to learn, when he and some colleagues had a week's training with a psychiatrist earlier this year, that suicidal people "are real people-not crazy people but real people suffering from depression." Nonetheless, Briggs remains opposed to a barrier. "The bridge is about beauty," he told me. "They're going to jump anyway, and you can't stop them."

Mary Currie, the bridge's spokeswoman, is an intense woman with short dark-blond hair. Last February, she went on a foot patrol with five Golden Gate patrolmen so that she would understand that detail better. Currie told me that her group stopped to assess a handsome middle-aged man who'd been at the south tower for two hours. "He said he was just taking a walk. But we all had a feeling," Currie said. "Still, you can't gang-tackle a guy for taking a walk. Five minutes after our last contact with him, he walked to the mid-span and looked back. We all took off after him; I was only twenty feet away when he went over. We saw him go in, feet first.

"The other guys felt they'd followed procedure, done what they had to do, didn't get him, and they've moved on. But I had nightmares for a week. Should I have grabbed his ankles? Should there be a barrier? I finally decided it was this guy's choice. I have depression in my family-I've had some myself-and you just have to fight it." After a second, she reversed herself. "You know, if my mother had succeeded in killing herself-and she tried-I would be much more devastated, and my thinking would be . . ." She shook her head, banishing doubt. "That bridge is more than a bridge: it's alive, it speaks to people. Some people come here, find themselves, and leave; some come here, find themselves, and jump."

The bridge comes into the lives of all Bay Area residents sooner or later, and it often stays. Dr. Jerome Motto, who has been part of two failed suicidebarrier coalitions, is now retired and living in San Mateo. When I visited him there, we spent three hours talking about the bridge. Motto had a patient who committed suicide from the Golden Gate in 1963, but the jump that affected him most occurred in the seventies. "I went to this guy's apartment afterward with the assistant medical examiner," he told me. "The guy was in his thirties, lived alone, pretty bare apartment. He'd written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, 'I'm going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I will not jump.' "

Motto sat back in his chair. "That was it," he said. "It's so needless, the number of people who are lost."

As people who work on the bridge know, smiles and gentle words don't always prevent suicides. A barrier would. But to build one would be to acknowledge that we do not understand each other; to acknowledge that much of life is lived on the chord, on the far side of the railing. Joseph Strauss believed that the Golden Gate would demonstrate man's control over nature, and so it did. No engineer, however, has discovered a way to control the wildness within. ♦

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Shortly after ten-thirty in the morning on Wednesday, March 19th, a real-estate agent named Paul Alarab began hiking across the Golden Gate Bridge. Midway along the walkway, which carries pedestrians and cyclists between San Francisco and Marin County, he stopped and climbed the four-foot safety railing.

# data[].attributes.body
Dorothea Brande is the inventor of freewriting and the author of many books including BECOMING A WRITER, which I read at the start of this Semester. I have found the book to be very inspirational throughout this process, not only from a writing development perspective but also from a self-confidence perspective.

BECOMING A WRITER not only gives information on techniques and style development but also the motivation and encouragement to just keep writing. Keep writing regardless of your life, the world, the universe. Keep bloody writing!

Brande explores the idea of the writer's mindset, allowing one to refine one's process without being taught how to suck eggs. It's a psychological insight into the mind of a writer in the most engaging and evergreen way. Yes, it is hard to start writing but what's harder is to keep going on what can be a complex and intimate journey into your own psyche. Brande's encouragement is reassuring and refreshing, with confidence that you don't have to be a writer to write but you need to write to be a writer.

# data[].attributes.headline
"Forget or ignore for a while all the difficulties you have let yourself. Forget or ignore for a while all the difficulties you have let yourself dwell upon too often; refuse to consider, in your period of training, the possibility of failure." 

# data[].attributes.subject
"Forget or ignore for a while all the difficulties you have let yourself. Forget or ignore for a while all the difficulties you have let yourself dwell upon too often; refuse to consider, in your period of training, the possibility of failure." 

# data[].attributes.body
(Becoming a Writer : Dorothea Brande : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive, 2020)

# data[].attributes.body
I came across Bryan Charnely by chance. I was listening to a podcast about the artist Louis Wain and how his mental illness affected his art, and I began to wonder if any other artists documented their illnesses through their art. This is when I found a video by a YouTuber called Shrouded Hand - Weird Art of The Mentally Disturbed who went into a little bit of detail about Charnely and his life fascinated me. His art is beautiful and precise, demonstrating how he viewed himself, his situation, and the world around him.

BONDAGE HEADS were a way for Charnley to express his struggle with schizophrenia. He painted what was happening in his head and occasionally gave captions to them, giving the viewer more of an insight into his mindset and his reasoning behind the images.

This inspired me to continue with my projections, as I wanted to be able to show the pictures in my head as I was writing. I wanted to give people the opportunity to see what I was imagining in real time. The feedback that I've received over the past few months has reassured me that this was the right choice and that the images feel like they've been pulled out of my head and plastered across the wall.

# data[].attributes.body
The idea of using the projector started from just playing around, and then it got more and more serious. I began to draw and sketch images in my own time. I began to create a collection of sketches that were paired with different parts of the text that I had written to better convey the images I was conjuring.

The image above is an open door and it fits into a part of the script about embracing death and accepting it as a fact of life rather than a looming event to dread and be fearful of. Everything dies eventually. Everything walks through that door and closes it behind them. That's life.

# data[].attributes.body
This adaptation of Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with Feathers is something that I have been visually influenced by. The use of projection by Jamie Vartan shifted something in me in terms of the way I wanted to utilise my images. The drawings, specifically the ones that look like illustrations, are haunting and isolating. I wanted to bring that same feeling to Send Him My Love, and so I tried to mirror the sketchiness in certain images to convey this feeling of dread.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Tickets

A production based on the award-winning novel by Max Porter. Directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy, Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a moving story of a widower and his young sons which becomes a profound meditation on love, loss and living. This production sees acclaimed writer/director Enda Walsh reunited with actor Cillian Murphy following the huge success of their past collaborations: Disco Pigs, Ballyturk and Misterman.

In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him.

Wayward Productions in association with Complicité
Co-produced with the Barbican, London, Cork Opera House, Edinburgh International Festival, Oxford Playhouse, St Ann's Warehouse and Warwick Arts Centre
Supported by Lindsay Badenoch and Brian Carmody

#GriefistheThing

© Colm Hogan, Tim Walker

Back to top

We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking "Accept All", you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Grief is the Thing with Feathers - Complicité

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A production based on the award-winning novel by Max Porter. Directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy, Grief is the Thing with Feathers is a moving story of a widower and his young sons which becomes a profound meditation on love, loss and living.

# data[].attributes.body
Courtroom Sketches seem like an outdated and unnecessary use of resources, but the thing with non-digital art is that it captures something so innately human about its subject. The idea of seeing a court proceeding drawn by a human hand, to see how the artist pinpoints features and moments to transform the story for those outside the courtroom is fascinating.

As cameras are usually prohibited in courtrooms, we have had to use physical drawings to continue the visual documentation of proceedings alongside the stenographer's log of events.

Sketching people feels like an intimate thing, as demonstrated in the very famous scene from Titanic (1998), and it can be used to portray emotion and energy that the camera is unable to.

This has inspired me to sketch freehand occasionally in my projections or to trace lightly in fill-in details without the aid of a reference image to give a unique spin on the stimulus image.

The article linked above is a collection of courtroom sketches collated from the American court system, including famous and infamous trials from Martha Stewart's insider trading to the trial of David Berkowitz aka The Son of Sam.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This exhibition showcases the Library's extensive collections of original art by talented artists hired by both newspapers and television to capture the personal dynamics of legal trials. Skilled at quickly conveying both individual likenesses and the atmosphere of the courtroom, these artists reveal, in intimate detail, the dramatic and, at times, mundane aspects of trial proceedings. The illustrations on display represent court cases dating from 1964 to the present day. These cases influenced how Americans perceive race and race relations, religion, gender issues, political and corporate corruption, international relations, and the role of celebrities in society. The corresponding drawings are poignant images of people from all walks of life during the last fifty years of court history, observed in their most vulnerable moments. While artistic styles vary, each artist brings the theater of the courtroom to life, capturing gestures, appearance, and relationships in a way that humanizes defendants, plaintiffs, lawyers, judges, and witnesses.

This exhibition begins with the work of Howard Brodie who documented the Jack Ruby trial in 1964. Brodie donated his trial drawings to the Library of Congress and spurred the development of its Courtroom Illustration Collection. The collection has expanded to include trial drawings by Marilyn Church, Aggie Kenny, Pat Lopez, Arnold Mesches, Gary Myrick, Joseph Papin, Freda Reiter, Bill Robles, David Rose, Jane Rosenberg, and Elizabeth Williams, among others. These courtroom drawings provide insight into the drama and impact of events in American law during the past fifty years.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Explore | Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustration | Exhibitions at the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This exhibition showcases the Library’s extensive collections of original art by talented artists hired by both newspapers and television to capture the personal dynamics of legal trials. Skilled at quickly conveying both individual likenesses and the atmosphere of the courtroom, these artists reveal, in intimate detail, the dramatic and, at times, mundane aspects of trial proceedings.

# data[].attributes.body
The idea that we should be able to choose when our life ends is one that is regularly debated in courts, parliament, and across social settings worldwide. With companies such as DIGNITAS allowing those with terminal illnesses to end their lives, we are stepping closer to a world where assisted suicide is more commonly accepted. Dignity in death is important to a lot of people and the use of DNR and DNACPR orders has increased significantly since 2020 (https://compassionindying.org.uk/press-release/do-not-attempt-resuscitation-decisions-dnr-queries-doubled-2020/). I know that when my Grandma was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour and rapid onset Alzheimers, she made it clear that she did not her medical team to use extreme measures if her heart stopped. I know that if assisted suicide was presented as an option for her she would have taken it, as I'm sure many people would in her situation.

When Adie Muller's mother chose to stop intensive medical treatment, she promised herself that she would go to Germany and visit her mother regularly before she passed... Until the pandemic shut everything down and Adie was refused the chance to say goodbye in person. Another Goodbye is an audio-based performance that combines spoken word with soundscapes. It is meant to be experienced alone.

"In a year when so many of us lost those we hold dear, Adie lost her Mum to illness and age. This is the story of a letting go, a passing on, another goodbye. A story told to see if we can find a way to talk about death and grief and about coming to terms." (Another Goodbye, n.d.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
26.06.21 - Adie Mueller & Armin Lorenz Gerold - Another Goodbye - 51:54 - 320 kbps

When artist Adie Muller's mum decided it was time to stop intensive medical treatment, Adie promised herself that she would get to Germany and visit her regularly. Then the pandemic happened.

This is the story of a letting go, a passing on, another goodbye. A story told to see if we can find a way to talk about death and grief and about coming to terms.

Another Goodbye is an audio performance for an audience of one in your own home, combining spoken word and soundscapes.

Created by
Adie Mueller: Writing and Performance
Peader Kirk: Direction and Dramaturgy
Armin Lorenz Gerold: Composition and Soundscape
This version is the outcome of the first project phase from April to June 2021 funded
by Arts Council England and supported by The Place Theatre, Bedford and Cambridge Junction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Touch Radio 151 | Adie Mueller & Armin Lorenz Gerold

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
26.06.21 - Adie Mueller & Armin Lorenz Gerold - Another Goodbye - 51:54 - 320 kbps When artist Adie Muller's mum decided it was time to stop intensive medical treatment, Adie promised herself that she would get to Germany and visit her regularly. Then the pandemic happened.

# data[].attributes.body
This expressionist play explores the idea of six dead soldiers refusing to be buried as an act of anti-war protest. Shaw served in the US Army during World War II but had written the play well before in 1936 as a comment on World War I and the sacrifices made by common men to win games played by the rich and powerful.

“Wars are won only when the fallen are buried and forgotten." (Bury the Dead, 1936)

The idea that the dead were able to stand up for themselves and protest their own burials is a fascinating concept that I wish was explored a little more rather than it being an anti-war piece. Each soldier has a woman at home, whether it be his mother, girlfriend, or wife, who tries (and fails) to convince him to lie down and die like a good little pawn.. It becomes formulaic and predictable, but thus is 1930s war dramas.

The amount of power that the living have in organising funerals or memorials is strange. Not many people have the opportunity to plan their own funerals, and this is something that I explore throughout my script as it is a fascinating concept. Imagine going to your own funeral and hating it. How disappointing would that be?

# data[].attributes.body
During the pandemic, memorials were set up across the country for collective mourning and grieving of those in local communities by local communities. The Clapton Common Memori-wall is just one of them, but it is one that really touched me. When my Nan, Bet, passed from Covid during the late stages of the pandemic, the family gathered here in Plymouth to scatter her ashes in places that meant a lot to her. We were fortunate enough to be able to do this due to the return to work policies and lockdowns being lifted. Others weren't so lucky, and so memorial walls were created.

This website contains a video that documents the events of Thursday the 14th of May, where the commons volunteers held a remembrance event to honour the lives of those lost. The video is really beautiful and the way that people gather to mourn those in their community is something that I'd like to encourage outside of funerals or wakes. Grief isn't contained to one day, and it is beautiful that these places were set up for public mourning.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Memori-Wall

As a community organisation we are committed to discovering, celebrating and connecting the assets present in our neighbourhoods and in this spirit we would you like to honour all those from Hackney who have sadly passed away during the period of Covid-19.

Traditional and established ways of saying goodbye to loved ones and mourning their loss is not possible at the moment. Using the hoarding around Liberty Hall, Clapton Commons volunteers have created a temporary memorial - the Memori-Wall - to remember those who have lost loved ones.

On Thursday 14th May we held a small and safe remembrance event to accompany the name placing on the wall. We were joined by Hackney's Mayor, Phil Glanville, who personally honoured the life of Rabbi Avrohom Pinter, who sadly passed away in April.

A short film of this evening of remembrance was documented by Clapton Commons' Aviel Lewis (see below).

We would like members of the public to send names, age and a few words about the person to info@claptoncommons.org which we will add it to the Memori-Wall as a way to recognise, remember, celebrate and grieve.

Throughout June you will find members of Clapton Common at the Memori-Wall at 7.45pm. We will then spend a minute at 8pm clapping for NHS and Key-workers in the UK.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As a community organisation we are committed to discovering, celebrating and connecting the assets present in our neighbourhoods and in this spirit we would you like to honour all those from Hackney who have sadly passed away during the period of Covid-19.

# data[].attributes.body
Sheila Seleoanes is a woman who lay dead in her flat for two years whilst her landlord cashed in on her direct debits, despite her utilities being cut off. The lack of concern and respect is something that I've noticed a lot throughout my research. Bryan Charnley committed suicide, Joyce Carol Vincent was not found until almost three years after her passing, and there have been instances where people were not treated with dignity in their final days.

As a sign of respect and remorse, Shelia's fellow tenants lay flowers and memorial cards outside her door. When I saw this image for the first time, it broke my heart and I felt horrendous. The overwhelming guilt that these people must've felt for allowing this to happen was unimaginable, and this is portrayed so delicately yet so clearly in this one image. For this reason, I have chosen this as my final image for Send Him My Love. The idea that you can make up for mistakes made in life after death is something that I talk about regularly throughout the piece, and this image perfectly conveys that regret and longing.

It is also the only piece of colour that I use in the performance, demonstrating that there is hope and there is happiness despite grief. They can coexist.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Woman lay dead in flat for two years but landlord cut gas and kept taking rent

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In a case that is ‘difficult to fathom in 2022’, the skeletal remains of Sheila Seleoane were found by police in her flat more than two years after she died and an inquest heard her landlord kept taking rent and cut off her gas - but made no contact

# data[].attributes.body
This is a technique / extension of freewriting that I learned during my undergraduate degree. The idea is that you start off with a word, or stimulus like a picture, and go from there. You write for as long as you can think about it, and you write whatever you think about it. I found it therapeutic and used this technique to process the grief that I was going through both during my undergraduate with my Grandma and now with my friend Sam.

# data[].attributes.body
Please note that the stream of consciousness exercise is numbered in order.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

# data[].attributes.body
I've put forward Send Him My Love to a project called MayFest by the Arts Institute at the University of Plymouth. After partaking in a scratch night, I received some insightful feedback that I will be applying to future iterations of the project, including a performance at the end of the month and another at the end of July with Marjon University.

# data[].attributes.body
This is just one of the posters that I have created to advertise my work going forward. I plan to continue developing my marketing strategy by flyering with local businesses and throughout Marjon and University of Plymouth.

# data[].attributes.body
I plan to put Send Him My Love forward to the next round of SOAK sessions, which will help me to broaden my audience and expand the reach of my community projects

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
SOAK Live Art is a new platform for performance in Plymouth.

The Arts Institute is pleased to be supporting SOAK's work to connect with local artists and develop audiences beyond mainstream theatre and galleries.

SOAK Salons are a place for conversation amongst performance artists and audiences. Alongside our regular Live Art night, these bi-monthly sessions at Leadworks will include artist-led talks and workshop-style activities. Each session is an opportunity to share responses to past performances and to gain new insights into artistic practice. The aim is to develop practice-based dialogue and build a creative community that supports new ideas.

SOAK Live Art is supported by public funding from Arts Council England.

This SOAK Live Art Salon series is supported by The Arts Institute, University of Plymouth.

SOAK Live Art is curated by Sarah Blissett and Kerry Priest.

Dates: 14 December 2023, 29 February, 25 April, 27 June and 29 August 2024
Time: 19:00-21:00
Venue: Leadworks, 170 Rendle Street, Stonehouse, PL1 1TP
Ticket information: Free,Ticketing managed by SOAK Live Art CIC

Join us at our regular , a new platform for performance in Plymouth. Live art showcases live art, dance, theatre and experimental sound and music practice in a regular series of performance nights, alongside artist-led events.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
SOAK Salons are a place for conversation amongst performance artists and audiences.

# data[].attributes.body
I found that the most helpful thing whilst experiencing grief was talking to other people in similar situations. I felt listened to, understood, and cared for. I want to give other people that opportunity by creating a Grief Box of sorts, where people can leave poems, statements, words, images that they feel portrays their journey through grief (ongoing or otherwise).

I'd like to take those submissions and create other versions of Send Him My Love with the love that others wish they could send but don't have the time or creativity to do so in the way they want.

I'd also like to run a grief-led freewriting workshop where people can express their love and grief through words, which could be further elevated by pictures if they wished.

For me, art is about expanding on ideas regardless of whether they are your own original ones or not. To magpie is to be creative. Everything you do as an artist, as a human, is unique to you and grief is equally unique. No two deaths are processed the same. Giving people the opportunity to use Send Him My Love as a tool to process their grief gives me immense joy, as this project completely transformed the way I processed Sam's passing. I am so grateful for this project, and I want others to be grateful for it too (not in a narcissistic way!)

# data[].attributes.body
I have spent most of my life dedicated to the arts and theatre. I have been a part of several Amateur Dramatic shows, from Les Mis to a physical theatre interpretation of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

I have over a decade of experience in this industry, and I hold a first-class degree with honours in Drama with Creative Writing from UWE, Bristol. Currently, I am studying for my Masters in Experimental Theatre Practice at Marjon. I hope to continue my education after this by pursuing a doctoral degree.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a document containing the work towards the project that Harry and I were working on before I began creating Send Him My Love.

The reason behind putting this project aside is that it felt too small. It felt like I was boxing myself in and avoiding processing the grief I was feeling, so I took it upon myself to create something to set myself free and channel those feelings into my art.

# data[].attributes.body
I have been using digital projection and video creation in combination with acting and movement for approximately five years now. My most recent project, Somatic Attunement, utilised this combination and allowed me to give multiple simultaneous perspectives of the same stimulus - the body and self-perception. This lent itself well to the project as it lifted the focus from myself onto those who had participated in my survey and it would not have been the same without it.

After closing that chapter, I began working collaboratively with another member of my cohort on a small project that explored themes surrounding the housing crisis, renting, and the emotional ties people have to their homes. As we began to find resources to create with, we discovered an Overhead Projector in a store cupboard and discovered, to our delight, that it worked! By using a plastic bag, some electrical tape, and some twigs, we began to create a house to project and take apart at will. This played with the idea of the deconstruction of a home and how easily people can pick things apart whilst rebuilding something without care.

The above image is a demonstration of the sort of thing we would create in our Praxis sessions. I would write something or find a poem to recite while taking the image apart or putting it back together, whilst Harry would score the process with live music.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a compilation of papers that I plan to read as part of my research going into Semester C to expand Send Him My Love.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Art of Dying in the Theatre of Sarah Kane

# data[].attributes.subject
The Art of Dying in the Theatre of Sarah Kane

# data[].attributes.body
Sarah Kane has influenced my writing for years, and I was very lucky enough to work with one of her writing teachers during my time at UWE. Her writing has always been very close to my heart, and I have always appreciated how personal yet broadly relatable her work was.

Her work is often characterised by violence, torture, and mental anguish. Death is often presented by Kane as an opportunity of humanity and peace, as well as an escape from the manic nature of her plays. This not only applied to her work but her life, as many regard her final play 4.48 Psychosis as a suicide note or final goodbye to life as she knew it. This acceptance of mental illness and eventual death is harsh yet comforting, and I wanted to emulate this harsh comfort in Send Him My Love.

# data[].attributes.headline
Death, The One and the Art of Theatre - Extract

# data[].attributes.subject
Death, The One and the Art of Theatre - Extract

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Death, The One and the Art of Theatre is the latest collection of Barkers distinctive and revelatory philosophical musings on theatre. It is a stunning array of speculations, deductions, prose poems and poetic aperçus that casts a unique and unflinching light on the nature of tragedy, eroticism, love and theatre.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Five Stages of Grief / The Kubler-Ross model

# data[].attributes.subject
The Five Stages of Grief / The Kubler-Ross model

# data[].attributes.body
This process of grief is one that people are most familiar with, but the thing with grief is that it isn't linear. You cannot predict, control, or force grief to follow in these exact stages. Death affects people in different ways and people grieve in different ways. Yes, the Kubler-Ross model is important for objectively understanding the emotional throws that grief puts you through. However, the format unfortunately leads one to believe (incorrectly) that grief is a journey that will happen in this exact order.

In my experience, I find acceptance easy and bargaining is something that I do not experience as deeply as the deaths that have occurred in my life were ones I was prepared for. I imagine that this may not be the case for the next death I encounter, but it was for the last few and this is something that I wanted to carry over into the script. It is not linear, it does not make sense. It is my grief embodied and it is my grieving process that is reflected in my style of writing.