Healing from the Fallout of a Parent’s Attempted Suicide

 Today's guest is Amy Turner. Amy is a school teacher, former lawyer, and author of a memoir called On the Ledge. The memoir tells the story of her father's attempted suicide when she was four years old, the hypervigilance and fear that then plagued her into adulthood, and how her own brush with death decades later unexpectedly led her on a path of healing and creativity. 

In our interview, Amy discusses the events detailed in her book and much more.  Amy, it's so nice to have you here. Thank you for being here. Oh, I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So you wrote, you wrote a memoir. It's called On the Ledge. And there's a couple pivotal events, I'll say. There's the first event of your father's very public attempted suicide.

And then there's a later event in your life of getting hit by a truck. And we'll talk about that. each of those. I mean, that sounded,  um, brief, but walking into a road and getting hit by a truck that had a large effect on you. And so we'll get into each of those. But the first thing I want to address is your father's attempted suicide.

And at the time you were a very young child, I think you're about four and a half, five years old. So you didn't know the details of it. At that time, but, but tell me about that. What happened there? So, uh, when I was four and a half, uh, my, and I had three siblings, a sister who's five years older and two younger brothers who are within, you know, 30 months of me and what I would learn later is that my father went off on a business trip to new Haven and.

At 930 on a Thursday morning, he climbed out on the ledge of his hotel room and threatened to jump and he had been seeing a psychoanalyst. So this wasn't totally out of the blue. But as I learned later, you know, he had been doing better. So it happened that. Three priests were just passing by and saw the commotion because this was 930 in the morning near the Yale campus.

So a crowd had assembled staring at him on up, you know, on him at the, on the ledge and one priest was sent up to talk to him. And the other priest was told to stay on the sidewalk in case last rites were necessary. And this priest talked to my father for 20 minutes. And my father eventually climbed back in and then he was hospitalized for, you know, 10 months to a year.

But as a four and a half year old, all I knew was that my father was there one day and then he wasn't. Eventually we started to get some notes from him. So, you know, I knew he was still somewhere, but I didn't learn the story until I was 16,  but it was as though. When I did hear this story, it was just like, like the family picture came into focus.

It was blurry. I had somehow the feeling of it, but of course, not the details because growing up, I'd always, I'd had this fear about him. That something was wrong, that if you made a mistake and got him upset or angry, there would be serious consequences. And as a child, it did feel like life and death. My mother would warn us, you know, don't get dad upset, don't get him angry.

And I had no idea why, but it felt extremely serious. So, as I said, when I found out the story at 16, I was furious that my mother had kept the secret. Bye. It all made sense because, and I'll say one more thing, if any listener has read Danny Shapiro's memoir, which I adore called Inheritance, she learns a secret about her life, which is more intense about her.

Parentage, but she talks about what a psychiatric concept is of the known, unknown. It's like, I didn't know, but on some level I knew. Exactly. I think that is exactly right. I wanted to talk about this issue where parents have their own lives. They're humans and they have their own stuff going on and sometimes very, very serious is in your father's case.

Right. And, and kids are kind of there and they're. Sometimes they know, sometimes it's right in front of their face because it's just obvious, sometimes it's not, but I think there is that issue of them picking up on the energy and being aware that something is going on, but they don't know. And so what would you say about that, about that ability, I guess, or that awareness that there's something going on?

What sort of effect do you think that had on you in your childhood or later? Well, I think, you know, it had lifelong effects, and from the very beginning, it's the development of that state of hypervigilance. So, if you're being constantly warned that you might do something wrong, that's going to cause something, some negative effect, you start to look out, you watch your behavior, you start to look and read the signs, you know, does he look like he's going to be upset?

Or, gee, have I? yelled too loud or I've said something to upset him. So you become hypervigilant, which is part of that state of arousal that's fight or flight. So you're constantly on guard and that takes a huge amount of energy, that anxiety, because you're, I talk about it as sort of like tower lights being on.

You're, you're constantly on scanning the, the area and that. Absolutely stayed with me. So I was very afraid of making any kind of mistake, constantly watching myself and constantly watching to see. If I could detect the signs of something awful happening, because if your parent just disappears overnight, anything could happen out of the blue.

You're not prepared for it. You saw no signs. So it's always also growing up with a feeling that just around the corner, something terrible could happen. I had lots of psychotherapy, which I. You know, I'm so grateful for and felt that I worked out a lot of it, you know, emotionally understanding the impact of what had happened with my father.

But as you know, I'm sure we'll talk later in the book. reveals there was more work to be done, but that, that early developmental, when you have that kind of trauma, I think in that early developmental stage, it, it stays with you. And I'm not a psychologist and I don't have that kind of training, but I'm just speaking from personal experience.

Yeah. Yeah. And so what was, what was your father's behavior after he came back from being hospitalized? Like I know that your mom was warning you and you were watching him and you were careful, but what, what was he like? Do you think now looking back, you detected depressive episodes, how did he behave?

You know, I should mention too, just for people to get the full picture, my mother was an active alcoholic and. I have just the amount of grace or strength, whatever it was that allowed her to actually get sober six weeks after my father went into the hospital. It's just stunning. But  up to and through this episode, she was an active alcoholic.

So already the atmosphere at home was. insecure, because I'm sure she wasn't, especially with four children, particularly a tentative mother that you could count on. But with my father, there was this feeling that just came from his physical presence and then his disappearance. And then of course, the warnings from my mother.

But Children are, I think people are, but children especially are, are really intuitive. And I could tell from looking at him, his eyes would seem dark or I would hear his psychiatrist's name. My, I would hear my mother say, you know, did Dr. Hupalowski call or did Dr. call? So, you know, I knew, I knew something was, was wrong.

And, and kids just. Pick up expressions of concern on somebody's face and I could see it in him was always like a darkness around the eyes and a sadness.  So, you know, when I read your book, your dad really kind of fascinated me because I think you, I think you did a good job of describing his complexities.

You know, he was a writer. And he really wanted badly to be in the new yorker. He was also an activist, which I thought that was really interesting because it really, it sounded like it made him and your family kind of a pariah in the community. After he came out of hospitalization, he got very involved in civil rights.

He. Later protested against nuclear proliferation and so these sorts of things like he he was a complex personality now at the same time It sounded like he would kind of read you guys things in Middle English at the dinner table You know, which I also found fascinating because kids are probably not gonna be interested in that So so tell me a little bit about this personality.

Like what do you think was going on with? Let's start with the activism. What was going on there do you think, if you had to speculate? I'll go back a little. You know, he grew up in a family with money and in New York, and he went to private school. He went to Hotchkiss and Yale, you know, great education.

His family started to lose the money when he was in Hotchkiss. But he had that kind of upbringing, a pri, you know, real privileged upbringing. And he says that at in Yale. At Yale he was. Like kind of a, maybe a moderate kind of Republican. He might, I don't even know if he supported FDR and politics was not really on his radar.

And he went into the hospital and came out and I'd never heard him make the connection as to what it was, but he was always a, I'm sure a compassionate person, but I think he came out of the hospital with a real feeling of compassion for the suffering. Of others, and couldn't look away from it. And so within about a year or two of coming out of the hospital, he was taking up civil, kind of civil rights issues or calling out issues in our hometown, which happened to be a one square mile of exclusively wasp white.

Affluent families, which, which didn't endear himself, you know, to the community. Later on, he supported a labor strike at the local hospital. It's predominantly black hospital workers and got involved in their efforts to unionize. And that actually ended up on the front page of the New York Times. It was a strike that had an impact.

Bye. Needless, that's when we really did become a pariah. Um, and as a child, of course, I was proud of him. He got, we received a telegram from Martin Luther King. I, I knew that was a wonderful, wonderful honor. But at the same time, you know, I was 12. I wanted my friends to like me. I didn't, I didn't want all the negative attention.

But this activism was part of his life forever, and I'm happy to say he lived a long life until he was 90,  and he the whole time, you know, one issue after another of anti war, and then he moved on to anti nuclear and was very, very, very active and had a, um, A certain, he had such confidence in, in his beliefs and his opinions that he really  was never reluctant to put people on the spot or approach people.

I mean, Yale has a lot of distinguished alumni and he would write them, you know, people he was in school with and ask them to go on hunger strikes with him and all of that. He just did whatever he could within his means, as long as it was somewhat appropriate. He was not going to shy away out of embarrassment or something.

And I should also say, For somebody who had such compassion, the ultimate was that he ended up traveling to Bangladesh about four times, even into his late seventies,  uh, was writing a book, which he never finished, but he always stayed in the local Y. He never stayed in the tourist hotels. He was very committed to.

doing what he could for that country. But on the other side, he was very playful, which my mother wasn't. So when he wasn't depressed or something, he, he was fun and he could be very playful. And he loved literature, loved poetry, and he instilled that in us from an early age. And I'll just say that. I mean, there are actors who do it, but I don't think I've ever heard or know of someone who could read Shakespeare to a nine year old and make it understandable and interesting and fun.

The Middle English, Beowulf, something else, but he could make Shakespeare exciting. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I didn't realize that he had that, that skill of really making it interesting to you kids necessarily. Yes, yeah, he did. I might have given him short shrift, not enough credit on that, but he really, the bedtime, you know, but he would take it to an extreme.

Like he's reading ode on a Grecian urn to my younger brother. And when he finds out that my brother doesn't know what an urn is. He makes him go to the, you know, Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the urns instead of going to his baseball practice. So he could take things to an extreme, but we all grew up with a real love of literature and writing.

Wow. That's, yeah, I just think he was, he was a fascinating guy. He really was. And I, I admire that activism that, and like you said, that, that sort of confidence and just Doing everything he could, even if it was potentially embarrassing to someone else to ask for  someone you went to school with help or whatever.

He just forged ahead. It sounds like. Yes, he absolutely did. I'll just tell one more story. He was always in the role of assisting in the nuclear activism  actions. They would call them and they would do these at New York and New York at the Riverside Institute, which was a think tank on nuclear. Weapons and so forth.

And he was a member of Kairos, which was Daniel Berrigan's, the Berrigan Brothers groups. People might recognize those names from nuns and the Berrigan's being jailed and their anti war efforts. In any event, my father would always assist. He would, he wouldn't do anything that really would result in anything other than.

A slight slap on the wrist and then they would be released, but after the Riverside, the Riverside Institute moved away and they moved their actions to the Intrepid, which is a nuclear warship that had become a museum in lower Manhattan, docked there. And because it's federal property, doing anything.  On that, you know, hammering the side or doing anything would have more penalty to make a long story shorter.

They were arrested and this time they were not. It was clear that it was going to be more than just a slap on the wrist and they were given a trial date and they don't hire lawyers. And as a lawyer, I was a nervous wreck for them because they had no defense. So they went, but my father refused any help, refused a lawyer, wasn't going to do it.

He called me, said he was getting ready to go to Rikers Island, which is prison, a notorious prison in New York City. Gotten all his medications, glasses, everything together. I was obviously a wreck. I mean, he was, uh, 80. He was 82 or something. I, I just couldn't imagine it. And he goes to trial. Stands up gives a speech to the judge and the judge just says at the end.

I can't argue with anything. You said, you know, not guilty. So my father did say, I think that was a culmination for him because he did feel that it was. Somehow, what he said was coming from, you know, a greater source. He didn't even really remember what he'd said. So, I think that for him, that was sort of the culmination of all that he'd done.

He felt really,  you know, a deep sense of satisfaction and vindication and all for doing that. And when he moved out here and could no longer go into the city, he still had a correspondence that he kept up with, with the people of Kairos who were in jail serving long prison terms for doing things, you know, with nuclear submarines.

So he really, yeah, he was very generous and committed in spite of the fact that too, he still suffered from his depressions and anxiety. So, let's shift gears now and we'll go to, as an adult, you had this event that you talk about in your book where you were picking up dry cleaning and you stepped out onto the road and a truck seems to have come out of nowhere and hit you.

Tell me about that event. Tell me about the event itself and sort of the aftermath. So, of course, this is the incident with my father and the ledge. I was four and a half, here I'm, you know, in my fifties.  I'm just crossing the street in a pedestrian marked crosswalk, and I won't explain the roads, but the truck did basically come out of nowhere.

I was staring at the windshield and the windshield was shaded and I would have seen the driver's face, but hadn't been. So, I'm standing there and this is all split second thinking, oh, he's going to stop. He has to see me. I'm looking right in the windshield. Apparently, he'd been looking over his shoulder and he mows me down and.

Drags me. Um, I'm lying under the  truck with a dry cleaning on my head and I go into detail in the book about what I was thinking. And I really did think I was dead or dying. But then I realized that I couldn't breathe because the plastic was in my mouth. I was trying to get it out, and I was choking, and then I realized, my God, you know, I just got hit by a truck, but I'm going to die suffocating on my dry cleaning.

And even then, you know, I've always  used humor, which I think comes from my father, too, and my mother, too. It's the only way to get through life.  But fortunately, someone I felt somebody's fingers in my mouth and they pulled out the plastic and they got the truck off me. And amazingly, I didn't have any internal injuries or broken bones, but I was flown to the hospital that did head trauma and so forth.

And I had a bad concussion and I was banged up and all. And I had quite a recovery period from that, and I will find in the course of recovering from this truck accident that I actually am able to uncover layers of the trauma surrounding the incident with my father in a much deeper, deeper way. And I. I would never have connected the two events had I not, but somehow through the recovery period, as I say that the nervous system has its own chronology and it's, it's not chronological, so events could be 50 years apart, but actually be.

Very much connected in how your nervous system reacts. I noticed in your book, you, after your accident, there was a lot of like, uh, it sounds like you did a lot of downplaying of, of your injuries and wanting to get back to everything and you're fine. You're fine. And so I think that that is one of the pieces that you're talking about where maybe like your coping mechanism.

It made you start to think about where, where is this coming from? So talk about that a little. Yeah. Yes. And I just have to say, I just thank you for reading my book so closely. I mean, it's really nice to be asked these specific questions. Yes. You know, as I said, that hypervigilance and all that started my life from early on and that stayed with me.

Once I got into my 20s and 30s, and I really wanted to distinguish myself from my family, from my father, from any hint of mental illness. So, you know, I never wanted to be considered sick or have emotional problems. And so when I was hit by this truck, I absolutely  refused to acknowledge that I think I have a line in the book that was nothing other than a close call with a laugh track.

I mean, I had so many jokes about it could get people in hysterics over it. And people would say, but Amy, you know, that was a Trump. No, no, no. I absolutely would not. Acknowledge that because what I, you know, realize later is, it's acknowledging a vulnerability, which I just refuse to do. And the true vulnerability really went back to that childhood experience.

You know, a child only survives if their parents are there caring for them. And to have one disappear and one be an alcoholic, that's a really deep, deep. Level of vulnerability. So I think it was evoking that and there was no way I was ready to face it. I ended up in the care of seeing a acupuncturist who happened to be studying training and somatic experiencing.

Which is a psychobiologic technique for releasing the aftermath of trauma that's stored in the body. I hadn't gone to her for that reason. I, I had a shoulder spasm, you know, something totally physical spasm. I wanted the pain to go away. But I noticed just something in her. Care in the office. It just we had a lot of connections, serendipities, and I just felt like I'm supposed to be here because how could we have all these connections?

It's too weird. So I just kept going to see her. And so. It was in spite of myself, actually, and very gradual that I finally kind of came to terms with what the accident really had been, what that had felt like, and what I had faced. But it was something that was gradual, and I can't say that I knew that's where I was going.

It was just happening. There was getting to be more space around the accident and I could talk about it more and feel it more and go back to it and acknowledge your fears and so forth.  Yeah, you know, it's interesting, I think, because you had already been through at least some therapy, you know, before that.

And I think, you know, it's a lot of therapy and you can go through, you can kind of process through things. But there are these coping mechanisms that are so automatic. Sometimes I think from. You know, young childhood that you don't even it's like, you're at that age, you know, in your  50s getting hit by this truck and still going automatically into those coping mechanisms, like, with no conscious thought.

And so it's like, it's, it's interesting that that's another level to process. Right? I mean, that's the way I kind of see that. And I relate to that. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, you know, after the accident, my, my GP said to me really should go.  Talk to a therapist if you don't have one, see a therapist to forestall any development of PTSD, to talk about it and so forth, post traumatic stress disorder.

So, I had this long time relationship with this therapist and I went to see her and I just did the same thing in there. I, I just cracked jokes and I talked to her about this sense and she reminded me, she said, Amy wouldn't even, he wouldn't even go there. So I think it really took the physical. Almost bypassing the mind and the thought and all our defense mechanisms and all the ways that we figure out how we can avoid something.

This technique just bypassed that. So, I couldn't crack a joke while somehow my nervous system seemed to be relaxing or releasing. So, I think that was, and I want to, Make sure I say this. I've had a lot of therapy and I'm so glad I did. I mean, developed so much self awareness and it helped me so much. So I would never say that it wasn't anything other than necessary and great.

But this other piece of the physical, physical nervous system impact was really just a piece that for me, I think that was missing. And I'll also back up and say, I don't think we ever fully recover or release or get over deep seated issues, but we get more space and distance, see it coming, are able to handle them more, more easily.

So that's what this physical work, this body work, the somatic experiencing has really. Really helped. I had no relationship with my body other than, you know, am I thin enough? How do I look? Do I have a pain? But never thinking about feeling any emotion in my body. And when you're in that fight or flight, you're constant, you're just tensed. 

You don't even know it that your steady state of being is this the tension in the shoulders, the bracing for the next shoot a fall, you know, drop. Yeah. What exactly is that somatic? I think you said experiencing somatic experience. What exactly is that? Well, I should say I'm, I'm not trained in it. You know, I'm not a professional.

So the explanations I give are really from my experience and a little reading I've done, but. It's, as I said, it's a technique for releasing the aftermath of trauma in the nervous system. And the idea is that when you suffer a trauma, and it could be any, like they would call my truck thing a shock trauma.

What happened with my father, developmental trauma, very different, but same effect in the nervous system. And if anyone has a dog or you see, you know, if the dog has a little trauma or some little problem, they'll shake it. You'll see them. They'll kind of shake and then they just run off like nothing happened to them through that physical action.

They're releasing processing that that trauma and getting it out of their nervous system. But humans don't we don't. do that. Nobody's going to shake or something. We just repress it, you know, and move on. So the idea is finding a way to just kind of get that out. And I can't really explain how the technique works other than that, through calming the nervous system down to a very deep level and also tapping into the Discomfort in the nervous system, like those areas of anxiety where you feel it, where it could be in your body, and then coming out, because you don't want to re traumatize the nervous system, but you go out into an area of discomfort, sort of stay there, but then you come out into that titrating and pendulating, the body kind of, the nervous system gets used to That area of discomfort and eventually it gets released, or at least you get distance from it so that you're not constantly triggered without knowing why, how you're being triggered, as you said, the defense mechanism of humor.

It's automatic. I don't have to think. Gee, maybe I'll try to be funny. It just comes. Well, that's, you know, a lot of us walk around with. Unresolved trauma and some of our behaviors are just a response to that. We don't even know. We just know all of a sudden I'm so angry or I'm so worried or I'm so this.

Nervous system has its own timeline, you know, and  old things get triggered and we don't even realize that's what it is.  When I started this, doing Having this in 2011 2012, it felt like it was just the beginning, but now there seem to be a lot of different kind of somatic body techniques and there's a well known book, The Body Keeps the Score, and there are a lot of different types of  modalities and all out there, but I think the whole general idea is this idea of trauma stored in the nervous system.

When you said that it took the physical. To sort of get you to that new level of, let's say, healing or processing the trauma. That is so interesting, because in that way, I'm not saying that you want to get, wanted to get hit by the truck, but I'm saying sometimes these things can turn into a gift. You know, they can turn into something that, you know, Maybe wouldn't have happened.

You wouldn't have gotten there without it. What are your thoughts on that? Yes, I absolutely. I mean, I don't, I don't wish on anyone, you know, getting hit by a truck or a repeat for myself. And I, I was  objectively so lucky that I just wasn't killed or didn't have a really, really serious injuries, but had the accident.

And it was so shocking to me. So, so viscerally shocking because how do you just do a routine errand? On a day when there's no traffic, it's a beautiful day, you're in a marked crosswalk, and a truck hits you. It just, it doesn't make any sense. And so, part of me, the lawyer part of me, too, was like, Why did this happen?

Why did this happen? And then my brother died, also unexpectedly, less than a month after this happened. He's, he's worthy of a home. Another book, but he had been doing better in the last three years than he'd been doing in decades. And so that was almost as random and shocking to me. So when those two events happened together, I, I felt, I don't think consciously, but I realized now unconsciously, I so had to.

Make sense of these two events that I think that's what actually propelled me to eventually write this book was to try to make sense of the narrative of my life and somehow to integrate these two events. So, yeah, I had always wanted to write had always been blocked like my father and after this accident.

I ended up being able to write. And again, I don't recommend, you know, hitting yourself, hitting your head on concrete to get rid of writer's block. But eventually through the somatic, the somatic work, I think I was able to get this kind of space and I was able to write about my life without shutting down, you know, and  being blocked.

So, Yeah, in a very strange way. I'm very hard to say you're grateful for that kind of accident, but I am so grateful for all the work and all that I did afterwards. And then the writing that it does go back to the accident. Maybe it's like. You know, these events can happen and you don't want them to happen and they're awful and traumatic, but maybe what you make of them, what you make of the aftermath, that is what makes the difference, you know, so it's like what it's turned into what the aftermath turned into is kind of how I see it.

Yes, it's very, that's very well said, because I think deep down, I just. I, I think I couldn't live with these two events just being some random, funny story, you know, stories in my life. It was too unsettling. It was too weird. I had to make sense of it. And in the making sense of it was, you know,  A deep healing and recovery and open channels that had never been open before.

I actually wrote this book. The English teacher had come to my brother's memorial just absolutely out of the blue. Hadn't seen her in 40 years, but we'd all been very close in high school. And months later I was writing her a thank you note. And she had known my acupuncturist who'd also gone to our high school, though I didn't know it.

So it made sense for me to tell her about eventually the accident and the acupuncturist. And I found myself explaining all that had happened. And all of a sudden this channel opened that I had never had access to before. And memories, reflections, connections just absolutely flowed out of me. And I was teaching then every weekend.

It was just flowing. My husband couldn't believe it. Writing and writing. And that was the genesis of the book, which really did directly flow out of my brother's death and the accident. And eventually, the writing's never that easy, and there was a lot of work, and it took a long time, but that's how it started.

You know, all of a sudden when you were talking, I just thought, how proud would your dad be that you wrote this book? I feel like as such a writer himself and someone who read to you guys, I just think he would be very proud, wouldn't he? Thank you. I, I hope so. I do wonder if he would be a little upset that, you know, they're talking about him.

So, you know,  I didn't hold too much back in terms of his, you know. that incident, which he would not talk about. So I don't know how he would feel about that, but I do know that he actually could put those kinds of things aside, even though, and just appreciate the fact that I was able to complete the book and write a, write a book.

I think he would be proud of that. Yeah, and he, I mean, I think I could absolutely understand why he would have feelings about that event, but I think so many people can understand someone struggling mentally. And he was such a, like I said, a complicated, interesting. Intelligent person. I mean, you, you wrote it in a way that I think he really comes across as a really interesting person and he's not limited to mental struggles that he had.

And certainly, I think, like I said, people would have a lot of compassion for that. Anyway, thank you. Thank you. I hope so. And I, I do have to say that maybe I could never written this book beforehand anyway, because I, I had to be at a time where I really felt resolved in my relationships with my parents.

And and somewhat with my brother, because it would have been a very different book at different stages of my life where you're still feeling some resentment or working something out on the page, and I came to appreciate them even more, you know, as I really delved into their lives and what they what they dealt with.

I have one more question. When you you did ultimately go back and find there were when you're. Father did this stepping out onto the ledge. There were newspaper articles. There were pictures, all of this that you had never even after you found out about the event, you didn't go look at try to find. But then at some point you did.

And so I want to ask you about that. What drove you to do that? Do you think? And then what did it feel like when you actually looked at those pictures and read those articles? Well, you know, I, I wish I could answer the first part of the question with some very clear motivation, but the way it happened.

Was well, I'll step back for a minute. So eventually I was told the story at 16 about what happened with my father and there was always a line and it was on the front page of the daily news. And for anyone who's not from New York, you know, the daily news is a. Tabloid and very pop huge, you know, circulation and big front page.

And so we never talked about it very much, but whenever it was talked about, there was this little tagline and it was, but I didn't, you know, years later, I didn't really know if that was true, if I heard right. But I had no curiosity about it. And I think as a lawyer, even, you know, why didn't I think to look that up?

But it didn't even occur to me. So in the course of that somatic, you know, seeing the acupuncturist just one day, the thought floated up. You know, I should find the pictures of my father and it just floated up almost like go to the grocery store, find the pictures of your father. I was shocked. I was like, why didn't I ever think of this?

And so I actually procrastinated and realized, oh, there's. I have some feelings about this, procrastinated. I had the wrong date. It took me forever. And I finally found it in the archives, newspaper archives of the New York Public Library, because back then, the Daily News wasn't digitized, and a lot of newspapers weren't.

And when I found it, and sure enough, You know, it's a tabloid, so below the fold was a picture of him on the ledge and there was a big, you know, bold headline, reprieve from eternity and the whole thing. And back then, Harold Turner of 35 Valley Road brought me his address, how many children. So reporters were showing up, my poor mother, at our house, apparently.

And I just went, I had a panic attack. I was shocked, so I thought, well, you know, this isn't, I was looking at it, say in 2013. It's happened in 1957, and  I was so panicked. It was such a combination of, I don't even know what to say. This feeling like he's going to jump. I've gotta help him. What should I do?

He's gonna show up in the room. It was. Really, like a three minute, no one would have known I was just sitting there, but I, I was in a panic, then I literally couldn't look at it for a long time. And I started to wonder what is it about why can't I even look at a piece of paper? He lived till he was 90 and eventually.

It's partially in the book. I'm, I'm able to really unpack that and now I can, you know, look at the photographs without being thrown into some emotional maelstrom. But so in researching the book, I well, actually, it was by accident. But anyway, I. Ended up finding out that his pictures, the pictures of him had gone out on the AP wires.

He was on the front page of over 80 newspapers across the country, from the LA Times to the Detroit Free Press to the other papers in New York, Chicago, and then. Small, small towns in Ohio and Tennessee and Indiana. So all over and I can only conclude. I mean, I think there are a number of reasons, but the photographs were very dramatic.

There's one of him on the ledge and with the ladder and he's looking down and that. The point of view is it looks like you're looking into his eyes, and then there's a triptych with the priest in the window. So, I guess it was just a matter of that drama, but  it was all over. And some of these papers were weekly, so it was over a course of two weeks, and they were all over the newspapers.

And I don't know how much He knew that, or even my mother, because I just, you know, lucky for us, it wasn't the age of the internet. If looking at a photograph 50 years later could put me into a panic attack, I, I don't know how people deal with family trauma like this and have it be instantaneous all over the internet, but.

Yeah, you know what, that's what I'm, I'm thinking of when I'm hearing this. It's like, oh yeah, you, you know, you see this. We all see this stuff sometimes. And it is, like you said, instantaneous all over. And then you have a family behind that. You have real people trying to cope with it on their, in their own small space.

And then, phew,  difficult to imagine. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Because, I mean, when he was out on the ledge, there were more than a hundred people. Watching Yale students and people watch, you know, so can imagine in the age of cell phones, what that would have been like as it was, it was just a newspaper, you know, a photographer who got the photos to the local newspaper, who sent it out on the wires.

Oh, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's an interesting, interesting story. And I think the fact that there was this priest passing by, I mean, all of it just made for this newspaper thing that was going to take off, but all I can do is just be so grateful that The priest got him to come back in, right? I mean, you got to be so thankful for that, that, that he came back in the room.

Yeah. Yeah. And I was so happy to find, well, the book is filled or the stories filled with these synchronicities, but one of them was that when I called the New Haven library, the reference librarians to try to get the local newspaper, New Haven Register's coverage, the woman who helped me said, Oh, I knew that priest.

He was my priest. And so  we got, I got her assessment of him. And so I also got the interview. He was interviewed by the newspaper. About what he had done, and he just had said, you know, he just talked for 20 minutes and he just kept talking and telling my father not to look down and somehow that connection.

My father was unbelievably polite. You know, his etiquette was, you know. Impeccable. And I again, here I am going to humor, but I did think there was my father. Of course, he was going to listen and talk to the priest. He wasn't going to ignore him. So, Oh yeah, but it's true. Yeah. This priest had to have been a specialist in his early thirties and had must've had.

Just the right approach. How lucky. Yeah. How fortunate. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I want to thank you so much for being here and talking about this, and I do think this is a really good, well, I think it's a really meaningful story and what you wrote. The book is really good. And it really makes you think, and it just about families and these connections between events and all of these things.

In addition to many other things, it's a couple events that you kind of integrated, but it's, it's so much more than that. And I really think it's a good book. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your close read of it and getting a chance to talk about it in such detail. Do you have anything else that you want to make sure we cover before we sign off?

I don't think so, but I'm I'm glad you said that it's also more. So it's, it's humor in it and there's other periods of my life as well. Overall, for me, I think the story is it's just, it's just never too late to figure something out in your life to, to get beyond an issue or challenges that we have sometimes.

I mean, I even thought in my fifties, well, this is as far as I'm going to get. So just urge people to. If there's things bothering them, just keep at it because it's just never too late. One more quick, quick question that I did have in my mind and then it slipped for me. The, the ways in which you did experience this sort of nervous system healing in addition to going to therapy, I would imagine that in your life you notice differences now for yourself in the way that you maybe interact with people.

Do you notice a new sort of richness or anything like that to your life after having these sort of healing experiences? Yes, I do. Part of those, those experiences. Is getting distance, but sort of distance and space around issues, or, you know, we all I, well, I think most of us probably have these kinds of thoughts that bubble up, whatever they are that bother us, or that we can't get rid of and I just.

I feel like I have a lot of space and distance from the kinds of things that used to just plague me. You know, that was those fears of looking out for  fears that something's going to happen, or that hyper vigilance, or self doubt, so forth. It just, I have, I feel a space and a distance from that, so I don't feel overwhelmed anymore or triggered.

I can see things coming. So that's a feeling of, certain freedom and liberation. And I think in that space and distance, that's where the creativity was allowed to emerge. And that's been a huge, huge gift for me. Yeah. So it's it's been wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here, for your time, for writing your book.

Again, the book is called On the Ledge and there's so much good stuff in there. There's humor, there's lots of interesting stories, lots of different levels of meaning in there. So thank you for being here. Really appreciate it. Oh, thanks. I've enjoyed the conversation.