How Jumping Off Auckland's Sky Tower Helped Me Deal With Witnessing a Suicide

Exactly 40 years ago Helen Schnabel and her siblings all bounced along an inner city Auckland street after seeing a movie. The Christmas holidays had begun and her older sister had just gotten her drivers licence, so the thrill of freedom and independence put a spring in everyone’s step. But as the four of them neared the carpark, where they were meeting up with their parents, they saw a person falling from the multi-storey building. “We were in total disbelief and so we just kept walking. We didn't register what was happening at all and then he literally landed at our feet. I tripped over his shoe.” Helen shifts her slim frame slightly on the wooden steps we are perched on behind her cluttered home. Her glassy deep-set eyes widen as she speaks as if she too is hearing this horrific story for the first time.

At the time she was just 10 years old and as you would expect, this has haunted her all of her life. Growing up, the family spoke of this day rarely and their mother telling them that “people get lonely at this time of the year” was the only half-baked explanation they had for years. Now living with depression and anxiety, being trained as a nurse and working with her husband who is a psychologist, she has more understanding. But her mother's words would still drive her to collect anyone on their own at Christmas each time it came around. “I definitely thought that people were too vulnerable to be alone,” she says.

Moving away from New Zealand in her 20s made it easier to store away the anguish and compartmentalise her past and current life. But when she returned to home soil and needed to see someone for her post-natal depression, she found herself back in that same sterile carpark. As she parked her car and the realisation of where she was hit her, it all came flooding back.

“It was awful. I kept having nightmares about people falling, and it was usually from the same carpark building. Or I would dream about being trapped in one of the elevators as it was plummeting down and not being able to do anything but wait.” Well aware she was terrified of this concrete tower and the “monsters” she says brought with it, Helen spent years doing all she could to steer clear of the entire block.

It was not until recently when she actively tried to stop hiding from it, thinking this could be how to overcome the trauma. She took a tour of the carpark with artists, met a friend at a coffee shop nearby and deliberately parked there whenever she could. She even stood and looked over the edge of the building to see the view he had seen that day. Jumping off the Sky Tower is her latest attempt to face that fear head-on.

“With the jump, I had to know what it was like to fall. I guess to know what the emotions were that he was going through at the point, and not be suicidal,” she explained. “The difference was I had people there, it was like a jump into life, rather than a jump into death.”

On a clear December morning, Helen and her support crew ventured into town towards Auckland’s most iconic tower. Dressed in a sparkly sequin jumpsuit—unfortunately, covered with a frumpy multicoloured one for safety reasons—she stood on the tallest freestanding structure in the Southern Hemisphere.

She remembers her daughter Annabella telling her, “just keep looking out at the view mum”. Helen tells me this was the perfect symbol for that moment because when she was battling her own suicidal thoughts, she only had tunnel vision and couldn’t see or enjoy anything else around her. But on this day looking out across the entire city she saw everything and it was “terrific and terrifying”. As Helen leapt off the platform she thought about the man she saw falling all those years ago. “I thought to myself as I went down, I take you with me, I don't know who you are, I don't even know your name, but I take you with me. I am with you, you are not alone.”

What haunted her most about the unknown man’s suicide, she said, was, “what if he had changed his mind?” The question played through her head constantly, tormenting her. “The healing thing about the jump for me was it is such a big drop but it goes so fast, so I thought, even if the guy changed his mind, it would have been over so fast and that is what has done me a lot of good,” she explained as she tucked a loose curl behind her ear. “It is an awful thing, but I needed to go through that process, to work through those feelings. That's what really had haunted me, and it kept on haunting me.”

Helen says the jump, more than anything, gave her a different perspective. Things that her anxiety made unthinkable, like enrolling in a university or riding in an elevator, now seemed almost mundane compared to jumping 192 metres at up to 80 kilometres an hour. “I always had that fear about being lost on campus, but now, fuck that is nothing in comparison to jumping off the sky tower.” Just days later Helen enrolled herself to study anthropology at the University of Auckland and she has since ridden the once dreaded elevators. “Now I love being on that carpark and looking out to the uni building, and going right, I am going to conquer that other tower now.” She beams at me.

“You are never going to get over it, you just need to learn to live well in the aftermath.”

Helen has forgotten where the simple words came from, but she has hung onto them ever since she read them. “I loved them because they acknowledge all of this bombardment of shit, they don’t minimise that a bomb has hit, but they let me focus on creating something that is left in all that mayhem. That’s what this is all about.”

Need to talk?
Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor
Lifeline – 0800 543 354 or (09) 5222 999 within Auckland
Suicide Crisis Helpline – 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)
Healthline – 0800 611 116
Samaritans – 0800 726 666

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