loss comes in many forms and usually in unexpected ways it can be devastating leaving you facing an uphill struggle to go on with life without someone you thought would always be there but life does go on and even in the deepest despair we c find hope welcome to grief relief with your hosts doctors gloria and heidi horsley brought to you by the open the hope foundation helping people find hope after they've had a loss and what they can do to help the world and move it along even though they've had a tremendous tragedy i agree with you i'm really interested to bring that what's going on to hold people's awareness and we are talking about making meaning after l golden gate bridge today and we have a couple of guests who unfortunately had a tremendous tragedy each one of them has lost a child on the golden gate bridge and one is story and her son jake up died at the bridge and david hall and his daughter kathy so we'll be talking to them about what's going on in the bridge and what they're doing to advocate to make the golden gate bridge a safer place and they were going to have run harder a good friend of us whose son that died not at the bridge but had an accidental death and we'll be talking to him about what he's gone on to advocate for the world and he's going to talk about an exciting cruise that pekoe people are going to take to be able to find yet and ron is also the host of the radio show  hope healing and help radio we think yes on that and he is also here to bring awareness to people's lives and to help them find help after a loss so we have three really big advocates today and all three of these people have  had children that have died and they've gone to transform their lives and help all of you out there who don't know how you're going to find help find it again and to not only survive your losses but to thrive all right so let's get started st we've got david hall here hi david hi david was really appreciate your coming today and says story wise you do now the reason we've had you both on today together is because you are very involved with trying to get some safety under the golden gate bridge right you want to talk about it per se that you're co founder of the bridge rail foundation right well the there's one there's you know we all have different purposes as we go through life they shift from day to day there's one legal citizen of california that has had only one purpose for its entire existence and that's the the the bridge rail foundation which was incorporated as a california nonprofit a legal citizen of the state in december two thousand and six or one purpose is to see a so as a deterrent system  hundred that's amazing i had no idea i've got to tell you before we did this show i you guys are really building when it's for me because i didn't i didn't realize this and that's only the document there's many others that haven't and only how many people have actually survived  it thirty two that's fewer than two percent wow it we did a straw vote a couple three years ago among a group of twelve or fifteen survivors to ask how many of you have bodies only half only half of the people found the remains so they weren't counted ok and you were saying before the show the i think you said three people a month jump off the golden gate bridge is that true the forty year average ok is about thirty a year last year they were forty six and august was the high month ever i struck them and and i was wondering now your daughter how long ago did wife it that you lost share kathy it was that your kids you didn't know anything about probably what was happening in the bridge or a foundation or anything like that and now here you are advocating i know you said that you walk the bridge sometimes yeah well since my son died one thing i did is when my son died i thought i thought my life was over i didn't think that i had anything to live for and i found the bridgeville organization and i connected with them and i realized that my son's life can't be saved so all they could do is reach out and try to save other people so i do what they call bridge watch and there's a couple of us that go back and forth on the bridge just watching to see if anybody is suicidal and so far since i've done it and i've probably done it  times there has been only one person that we found that was a possibility of suicide that was suicidal that's pretty amazing given that you only done it time fifteen times you found somebody as you were walking and possibly help save their life yes now david talk a little bit about where you are with the bridge well if it's a time when maybe actually there will be nets right and what does it look like i know you've been advocating for along with this well since since december two thousand and six and there's been a number of checkpoints here in two thousand and eight was the st major checkpoint when the golden gate bridge district approved reversed seventy years of non policy and approved construction of a bridge of a suicide deterrent system with the cab yet that the money had to come from outside their budget it's not a small amount of money is it how much is well that night in two thousand and eight it was fifty million and it went to sixty six million there's talk now that it would be higher so we're talking about a lot of money but as i i watched a video that you were on and you were making the comment that if people are jumping off another building in san francisco they'd be doing something about it right away and right here they know effort compromised accepting cameras video cameras patrols and a hotline and the report from the ring county coroner who's charged with receiving the bodies was that that did not change the forty year average at all and is as you sue and david know we've talked about this before the show the research shows and you know this that if you put up a deterrent somewhere for example if someone is going to go to the bridge and jump and there is a deterrent there you know they won't go somewhere else which i think is interesting so it does save lives oftentimes they fixate on a certain mode of suicide whether it be the golden gate bridge or by another means my son he fixated on the golden gate bridge i'm sure that he knew exactly where he had to go to jump just to not survive if that i believe if the net is there he'd still be alive when he had jumped in the net probably not he probably would have sat down and started to ask for help but we don't know but the fixation it's the fixation on the certain mode of suicide and also a friend of mine david rosen actually did a study on earth all there about forty years ago and interviewed people who survived a very small number and they were all far on the way down you know i like to make the distinction between suicide prevention and suicide intervention suicide intervention is necessary when when suicide prevention mental health and so on fails are there's no access for the individual you have to have a physical intervention there and that's been the result of the forty years of empirical studies around the world restriction of access to lethal means is the most effective right invent to realize that you know i had a choice st choice was live or die right right but beyond that it was there are integrated  and i decided that i had i had to integrated into my life and and then at one point my my shrink said said to me david  you are a little earlier i'm a little earlier on and i think what it is for me is i can't bring my son back i could win all the lot of this for the next twenty years and i won't bring my son back but i can make a difference in one person's life belongs to everybody and so as i as i think about it i think about working with bridge rail saving those people that will go to that bridge to jump and they'll not be successful because we get that not in and that's incredible that's great and i know you go on large groups to meeting with and do author things that we're going to be showing in a minute picture of the what you do it  in all sizes we do shoes exhibits ranging down the tabletop size and we also encourage people whether they've lost someone or not if they feel that the bridge needs a suicide deterrent system to body that has jumped from that bridge and not survived we write that name in the sand with it we get a stick and we write their names in the sand we've got somebody that's collected all the names and we write their names in the sand because they have to be remembered  love that you write them in the sand then when the tide comes up it gradually washes them away yassin last year it was on jacob's birthday and it was very powerful to say that water took my son  but i know that i have to stand up and do something about it so it doesn't happen other people since right i feel like that that kathy and jacob are doing as much in their death as they're doing in their life i feel like they are the guiding lights here and that they are moving this forward and you guys are just doing incredible things and like you said you don't even know your impact because i think it's enormous you're saving lives and building awareness for what's going on so let's let's talk a little bit about kevin hines because i want to talk a little bit about people who do survive because of what he goes around and says he talks about mental illness and we believe a lot of the people that jump from the bridge are have mental illness or are suffering  depression or you know something like that and i know he speaks about it one of the things that i thought was interesting he said it's four minutes right i mean voice lessons i can see that until you hit the water you up for settle when you jump it's four seconds yeah that's very quick and then you hit the water at approximately seventy five miles an hour oftentimes well i got my sense autopsy back i'm one of the people that they found his body the damages inside his that we were called by the bridge sergeant saying did you lose your cellphone because they found cathy so full on the steel beam outside the railing and they called up the patrol saw jacobs twice he drove by him going north down and saw went south down and saw him and then when he came the rd time he was gone and they didn't send the coast guard outlook in form his body was found the next  dollars within three months was the st the st suicide of world war one veteran we know his name harold wilder so that was the beginning and now it is how many people want every other week one for the forty year average is unchange by the last year which was a high one of the highest years ever at forty six the forty year average is thirty a thirty three year thirty four year and the documented cases last year the month of august was the highest ever and that was ten documented cases in the month of august alone now would you have a suggestion for people if they want to get involved in helping you well my suggestion is you can go to the defen what you want to do course but if you want to go tell the golden gate bridge board that you think they should be a suicide to to remember this is going to show all over the united states so they can email them sure as they get email him they can also contact us at we're here at crissy field under the beautiful iconic but severely deadly golden gate bridge the bridge that has become a harbinger of death to those who are  suicidal to those who know not what they're doing are so mentally unstable they cannot bear to live this is the who shoes event sponsored by the bridge rail foundation a bridge rail dot org and these are the shoes of those who have been left to die at the golden gate bridge these are the shoes the symbolic shoes of the people who are no longer here and cannot speak for themselves so we are in effect speaking for them we are praying for them we are hoping that no more have to die that bridge to put up a net we stop this atrocity and we save lives well ron welcome to our show today ron harder it's good to be here really good to see heidi and gloria it's just amazing privilege to be here and talk about our losses were great and glad to have you here i know you're doing so much in the field of grief and loss you've got the sense from our next of the youngest son saying that zach had drowned and it was so devastating it was a terrible thing it was on june th that arresting lee enough that to anniversary is coming soon and we will be working through that together as our family meets to talk about thinking about him but you know one of the things that happened was after we got back to the west coast we were in virginia as i said we had people surround us and really help us and that was an amazing thing and specially for chris says our good friend denise peterson was there for her and listened to her and helped her out we become so close to allan and that he sets been privileged to know them but we also met with a grief counsellor and he said to us you know you're going to ask why for the rest of your life but you said you know you're not going to get an answer the better question is how and why not how can something good come out of this and what would corinthians chapter one verse three dollars and four dollars it talks about that god is a god of comfort and he wants to comfort us so that we can comfort others also with the comfort we've received and so chris and i got to thinking about that and saying you know maybe what we should do is start thinking about ways we can learn how to help other people graham how pretty it will fire you down the road when you started thinking oh oh that was just really just really probably six months or so yeah six months it's we just felt like we needed to find a purpose  this and so we started going to grief share classes and started doing other things and learning things and my wife really was the st one to kind of step out and she and then he started a mom's group y yeah she had just and she had lost a son a year before and it was called the son sean sullivan project and that led to that group and so i kind of watched what was going on you know and to be honest with you i wasn't there yet but i was there is for it's beginning to start learning about grief and then we started teaching grief share classes and now far down the rabbit that probably about a year year and a half into our grief ok but about the same time we thousand and eight us when we opened the doors and we could have done it without by my great nephew beating he was there taught me everything i know about the funeral he was in the business i was already divided up and yeah yeah and so and i'm thinking if i had a loss and lost a family member i would want to go to your if you know because you know looking at you really understand the grief is that you personally lost your son you know what you would have wanted in a situation like that so i love that you did this well here to make a difference in people's lives and we try to do that every day you know jeff does a great job the rest of our staff and then the next thing that happened is i was interviewed about my business on a radio station and we we realized that we had an opportunity to take it to radio and i had some radio background so we started a program called hope healing and help ok and how can i find that because i know you  hope healing help dot com and i hope healing help dot com and you can go on the web and find it i think we have seventy eight programs on there now all kinds of wonderful just like you guys you know it's a wonderful show  all right and i know the next thing you're doing is the crew yes let's talk a little got that february of two thousand and fifteen we're going to do the st cruise conference and we're going to have a four day cruise and we're going to go out of los angeles and we're going to have wonderful speakers ok hey ed it's an exciting time to people can get away and kind of work on their grief in the whole concept is is recovering from the losses of have fantastic and how many years has it been since that it's been almost eight years ok in two thousand and six it will be june th it is next week eight years and you know i think it's important that things do change and a little that further down the road the journey becomes different does and it does and i think it's because you make decisions along the way about what you're going to do about your grief you're not going to let the grief control you but you're going to say wait a minute i've had to do something with this grief i need to see it come something positive come from and i see that whenever people find a purpose yes invariably they move on from morning to so many angels on this earth like you did a working in this field trying to help other people because they've had a loss and they want to help others find hope and joy again as we have you know lovely doing on their thank you love what you're doing w amazing so we hope that you'll have some inspiration from the show today and find that little piece for yourself where you can make a difference in the world even though we know you may have had a tremendous loss and god bless  this is band the grief relief show hosted by mother daughter team doctors gloria heidi horse this show has been brought to you by the hope of the hope foundation helping people find hope after a us be sure to visit open to hope dot com where you can listen to radio programs watch open to hope t v read articles a few books you can also join dr gloria dr heidi on twitter and facebook and put your events on their international calendar thanks for watching and remember others have been there