The earth shook when she died. No metaphor, that: a person who has fallen three thousand feet hits the ground with considerable force, and the lip of the cliff at El Capitan stands that far above the meadow. She set off car alarms. Those who watched her fall felt the tremors through the soles of their shoes.
She was no suicide. Three had jumped before her, had touched down lightly in the meadow to applause. From the ground, her lover watched her fall. A thousand feet fallen and no chute billowed out behind her. Then two thousand, and then?
Then the earth shook.
I have watched her jump two dozen times the last few days, three dozen, replaying her last steps again and again. There is something in the way she jumped that compels me, and I have watched the way a mouse might watch a snake, an infatuated horror in me. Advance it a frame at a time or let it run undissected: no matter. No delicate swan dive, this. There is no focus on tight form or presentation, save that needed to get to the edge without stumbling. (You do not want to trip on your way to jump off a kilometer-high cliff.)
The void was there and she flung herself at it, flung herself hard and unhesitating, as if the void was her last chance.
Eight years this month since Jan Davis fell, eight years since she flung herself into a well of air. Eight years since the earth rose up to take her. Which of us can equal her grace in meeting it? The void comes around to snatch each one of us in turn. I fling myself up at mountains rather than down from off them, but my end is as inevitable as hers.
The trick is not to hesitate, to step off deliberately and strong. The earth rises up and one must greet it.
