By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

Kevin Hines’ message to the world is “Be here tomorrow!”

The message is all the more powerful because he was almost not here to share tomorrow.

Hines is one of only 36 people in 80 years to survive a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge. He is only one of five to be able to still walk and run.

“I am not just lucky to be alive,” he said. “I am blessed that I get to exist.”

To a packed crowd at Hays Middle School on Wednesday, Hines shared his journey from that dark day when he tried to kill himself by throwing himself off the bridge to a life of light.

Kool-Aid, Coca Coal and sour milk
Hines, 37, had difficult beginnings. Both of his parents were drug addicted. Hines and his infant brother were left regularly in seedy motels so his parents could score or sell drugs.

The boys were fed what their parents could steal — Kool-Aid, Coca Coal and sour milk.

When a hotel attendant finally reported the neglect to the police, the court documents read, “The children lie there in their own filth, screaming and crying not to be neglected, lying next to dangerous drug paraphernalia that had they touched it would have killed them.”

Although they entered the foster system, Hines and his brother both contracted a vicious case of bronchitis, and Hines’ brother, Jordache, died.

“People have looked at me as an adult and asked me, ‘Kevin, why does that matter? You were an infant. How can that affect you?'” Hines said. “If you don’t know, the first three to nine months of an infant’s life are the most crucial to their ability to connect, adapt, attach and be well in any future. If your first nine months of your life are filled with nothing but consistent trauma, at some point, something is going to give and you are going to have a hard time. And I would have that hard time and then some.”

Hines was in foster care for the first nine months of his life, but then he was adopted by Pat and Deborah Hines. Deborah wanted to adopt a sister for daughter, but after seeing Kevin in his red rubber ducky overalls, she fell in love.

Pat and Deborah took Kevin in, but he was violently ill over the next 30 days. No doctor could determine what was physically wrong with him. The medical profession finally concluded that his physical symptoms were all emotional.

Kevin’s biological father fought for custody of Kevin for two years before finally outside of a courtroom, he told Pat and Debbie, “‘Patrick, Deborah, I can do this no longer, please take care of my son.’ ”

Blessed childhood
“And they did,” Kevin said. “They took care of me, and they made me theirs. And I am a Hines.”

Kevin’s mother, Debbie, was an incurable optimistic, to the point of annoyance. Pat was not an optimist. He was tough. He played goalie in hockey without a mask.

“Pat Hines is a pragmatic pessimistic and stone-faced man,” Kevin said. “He is a man void of true emotion in my life, a man I had never seen cry in 19 years up to that point, not through hard times, not through deaths, not a tear dropped from that man’s eyes. I would not learn until years later when he and I would go to therapy why he was such a hardened soul and why he was so hard on me. He was like a drill sergeant who was never in the military.”

Pat’s father was in the military and was in the Battle of Okinawa. When he came home, he was a changed man. Pat’s parents, just like Kevin’s biological parents, had substance abuse issues. They were alcoholics and died of cirrhosis very young. Pat was left almost penniless to make his way in the world, Kevin said.

Pat and Debbie, who were white, adopted two other children. Kevin is mixed race, his brother is black and his sister is white. People stared, but Kevin said, “We were a family filled with love unconditionally, hope for the future and possibility. I thought growing up I had that traumatic infancy, but a beautiful childhood and adolescence. I thought to myself, How could anything go sideways from here?’

“I am going to grow up. I am going to go to that good school my dad’s always talking about. I’m going to get that great job he is always speaking of. I’m going to live the American dream. Then it happened.”

Things go sideways
“At 17 and a half years of age, it all came tumbling down, because of one thing — my brain.”

Hines was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic features.

His mind was telling him things like he was a horrible person and he had to die.

“All of which was untrue,” he said. “I wish I know then what I know now, which is that my thoughts do not have to become my actions. …

“In the realm of suicidal thinking, this is very important because we think our thoughts own, rule and define our actions. Yet, in a suicidal crisis, they do not have to take us. We can always stay here.

“If you realize those thoughts don’t have to lead to an attempt, you can always survive. I live with chronic thoughts of suicide. They will never take me. Because every time I think of them, I will turn to the person to my right or the person to my left and say four simple and effective words, ‘I need help, now.’ ”

Hines said his family and friends know what that means and know what his triggers are. He has an emergency plan that he has shared with his loved ones.

“Even when I go sideways and I can’t see it, they have got my back,” he said.

He began to have delusions that the postal service was trying to kill him. If he saw a postal truck, he would run home, causing him to go into a debilitating asthma attack.

‘I wanted to tell’
Hines went from natural euphoric highs to the dark abyss that is depression.

“I would come crashing down into an insurmountable amount of pain that I could not bare on my shoulders,” he said. “At 19 I was done. I wish that morning that I attempted that I told my father the truth. …

“I wanted to tell the one man who loved me more than anything else in the world, arguably, the truth, but I couldn’t get the words out. Every time I wanted to tell my father what I was thinking, the voices in my head, (I had been hearing auditory hallucinations that no one else could hear) told me that I had to die.”

Every day, Hines would see death in the form of the grim reaper hover in through his window.

“Do you think I told anybody? No, I kept it inside, because I thought if I tell somebody what I am seeing, well, they are going to think I am crazy. I don’t use that word lightly.”

He buried all of his symptoms for two years. He silenced his pain.

“My new friends, if I am going to help you learn one thing today, and one thing only I have to ask that it be this,” he said. “When you go about the rest of your natural lives, when you walk out those doors, and you go about your day, do me a favor and learn from my mistakes and never again silence your pain. Your pain is valid. Your pain is real. Your pain is worth your time and others’ and your pain matters, ladies and gentlemen because you do.

“When we silence our pain and our struggle and our hardship, and we tell no one, it just grows and festers and morphs into rage and violence and substance abuse or domestic disputes, suicidal thoughts or actions.”

Life is a gift, Hines said, but he could not see that and on the Sept. 25 he boarded a bus for the Golden Gate Bridge.

‘Why doesn’t anybody care?’
He sat in the middle seat in the back row of the bus. He began to cry, softly at first, and then harder until finally tears streamed down his face. He then began to yell back to the voices in his head that were telling him to kill himself.

“Leave me alone, but I don’t want to die. I am a good person, why do you hate me so much? What did I ever do to you?”

The 100 people on the bus, said nothing … except for one man, with a smirk on his face said, “What the hell is wrong with that kid?”

“That is what is wrong with some of our society, today” Hines said, “our innate human ability to see someone who is in potentially the greatest pain they are ever experiencing and feel nothing for them, but fear of them and apathy toward them. That is a real problem. I believe if nothing else, this one thing — we are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.”

When Hines reached the bridge, still sobbing, he desperately wanted someone to stop him and ask him if he was OK. He wanted someone to stop him, to save him.

“All I wanted to do was live, while my brain was trying to kill me,” he said.

Bicyclists, joggers tourists and even police officers there to look for jumpers, passed him for 40 minutes and did not stop.

Although police are now trained to look for suicidal individuals at the bridge, a person still dies at the bridge every seven to 10 days.

Finally, a woman started to walk toward him, he thought finally someone is going to help me.

“I thought, ‘This is it! I don’t have to die today,” he said.

She reached out and handed him a camera and asked him to take her picture. Hines took the picture, she walked away.

“I used to be upset about this woman. I used to think, ‘Why doesn’t anybody care?” he said. “Everybody cared. Every member of my family, every one of my friends, my acquaintances would have been there to rip me from that rail to safety if they knew where I was and what I was doing. They would have saved me, guaranteed, and so would have yours because you care and you do matter. I couldn’t see it. I thought nobody cared. The voice in my head said, ‘Jump now,’ and I did.”

A friendly shark
Falling 225 feet, 25 stories at 75 mph in four seconds, he said he realized his value. He prayed to live.

“I had the instant recognition that I had made the biggest mistake of my life, and it was too late.”

He hit the water and it felt like hitting a brick wall. It shatter three vertebrae in his back, and the fragments came millimeters from severing his spine.

“I swam to surface, using only my arms, 70 feet with one breath and one thing on my mind — all I needed to do was live. I remember thinking that ‘If I die here, no one will know I didn’t want to. No one will ever know that I knew I made a mistake.”

As he struggled to stay afloat, something began to circle beneath him. He thought it was a shark. It pushed him up. He thought it was odd to have such a friendly shark. He named him Herbert. Much later, after doing a television interview about his experience, Hines received a letter from someone who had been standing on the bridge next to him on the day he jumped. He told Kevin, it had not been a shark that saved him, but a sea lion.

Why?
The Coast Guard pulled Hines from the water. As he was strapped to the backboard, a rescuer asked him, ‘Why?’

“You must stop asking why,” he said. “It is the wrong question. We don’t know what someone is going through up here. You never can entirely,” he said. “What we need to ask ourselves is ‘how.’ How do we look to the living and through community and togetherness to move forward?

“I don’t think we can move on from a suicide,” said Hines, who said he has lost seven people to suicide. “I think that is impossible. If someone tells you to move on from suicide, you tell them that Kevin Hines told you to tell them to sit down. You get to grieve those you love until the end of time. If you are not done grieving, you’re not.”

Uncle George
Hines still had a long road ahead. He was hospitalized for his suicidal depression seven times during the next 11 years. He had electroshock therapy after one stay in the hospital that included 60 days of suicidal crisis.

His Uncle George had been driving six hours to visit Kevin during each hospitalization. On his third hospitalization, his uncle brought him a magazine article.

His uncle said to him, “Kevin, your family can help you until you are blue in the face, but until you take 110 percent responsibility, young man, for the fact you have this disease and fight it tooth and nail every day with every fiber of your being, kid, ain’t nothing gonna change and you are going to be in and out of these places for the rest of your life. Is that what you want?”

Kevin responded, “No.”

George said, “Get it together, kid, we are counting on you.”

Kevin read the article. He learned there were techniques he could use to help his brain by creating routine—eating healthy most days, exercising, educating yourself about your diagnosis to learn tools to fight the disease. Music therapy at the hospital helped him to start sleeping again.

He read that 23 minutes of rigorous exercise lead to 12 hours of better mood.

He was finally honest in therapy.

Hines finally started to feel better. He met the woman who would become his wife.

“If we can find hope in the darkness of our hours, we can find purpose, and if we can find purpose, we can always stay here,” he said.

To end his presentation, Hines asked the audience to raise their cellphones and repeat after him …

“Be here tomorrow!”

If you or someone you know is struggling with depression, suicidal thoughts or mental illness, you can reach services through High Plains Mental Health by calling the center’s emergency line at 1-800-432-0333 24 hours a day.

You can also reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255 or visit suicidepreventionlifeline.org.