Why does It’s a Wonderful Life maintain such a powerful grip on the American imagination? Writer Dean Bakopoulos details his personal experience with the movie, from his childhood through his adult years, when the life and times of George Bailey (played by Jimmy Stewart) hit painfully close to home:
I was thinking that my life had become a life I didn’t know how to live.
I was in the middle of the worst major depressive episode of my life—a darkness I had known several times in the past but one that, at this moment, was threatening to kill me. I had never seriously considered ending my life before though, for some reason, in the darkening weeks of late autumn that led up to the moment on the bridge, I felt the pull acutely. I’d gone dizzy one morning on the roof of a parking structure in Iowa City a few weeks earlier; driving down a dark two-lane one night, I pictured the release of swerving my small pickup into the path of an oncoming hog truck. One night, I found myself in the emergency room at the University of Iowa telling a receptionist that I had chest pains, but once I was admitted, I finally told the attending physician the real reason I was there: I wanted to hurt myself and needed somewhere to get through the night.
And yet, these moments didn’t feel like me. I didn’t feel like the kind of person who would consider suicide. My two kids needed me—I knew that and the thought of leaving them fatherless in this world while I moved into the underworld seemed unthinkable—but the voice in my head insisted they’d be better off, the world would be better off, the whole fact of my existence was—
I walked out to the bridge.
There are stories you never tell anyone until you have to tell them.
This is one of those stories.
In the middle of the bridge, it was windy. Cold. The sky was steel gray, the cloud layer low. The water churned, choppy below me. I did the mental calculus. Would I die if I jumped? Would it be painless? Would it be—
And then I thought of George Bailey. And of Clarence.
Fucking Clarence.
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