A life worth living

There were two stories during the past week that made me ponder human nature. The first one was the story about seven young people living in a small Welsh community who took their own lives over a period of about a year.

These young people, aged in their teens and 20s, committed suicide and it doesn’t seem that anybody really knows why. There seems to be some connection in terms of a social-networking site for young people called Bebo. Police are speculating that the “prestige” of having a memorial page on this site could induce young person to take his or her life.

These young people had posted personal profiles on Bebo and, since their deaths, friends have set up memorial sites for the purpose of collecting messages, photographs and videos remembering their dead friends.

What created the interest in the media recently has been the fact that the latest victim, a 17-year-old girl, had hanged herself in her bedroom. The following day two of her teenage friends had also tried to commit suicide.

One message on the Bebo memorial page stated that the writer had sent off a balloon with a message on it that she hoped would reach her friend and that she hoped her dead friend would have a laugh. It seemed that the live friend believed that heaven was something a balloon could reach and that her friend was now “living” there.

It is difficult to imagine that these young people could consider a memorial page on a social-networking site worth committing suicide for. Do they feel so insignificant that the idea of a page with messages, videos and so forth would be something they would aim for just because it would give them status?

Against this kind of wilderness of emotion, the other article that caught my eye at the same time was as far removed from the first story as one could possibly imagine. It dealt with a young girl who had died of cancer in her teens.

Even though she had terminal cancer, she was up to taking a lengthy trip to a TV studio to speak to the first South African in space, Mark Shuttleworth. And for a fun question she asked Shuttleworth to marry her. Needless to say, this question stumped him.

It’s not so much her fabulous question to a space traveller that made me appreciate this article by a father about his daughter, but rather the fact that this young girl carried her illness bravely and still wanted to experience life even though it was quickly ending for her.

The question I asked myself, reading both these stories on the same day, was how seven young people who have no debilitating disease and everything to look forward to can commit suicide. And yet there was a young girl who had suffered through a leg amputation, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and two lung operations whose zest for life was there right to the end.

I don’t have an answer, nor do the parents and friends of the young people who took their lives. They do not know how this could have happened. What makes one young person live through a shocking illness with courage and a positive spirit while others cannot face their disease-free lives? It’s difficult to understand. Whatever the reasons are, all these young people deserve our compassion and sympathy.