Burning Sixteen Candles

For the last couple of months, I have morbidly saved the newspapers clippings about a double suicide in Norwood, Pennsylvania. I find myself occasionally staring at the smiling profile pictures of two pretty teenage girls, Gina Gentile and Vanessa Dorwart. One harrowing detail about this case haunts me. The social ease of an instantaneous text message the girls shared moments prior to committing suicide may offer a human x-ray of their derailed psyche.

It read, “Hurry up! The train is coming.”

To express concern about being late for your own funeral is a suicide note in and of itself. The text message is received right as the southbound train blows its approach whistle. The sixteen candles their parents readied to top their birthday cakes were about to be snuffed out and nobody close to them apparently saw the train coming.

I suppose my zest for a measured life makes the act of suicide inconceivable for me to fathom as anything but an irrational desperate act of surrender. Life should be revered as a miracle, a coveted blessing to be time honored for its natural duration. After squeezing every possible experience out of this world, mark my words that I will fight for my last breath. I bask in this thing called life so much so that I wish that I could live longer than Methuselah. Perhaps, I should count my blessings because I have not experienced dire circumstances that would prompt me to terminate my existence. For this logical reason alone, I keep staring at this newspaper article trying to make sense of it all.

Possibly suffering from untreated clinical depression, these two high school girls mourned the recent accidental death of their mutual close friend, Bill Bradley. Believing that they could not live without their departed friend, who got hit by a car while riding a bicycle, they trumped his death by kissing a speeding train. These distraught girls gained strength in tandem what they may not have been strong enough psychologically to carry out alone. With truth a stranger, they stepped onto the tracks together. They embraced each other through the train steamroll. As far as suicides go, its execution proved flawless.

I wonder whether their souls in the hereafter are accountable for murdering the breath of life that was given to them or is suicide nothing more than exercising freedom of choice? I pause to think that maybe they must make amends for the pain and suffering they caused on their loved ones suddenly left behind.

Life moves faster than a speeding locomotive to begin with. Getting in its way, does not seem an answer on any level. We should follow profound light or seek professional help. Life not death should be kept in front of you…maybe no more so than at sixteen candles.