God Rest A Child Expired

God Rest A Child Expired

“Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” come from the 70s ballad ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ but today I am borrowing them to somehow pay tribute to a life all too short.

Mental health…what the hell do we mean when we say that?  Endless journals have been written.  Psychologists with enough qualifications to paper the lounge have pontificated the very same.  Yet how can they really look inside the tortured mind of a fifteen year old girl?

I grew up in the sixties and was sheltered enough from the turbulence of those times to celebrate and acclimatise to my rapidly changing world.  The world came to the very edge of nuclear war, an imperialist bully napalmed innocent children in Vietnam, Black people were assassinated for wanting peace and man walked on another world. Yet I was given the grace, freedom and time to adapt and understand; or at least find my niche on Planet Chaos.

I wrote a while back about a suicide that cut short a jolly jaunt I had planned. The victim remains unknown to me to this day, but now I am tormented by a death of one far too young and one I knew and had indeed taught.  I say death, for the coroner has yet to do his or her work and I must, like the file remain open until that awful day when a tender life is recorded as a cold fact.

I see pressure on today’s youth like never before.  Pressure that comes from all sides and is relentless in its assault on our young.  Values, principles and morals are under scrutiny and questioned at every turn.  The traditional family unit we once espoused as places of perfected sanctuary; a birthing pool for the tender souls of adolescence to flourish. Yet now we expose our young to far too much and far too soon.  Some call it empowerment; I call it pressure, unfair and undiluted pressure that ends in tragedy far too often.

I saw things as a child that made me question love.  I retreated into a fantasy world that gave me sanctuary and a chance to make sense of the injustices I felt, but now…I just don’t know.  I cannot begin to comprehend the mind of the child of which I write today; what tortures, anguish and hopelessness that beat a lonely path to a tragic end I cannot dare to guess, but no life should go unmentioned.  All are precious and ALL are loved.

I taught the child I speak of; not for long and not often, but enough to carry an image of someone who was alive and now is no longer.  A cry for help?  A determination to die?  Who knows and even the coroner will end with a sentence or two of speculation.  Only God can really answer and for now he has to leave us with our grief and anger. The freedom we fought for, the freedom of our individuality and the freedom to be comes with a price.  A young girl found that price too high and tried to pay with her life.  But by the Grace of God go we.

Go, Rest, Accept, Caress Eternity  young one.