A Life Destroyed

It is a dreadful, sad mystery. Why anyone, much less a teen, would be so burdened by the weight of living and feeling herself no longer capable of coping, of enduring what inner miseries she was obviously suffering, would decide to end her life. It is inconceivable that any young person contemplating suicide would be unaware of the anguish that would be left behind, in the wake of her death. The unassuagable grief of parents, of siblings.

The human brain, consciousness, mind and experience is so profoundly personal, and so exceptionally idiosyncratic, we cannot ever know what someone under such dreadful psychical duress must be feeling. All the more so when we aren't aware of what is concerning them, and how greatly they are affected by it. Everyone, at one time or another, feels under stress, incapable of coping, and exhibits symptoms of distress.

Because we all experience these emotions at times, and we recover from them, we don't tend to think that others may be unable to find their way out of their personal and very private pain. For one thing, we hardly know how to respond, even to those with whom we are most familiar. We feel helpless to help them manage the pain they feel. We hope it will diminish and become manageable.

We hope that whatever its source, it will disappear. And life will return to normal.

Yet, for all we know, this is 'normal' for that person, struggling to maintain some semblance of balance, until something, some inner or outer event simply swamps that person into the despair of finality. Wanting to deliver herself from the unmanageability of it all. So desperately wanting peace that oblivion is the way sought to obtain it.

How else to explain, to make sense of a 17-year-old girl, Mariam Makhniashvili, vanishing, everyone desperate to discover her whereabouts, certain she has been abducted, or met an ill end through violence visited upon her by some outside influence. When all the time she had been there, in Toronto, her body awaiting discovery. The forensics investigation and autopsy results seeming to point to suicide.

She had been so newly arrived with her family in Canada from Georgia. An introverted young girl who loved reading books, and who attended for the first time a new high school close to where she lived with her parents in a good district of Toronto. And for some unfathomable reason she chose to leave her parents' home, her relationship with her younger brother, and her very life, in favour of stilling the demons within.

The massive search grid at the time of her 2009 disappearance had turned up nothing, no clues whatever. Sightings far afield across the country had been cited, but led to nothing useful. Her backpack had been discovered, abandoned. In the end, her body was discovered in a wooded area under a busy overpass in north-end Toronto. Her parents will never have the relief of hoping she would be found some day.

Her father, who had believed that neighbours had abducted his daughter, and who had attacked them in his delusionary grief, will find no relief with the news of his daughter's body having been retrieved, for his grief will continue, as will her mother's. Her brother will wonder, throughout his life, what had assailed his sister's well-being.

But she herself is now free from whatever it was that destroyed her life.