The Story of a Girl

This was the headlines that everybody in the town could read five days ago in the local newspaper. I cannot think of something else since I read the news.

Mary, the girl who was found dead, was a classmate of mine. Beautiful, smart and admired by everybody for her intelligence she was a popular person with the whole school. Half a year ago she fell in love with an older guy, she was 17 and he was 20. Her friends thought it had been love at first sight. Flowers, telephone conversations and long walks in the park made us think it was a relationship that appears once in a lifetime. She had actually said a couple of times this was the man of her life.

Mary left home two months ago. Her parents immediately phoned the police and informed the authorities about their daughter’s disappearance and about a large sum of money being stolen from the house. Since then the police has been searching her. Someone came up with the idea she was kidnapped while others thought she was killed.

Five days ago everybody’s impatience to find out the truth came to a tragic end. A boy found her dead body on the bank of the lake 2 km far from the town. The police officers started an investigation and it became obvious that Mary had committed suicide. She drowned in the lake in a desperate attempt to escape the situation she had entered. After leaving home she moved with her boyfriend. She remained pregnant. In a long suicide letter, found by the police at her boyfriend’s place, she wrote the guy she was with had been cheating on her with a former girlfriend of his. Given the situation, her pregnancy and the shame of having been cheated on, she made a stupid decision and committed suicide one week before Christmas.

The local community is terrified. A well behaved young lady, the only child of a respectful family found her terrible death in a stupid way. Personally I regret her death. Young people like her often do mistakes because they lack experience and because they do not communicate with their family and friends. This tragedy could have been avoided if she had been helped and advised by family, friends or social workers.