cathartic connections

Two current news stories have been rattling around in my head since I stumbled across them. I can’t shake them. I think I know why. I think I’m meant to gain some understanding from them to slot into my jigsaw-puzzle brain before I’m allowed to move on.

 

The first is a sad tale of a teen party gone wrong, a few suburbs away from me in West Perth. Kertisha Derschaw, 17, befriended a guy at a party, 24, who for reasons unknown, bashed her unconscious and leapt off a balcony. She later died a day before her 18th birthday and he strangled himself in jail.

 

Tragedy all round, really.

 

The second regards Rebekah Lawrence who in 2005, at the age of 34, reached the end of her workday, took all her clothes off and jumped out the second storey window to her death.

 

She’s in the news because there’s now a coroner’s inquiry into whether the intensive self-help course she took on the weekend had anything to do with her naked death leap the following Tuesday. Apparently, quite the possibility, since another guy threw himself out a window to his death while on the same course years earlier, and another guy got naked and stabbed himself to death three days after taking the course. Allegedly. Not for me to decide.

 

Here’s the resonance: I see myself in both of these incidents.

 

When I was 17 I too found myself at a random party in West Perth where there were a few older people I didn’t know (and here’s where mother has kittens..). There was no thought at all that I might have been in any danger, but what if I was? What if I was only two steps away from having danger come bash me in the head and I never knew it?

 

Also, at the age of 17 I hooked up with a 24 year old, which went on to work out perfectly fine (well, for 11 years anyway, before it went Pete Tong), but in the beginning, who was to know that for sure?

 

Now, at 34, I find myself battling inner demons probably much like Rebekah’s – a ticking biological clock, a strange sensation of floating between being a happy and productive member of society and being a packet of mixed nuts, and a job that at times drives me mad enough to think about throwing my computer out the 18th floor window and following it (disclaimer: I never ever would. Computers are expensive things).

 

I’m not making light of her situation; in reality, her story has hit me hard. The inner battles I’ve been going through have made me sometimes wonder whether some sort of structured professional help might be needed. I worry about my age and where my life’s heading (or not heading, more accurately).

 

Here’s the lesson: But for the grace of god…

 

I stand here, at this place, in this time, doing these things, because it is meant to be. The universe has decreed I be here, doing what I’m doing, going through what I’m going through.

 

If it was meant to be any other way, it would be.

 

Perhaps on another parallel universe, I’m Kertisha, or Rebekah, and they’re me. Perhaps their lives continue, and mine’s ended prematurely.

 

It’s fatalistic, but I can’t help feeling that fate is a thread wound through more of my tapestry than I realise. Sure, I make decisions, I sit at the wheel pretending I’m a competent and licensed driver, but maybe my ever-hardworking guardian angels are the ones ensuring that I stay within the boundaries of my fate.

 

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Now at the end of this thought process I realise how totally self-centred this sounds. Two young women have died in horrible circumstances, and all I can think about is how it affects me. Well it’s not entirely true – first thoughts were of the horror, the tragedy, and the families’ grief, but after that, doesn’t every tragic situation begin to rotate and work its way into our psyche through personal connection, to allow us to come to terms with it?

 

Maybe that word which for years I have had trouble grasping the definition of, is finally starting to make some sense to me – catharsis.