When someone young dies.

You might remember this one.


Someone once told me how horrible it is when a teenager dies. From my bubble of cold logic I glanced at him, “Isn´t it horrible when anyone dies?” Apparently he felt the need to defend himself for he answered “Of course every death is cried, but when someone young dies… it´s so much worse.” For the way he said it I knew it was one of those things you can´t explain with words, so I didn´t ask him anything else. He wasn´t going to give me the answer I wanted, and I strolled away thinking “That´s stupid, all deaths are equally terrible”.

But today I realize that´s not true, and I´d like to know why. I want to be able to explain that, which is only felt, and when tried to pronounce results in muttered fragments of something in between incomprehension and indignation, an attempt to give a shape to what we all feel, a longing to name it. Some break into tears, grief, and so many other things; or they translate it into eloquent speeches about mankind and society, fantastically spoken, but used to cover what they can´t speak out loud. Others, we remain in silence, and seek to understand.

Understand… understand what makes it so terrible. Is it the innocence they snatched from him, how in his few years of existence he couldn´t have done anything that bad as to deserve death? Or is it because at this age we are so moldable and undefined, with so much to learn and so many decisions to make that such an irrevocable sentence makes us stand up before the jury and claim for justice, for benevolence? Maybe it was the years thiey stole from him, all the road he left untraveled, the lives he could have touched, the times he would have gone around the world. That´s because when we are young we are unlimited potential, unrestrained energy, ourselves in our purest state, and we still have so many shapes to assume. I think that´s why it´s so terrible, because someone dares to stop this machine when it´s starting to build up momentum, because they tell us we can´t go on even before we decided which way to go, because they extinguish us when we should be more alive than ever.

Maybe you will cry him a little without having known him, when you are alone in your room and you finally realize what happened. No, you wouldn´t be a hypocrite, because when someone young dies we all die. I didn’t know him, and here I am. Writing this.