Life choice---Letter From Peter

I am touched and so sorry Ava. These are difficult lessons to learn, particularly in lifetime where so many of you have "benefited" from being only children and having the love of your family so strongly focused on you. A parent's natural instinct is to preserve the lives of their child or children, protect them from life's harm, and not let them suffer in any way.

Life has an ugly way of going in whatever direction the fates take us without a respect for the tenderness of a child or the vulnerability of humans. When a young person dies of an illness that cannot be cured the human vulnerability is underlined. The death of a classmate, even one who may not have been well known, brings death so much closer. How many of your generation have experienced the death of someone close. It is devastating. For this you have my deepest sympathy.

Suicide is the unexplainable. How can a person blessed with life, end that life. The question can never be satisfactorily answered by those of us left behind as the living The natural question: "Could we have done something to prevent the suicide?" The answer is rarely: yes. That makes the event all the more unexplainable. Why are we so limited that we cannot save a life, even a "healthy" life.

Yet inthe midst of all these difficult questions I hope you will see the process of experience and maturing that will give you strength.

I admire and am almost jealous of your decision to work near home. Why jealous? For reasons I won't bore you with I never had this kind of a relationship with my parents (good and bad reasons). I was also fortunate, my parents were both healthy.

The lifestyle we live, like everything else, is a matter of choice.

Cheers

Peter
2009-1-6