In that gray place between half-sleep, half-waking, I heard ABS-CBN’s The Correspondent doing a documentary about Mariannet Amper’s controversial and alleged suicide. There must be something in that state of mind (half sleepiness, I mean) that makes you retain certain information. I haven’t stopped thinking about her since.
Oddly, I felt like the way I felt when I was reading Jeffrey Eugenide’s The Virgin Suicides.
Mariannet somehow reminded me of Cecilia, the youngest of the Lisbon sisters and the first of the girls to commit suicide. When Cecilia was rushed into a hospital after her first suicide attempt, a doctor asked her “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets. ” and Cecilia replied “Obviously, Doctor, you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl”.
Apparently, her family’s poverty drove the 11-year-old girl to wrap a swathe of nylon rope around her neck and to exit the world in a noose. When the news about Mariannet’s suicide first broke out, the immediate reaction is one of shock and disbelief. I told myself that there must be something else wrong. An 11-year-old girl is simply too young to feel that she has no other way out–something is terribly disturbing in that picture. Even more disturbing than the fact that her family laid out her diary (her diary!!!) for all the world to see. That they let the press go open season and vulture-gobbled her memory. And now she would be known forever as the girl who committed suicide. They will never know what she was when she lived, but only how she chose to die.
Even in death, that little girl is continually soul-raped.
When the Lisbon sisters were buried, their deaths were registered as an accident. The town priest told them (quote not verbatim) “Suicide has to be an intent. It’s hard to know what those girls were really trying to do.”
It would be too presumptuous to declare that we know how she felt, that she ought not to have given up so quickly. Just like I felt when I was reading the Virgin Suicides, we would never know what truly went on inside her brain. But poverty is something I, and a lot of people, can relate to. How it sneaks up to a person and like a petty thief, snatches away your childhood before you’re old enough to fight back. How it could make you age faster than your years, how it makes you feel helpless and alone. Trapped.
And perhaps it is in this tiny acre of common ground, I find reason to send up a prayer for that little soul. They say that people who commit suicide will never get to heaven.
But I like to think otherwise. Perhaps she’s right there, right now, riding the bicycle she never had, her soul now light and free.
Except, perhaps, told in a hopefully classier way.