Rumors Abound With Every Tragedy

Recently, a baby boy was born to a loving mother.

Within a week or two, the loving mother - just 19 years old - was found dead, and the rumor mill has quite probably kicked up as a result. See, every sudden passing is always met with speculation and guessing games, but when we're dealing with a really young parent, such as in this case, it seems that rumors are a natural result, somehow.

It's quite possible that this mother's passing was a horrendous confluence of a range of physical illnesses that she may have had in the wake of the birth of her youngest boy, who will now grow up without the physical presence of his mother. With the bacteria and viruses in the world today, anything is possible, particularly after the body has gone through something so physically traumatic as childbirth.

This young mom was scarcely an adult, save for the eyes of Canadian law. Under Canadian law, you're legally recognized as an adult between the ages of 18 and 19 years of age, while in the United States you're a legal adult when you're 21. She was someone's child, not someone to drag through the muck and more simply because we have the urge to throw labels at the situation to try and understand it better.

Here's the deal; there's now two young boys who are now without their mother, and while the young mom's own mom is struggling to make any sort of sense of the loss, she is also trying to raise two small children and stabilize life for them. It's going to make their lives hell when they get older and come to learn more about their late mother and there are certain things that no child should learn about their mother, particularly when it's peppered in rumor and speculation?

We need to be mindful of and respect the fact that this young woman was someone who was very loved by those in her life. Whether that meant her parents, her fiancé, or especially her two little boys, she was loved. Imagine if the person we were discussing was someone important to you - how would you feel if you heard gossip about the person that didn't even touch the truth of who your friend or loved one may have been?

Imagine if you were that person's child.

Imagine you were that child growing up, not knowing who your mother was, save for stories her loved ones shared with you, and then began hearing rumors in the outside community. It would be hard enough growing up, knowing that your mom died when you were very young, but harder still having to deal with everything else that might come with that as you grew up.

This young mother was someone who was loved, and regardless of any rumors that might be generated because her life was somehow cut short, we need to honor that love. We need to be able to forget that it's easy for us to sit and judge a 19 year old mom of two beautiful boys because she was so damn young. We need to remember that this young woman was someone's co-parent, child, partner, friend, relative...all of it...it could be any one of us who is grieving the next loss and having to deal with the fallout from that.

We live in a very judgmental world, us 21st century North Americans, and nowhere does this seem - at least to me - more prevalent than in the case of a young person's sudden death. It seems that as the shock starts to be processed and we try and determine exactly how something so terrible could have happened, theories abound. The problem is, unless any one of us have medical degrees or intimate knowledge of what happened - and even then that's questionable - we are treading on very dangerous ground by engaging in speculation about what happened.

The best way to honor this young parent, instead of speculating about what happened, is to honor the beauty she brought to this world. She has two boys who are part of her legacy now. She had family and friends that loved her and were robbed of a lifetime with her.

She was loved. Take away our need to understand what happened and theorize when we're not qualified to do so, and that's really all that matters.