THE 21-YEAR OLD MAIDEN WHO KILLED HERSELF: THE MYSTERY OF FAITH

She was beautiful, tall, the slender kind, fair-complexioned, with a ready smile that would have disarmed you. She would have had wonderful years ahead of her. Yet on the night her lover told her their relationship had ended, she killed herself-- all of her 21 years on earth.

If you were Lani, the village lass of Ramon, Isabela, what would you have done in a similar situation?

Would you sleep the rejection off and let the issue go away? Would you take action until the following day when things are different--you see the sun rising beyond the far mountains and the sky and the hills appear to be on fire. What a beautiful sight!

Would you stay in your room the whole day and nurse the inflicted pain?
Would you think a million times that life is no longer worth living but in the process you see the light?

Would you go to church and, in the silence, pray to the Almighty God for comfort? Would you pray to Him for guidance? Would you go the local priest and seek counsel?

Or would you join your friends and go camping or go to Boracay and see the place and find out for yourself why it is the best tourist destination in the planet?

There are so many things to do in a day in a difficult situation.

But for Lani there was only one way out of her despair and frustration: Kill herself. This is the mystery of the human condition and faith. Why did God her creator allow Lani to take her own life? Isn't God in her that He would have told her it was not the right thing to do? That He alone is the giver as well as the taker of human life?

And the philosopher says that God was generous to her: she gave her everything, loving parents, a home, a beautiful mind including the freedom of choice. And the argument stops there? No. Did he also give her a mind that snaps at the slightest pique?

Lani's action was deliberate. Before she jumped to her Lethe--a watery grave at one of the canals of the Magat River Irrigation System that originates in the village of Aguinaldo--she wrote a suicide note which says in part," Mother, I drowned myself. " She was alive then but she was thinking in the past, her sentences were in the past tenses.

The Magat River in Ramon, Isabela, the water of which empties into the canals of the Magat River Irrigation System.

The last time her mother saw her was at 11:30 at night outside their home. Lani was then talking to someone on her cellphone. Her mother even called her to come inside the house because it was then a windy and cold night.

She was missing for two nights and three days. Then there was a call from a  funeral house in Cordon town, 19 kilometers away from Ambatali, informing her family of her body, which had been found floating in the irrigation canal in the village of Malapat. They had traced Lani's family through her cellphone she had zippered in her maong pants.