On March 13, Gor would have turned 12 years-old. His friends and relatives, however, will celebrate the birthday without him – days before they found Gor in the basement, he had hung himself.

“He was a very active child, out-going and friendly. He wasn’t all that interested in school work but he was a well behaved pupil. If there was any community work planned, he was one of the first to get excited about it,” says form master Margarita Maroutyan. She recounts that Gor was out sick from class for a few days. On the day in question, he wanted to leave early as well but she didn’t let him. During the long class session he was seen to be sitting alone around the heater. “We conversed a bit, but I saw nothing out of the ordinary in his behavior,” the teacher notes. After classes, Gor went home with some friends, stopped in to see his mother, who was baking bread at a neighbor’s house, and then repaired his brother’s bike. His mother was still at the neighbors when the tragedy unfolded. The mother, engulfed in a sea of grief, can’t remember who first came upon the heartbreaking scene. Nor can she explain what drove the otherwise cheerful and playful boy to commit such an act. She only recalls that a few days before rumors began to circulate about a boy who attempted suicide in a neighboring village and that Gor had asked his grandfather how many minutes it took for a person to die. According to the mother, the grandfather only told her about this after the death of Gor. On the day we visited the family we weren’t able to see Gor’s father, a well-known tractor driver in the village of Akner. There was an unusual amount of commotion in the house and loud voices were heard emanating from the neighboring room. The women in the family of Gor’s uncle were freely expressing their views and suspicions regarding the incident and were doing their best to poke their nose into my conversation with the mother to find out what we were talking about. At first the mother was hemming and hawing with her explanation and then, as if she had memorized her lines, she repeated, “I really can’t understand what happened, or why.” Witnesses recount that during the days surrounding Gor’s burial the household was eerily calm but that there was a visible sense of tension displayed by Gor’s relatives towards others in the immediate area. The boy’s suicide was also a mystery to his friends and teachers, and none could recall anything out of the ordinary in his prior behavior. What friends his age perhaps found strange was that Gor liked to jump from high places. If he encountered a stream he wouldn’t go around it but would definitely take a risk and leap over it, exhorting his chums to do the same. “Jump and you’ll reach heaven,” he’d say. Gor’s friends would only say that people would gather in an apartment located in a large house and people would be going in and out till late in the evening. The Goris police also knew about the incident. People had been questioned but, according to Antranik Minasyan, who heads the department’s juvenile affairs division, such incidents aren’t recorded as criminal cases. “He’s an individual and can do with his life what he wants,” Mr. Minasyan told us over the phone. The attempted suicide of another young boy just a week before was, naturally, written off in the same manner. Miraculously, the life of the 16 year-old was saved by a team of Yerevan doctors. The attempt, however, did leave its mark on the boy’s overall health. In a traditional village, far removed from the capital, it’s much more difficult to confess that your child decided to take this extreme step due to some problems. What is even more appalling is that, in the 21st century, the underlying cause for such action might be the distorted perception one has of a common illness and that one’s friends and relatives are constantly pestering you about it. One month before Gor’s suicide, a 15 year-old girl living a few kilometers from the village, tried to take her own life and left this note to her girlfriend, “They all pity us but they don’t like us.”  Luckily, for the forlorn girl, she proved too tall for the low basement ceiling and her attempt failed. A top school student, the girl had found the desperate social conditions in which she lived no longer tolerable. The only bread winner in the family was her mother who had recently joined the ranks of the unemployed. And the compassion shown by friends and relatives had started to offend her sense of self-worth. On top of this were the constant beatings she received from her elder brother. The poor girl could find no other escape from her plight. Even after the botched suicide attempt the girl continued to point out that, “No matter, the day will come when I succeed…” Three cases in the space of just one month in a radius of a few kilometers… Three cases that mirror our life even though the reasons behind each incident differ… And even though the police have seen fit not to classify them as criminal acts (the first case is still being investigated), how justifiable is it to dismiss them out of hand by stating that a person is free to do with his/her life as one wishes, especially if the life in question is that of a child. Perhaps society at large also believes that the gates of heaven are open to those who prefer to soar.