DEATH, any death, is always tragic. But the loss of a young life is particularly hard and when that occurs by their own hand, the outcome is particularly difficult to bear.

So islanders will have much admiration for the parents and family of Jean-Pierre Le Bachelet for the courage they displayed at Saturday’s Vale Castle celebration of J-P’s 14 years.

It was an extraordinarily moving event and, whatever drove the troubled youngster to end his life before it had really started, the humanist ceremony showed that it wasn’t a lack of loving family or friends.

No parent will be unmoved by the story or by the openness of J-P’s mother and father at the service – or of the dilemma they faced in whether to give a depressed son a home or a prison.

As Mrs Le Bachelet put it, ‘in the end, the illness took his life, even though it was by his own hand’.

J-P’s uncle put it another way, one that parents will also identify with: ‘He took the weight of the world’s problems and those around him and made them his own and no teenager should be left unaided with such a burden.’

It is one of the reasons the grief-stricken family is urging young people everywhere to speak more face-to-face and less by text and computer.

There is growing concern at the number of teenagers and young adults struggling to make sense of today’s world and this is matched by increasing numbers needing help for self-harming and other emotional problems, and the escalating use of drugs. Whether these developments are linked or not, it is difficult not to conclude that the online communities and social networking sites with the heavy emphasis on winning ‘friends’ means that virtual relationships become more important than real ones.

Life, too, is harder, faster and more competitive than even a generation ago and the global difficulties mankind faces present in a more insistent and strident way.

Before, we didn’t know. Now, it has become impossible not to care but – perhaps as J-P so vividly demonstrated – it is possible to care too much.