Sharon Tate…Her Raison d'être…

If anything about anything about Life can be known to MsBurb, it must be that ALL of us born to this Earth have a reason for being.

We, of course, start out not knowing what that reason is, and yet, in our youth, with all its zeal and abounding idealism, we are so sure we’ve figured it all out.
But for most of us, what we thought was our purpose in Life turns out to be anything but.
And the difference between what it really is and what we thought it was is only made known to us moments before…or sometimes, sadly, moments after…

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Sharon Tate thought she knew what her future held on August 8, 1969. Motherhood. Marriage. Mounting fame.
Anything but Murder.
Yet it turned out that it was her Death that was truly the reason for her Life, her ending fuelling hope in all of us who remain. That her Life, as it was intended, had been fulfilled, even if not to her, or our, expectations. It was the Ending and not the continuation of her Being which would make us sit up and take notice that hers was an exemplary Life of how to Be and Treat others while Being.
Without Sharon’s death, we could no more see the Evil in The Manson Family than we could see the Good in her. Without the loss of her, we could no more possess an example of how to live and not to live.
Her Life was that Greek Tragedy we humans always seem to need to be reminded of every hundred years or so.
Sharon’s raison d’etre was to remind us all that, despite the horror which was unleashed in her undoing, the time that she spent with us on Earth was a shining example of the Beauty and Innocence and a “Joie de Vive” that did encompass all our lives in the 60s.
Yes, there was Vietnam and yes, we had lost an iconic President, but we were slowly learning how to live with those losses and still smile, evident by the music of that time – songs that could be full of darkness one moment and yet full of light the next.
We could have seen this event coming, if we had noticed this dichotomy, and our obsession then for extremes – the Good over the Bad, the Black over the White, the Right over the Wrong – but in our youth, we had no time to entertain the Unknown or the Grey, we shunned the possibility of that our own peers would be the cause of ending our own decade’s long Summer of Love.
In our refusal to see Life through anything but an LSD fuelled, rose-coloured kaleidoscope, we were made to bear witness to people who we thought were all Good being systematically eliminated by people who we decided must be all Bad, forgetting that the victims and the perpetrators were just a reflection of the good and evil in us all.
We needed to grow up and August 9, 1969 was our generation’s Wake-up Call.

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Today, the Youth of America in the 60s, are the Middle-Aged in 2010.
We’ve grown up, we’ve experienced Life, and we’ve matured. We know what can hold pure joy one moment can have lurking in its shadows pure horror in the next. We are now tempered steel that was once just un-worked ore and we are stronger for the pounding.
The moment Sharon died and took with her in her arms her unborn baby and left this world for another, she knew what her purpose in Life had been, and for her, in that moment, all the pain and the sorrow lifted from her soul like a coastal Californian haze cloud can as quickly lift from the hills of Bel Air.
As we, in Life, have felt her pain and sorrow for forty years, she, in Death, has rested at peace, knowing that her time on Earth was meant as a testament that Life does indeed possess Light and Beauty even amid much Darkness and Repulsion.
What she knew one minute after…on August 9, 1969.
It has taken MsBurb a lifetime to learn.