WATER MARKED

Mother's Day is on 14 May this year. But the Sunday before that is a day few have heard of: International Bereaved Mother's Day, for moms who have lost a child. I am one.

- GLYNIS HORNING

Holding a dead child in your arms is something imprinted indelibly on the psyche. There are days I still wake to feel my heart stutter and leap, as his no longer can, cells quiver at a frantic new frequency, mind shut down then abruptly reboot, flickering from overload, struggling to compute. For a moment I again think I have joined my boy. I long to join him. To not be. Then the world flows back, as it did that September Sunday in 2019 when police arrived, peeled me from him, zipped his beautiful, unblemished, six-foot body into a mortuary bag and drove away. Leaving him forever 25. And us, like all survivors, forever changed, invisibly but intrinsically, as we move on through life. Watermarked.

My book Waterboy, Making Sense of My Son’s Suicide (Bookstorm), written the year after Spencer left, wrestles with the endless question: Why? And with the shock and self-blame that sharpen and complicate this grief.

Almost four years on, the storms have grown less frequent but more intense in the full realisation of ‘forever’, and I find myself instead becalmed, bereft, occasionally wanting to slip under.

Everyone is different, but here are some things that have helped keep me afloat. I hope they may help other parents, as the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) reports that calls to their helplines are soaring, many from young people. In one 10-day period, says operations director Cassey Chambers, they had reports of children aged 12, 9 and 6 dying by suicide. And when child deaths by other means are included, the numbers are shattering, especially in Africa. By their late 40s, almost two-thirds of women in sub-Saharan African have lost a child, according to a study published in 2020 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.