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.