By Gillian Schutte
Tomorrow, September 14, Kai would have turned 25. My heart explodes with an unbearable longing, wondering what he would look like now, his gangly phase behind him, his features maturing, his eyes still bright with the light of his dreams.
I ache to know where his talent in filmmaking might have taken him, what stories he would have told, what magical worlds he would have created. Instead, I am left with the memory of finding his lifeless body in his bedroom on December 1, 2019, just two months after his twentieth birthday.
There are no words to describe what happens to a mother who finds her child after suicide. It's like an atomic explosion that obliterates everything you ever believed to be true. Your solar plexus implodes, your heart shatters, and your womb is torn from your body. You hear a disembodied, primal scream that is both yours and not yours. You fall into a timeless black hole, with no material safety holds to cling to, and you keep falling and falling and falling. Read my early account here .
Sipho had to take Kai down while I struggled to phone an ambulance through my screams. He was the father who had cut the umbilical cord of his son at his birth, and now he had to cut the cord from around his neck at his death. His pain and trauma are immeasurable.
