Kate Shand is the communications and strategy manager at the Housing Development Agency in South Africa and a former freelance editor.

Boy

The Story of my Teenage Son’s Suicide

By Kate Shand

Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Kate Shand
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-920601-16-4
CHAPTER 1

I have a son my son is dead I had a son. It becomes a mantra and the words can drive a person mad. I have a son I had a son. Since Boy died I have read a lot of books about suicide and grief and the loss of a child. Much of what I have read affirms that I still have a son, it’s just that he’s no longer physically with me. My relationship with my son will continue although he is no longer here in physical form. I had a son he was fourteen years old he hanged himself. It’s as though by repeating the words they will somehow become real. The words will solidify, and the full and truly horrific reality of this tragedy will penetrate. But somehow the mind – or is it the soul? – protects me, for if I am to feel the full impact of these words, how will I continue? Instead I get sent my grief in parcels that I can handle – just. What I can’t plan for is when these moments will arrive. Sometimes it’s random, when I least expect it. I feel the tears welling up, the twisting of my tummy and the clamping of my heart, and my right hand reaches up and tries to find my heart, where the pain is, so I can hold it, as though touching it will stop it exploding. And the terrible and terrifying choking-crying starts. I may be at the shops or walking the dogs or sitting at my desk at work or driving into the driveway, but most often it’s as the aeroplane takes off and starts flying. This I can now expect. Perhaps it’s when I am flying that I feel closest to John Peter.

An interesting thing has happened. I am no longer scared of flying. I am no longer scared of anything. If someone asked me to, I would jump out of an aeroplane with a parachute. There is no anxiety about flying whatsoever. It’s almost as if – and it’s not really a consciously articulated thought – I don’t really mind if the plane crashes because (1) I will be with Boy and (2) the struggle of trying to keep together the pieces of this broken family and of my shattered heart will be over and (3) I will be free of the splinters of pain and anger that pierce and probe and I will no longer feel this loss.

And it’s not just the loss of Boy. It’s the loss of the six of us struggling and bumbling through life. My family – chaotic and loud and opinionated and rebellious and colourful and loving and a bit messy and rough around the edges. My children – Laine, Annie, John Peter and Ruby-Rose – and my husband, David. The big old sad house doesn’t seem to fit anymore and I want to move into a smaller, cosier and more comfortable space – one that doesn’t echo the loss. And then there’s the relentlessness of life. It never slows down but keeps grinding on. Day after day I have to get up and face whatever life brings. Just showing up takes all the energy I have and some days there isn’t enough.

The most challenging and painful part of all this is that the hugest thing has happened – and it doesn’t get much worse except perhaps for war or other mass tragedy – and yet I have to put on my face and confront the world and drop Ruby at school and go to work and carry on and yet everything is different now. I am so changed, so altered, I barely recognise myself in the mirror. In fact, I hardly even look in the mirror nowadays, not caring much about how I look. These days I have a relationship not with the image of me but with my interior life. I hate that life has to carry on. When tragedy strikes suddenly and severely, as tragedies do, there should be an escape route. L