Waterboy: Making sense of my son's suicide

By Glynis Horning

The hole gapes still. It always will. And I fall in periodically.'Durban-based journalist Glynis Horning and her husband Chris woke one Sunday morning to the devastating discovery of their 25-year-old son Spencer dead in his bed. Surrounded by loving family and friends, Horning pieces together the puzzle of his death, writing with a visceral intensity of loss and grief, but also of the joys of celebrating her son's life. Waterboy will touch anyone who has directly or indirectly experienced this ultimate heartbreak. Her wisdom and insight are extraordinary.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookstorm
• Release date: Aug 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781928257936

Book preview

1

Decorative flourish

GOING UNDER

Sunday, 15 September 2019, morning

It’s just another Sunday morning, the one day a week Chris and I don’t start with a swim. We sleep late, make mellow, married love. Then he brings me the Sunday papers to browse while he feeds the hounds in my home-office kitchen downstairs – patent-leather daxies Viv and Zeus twinkling excitedly around him, old husky-cross Ziggy following patiently, single blue eye unblinking – and fixes our yoghurt breakfasts, taking Spencer’s to his flat alongside my office.

We must keep up our elder son’s energy on the eve of his first fulltime job. Tomorrow Spencer starts work with a small, dynamic engineering company that produces high-end scuba gear for the international market at Dube TradePort near Durban airport, catching a lift with a varsity mate who already works there. It’s the perfect transition from university, where Spence has just graduated with his mechanical engineering degree. His future stretches before him.

I savour the thought, reliving last night, when he walked the dogs with me in the glow of the sinking Durban sun. I’d commented on the brilliance of the bougainvillea, the early purple haze of the jacaranda, the sweet scent of the yesterday-today-and-tomorrow, between picking up litter, as I always do. He’d goodnaturedly taken the leash of my canine charge and added it to his own each time I crossed the road, cursing, for an elusive chip packet or mahewu carton.

‘The six months’ probation is for the company as well as you,’ I’d reminded him. ‘If it isn’t right for you, you can just go into teaching instead – do that bridging course at varsity or join the staff at your old school. They keep telling me they’d love to have you.’

The world of newspapers is spread around me as I laze in bed, preparation for my editing shift that starts at noon. ‘Police ignore rape of girl, 3, for four days’, ‘Ghosts of Nkandla could put buyers off Jacob Zuma homestead’ … There’s only one bright note: ‘Ndlovu Youth Choir’s humble roots’, about the choir’s rise from a village in Limpopo to the finals of America’s Got Talent. The world awaits them. And our boy.

I smile at the thought, pleased that our son has decided to give engineering a go. I wonder idly if he’ll wear the same blue tie tomorrow that I helped him pick for his interview a few weeks back, and I hope that his only smart white shirt is still clean. I’m relaxed and more content than in a long while.

I sense Chris standing motionless at our bedroom door.

‘Glyn,’ he says at last, in a queer, strangled voice. ‘Spencer is dead.’

Three words.

Heart heaves. Bowels knot. Synapses fire. I shoot from bed to door and down the stairs to our boy’s flat.

He could be asleep, lying against the pile of cushions. Sculptured mouth slightly ajar, small fleck of pink foam at one corner, beautiful blue-grey eyes half-closed, as if in meditation.

As always, he’s only in boxers, and as I reach down and take him in my arms, his alabaster skin is cold. Already, bruising shadows his limbs, where blood, no longer pumped by that big heart, has pooled and cooled.

There’s not a mark on him. Not a clue around him. Not a pill box or wrapper. Just an empty McDonald’s cup and an ice-cream container beside him, like when he occasionally felt ill as a child and thought he might throw up.

My left brain knows he’s dead. I’ve seen enough forensics series, and enough real dead people – my grandfather, when I was 12; my father, a few months before Spencer was born; Chris’s dad, who’d died moments before Spencer and I could reach him on a late-night dash to the hospital. Spence and I had held each other at the bedside and wept.

Now I hold him, and I can’t weep. I can’t breathe.

But wait: I am breathing. Those great, noisy gasps are coming from me, as my right brain grinds into denial. Perhaps our boy is only in a coma, perhaps he’s still alive. Call an ambulance! Call the police!

I sprint to my office and try frantically to phone, misdialling, swearing, starting to come undone.

Then our second son, our slender, dark-eyed Ewan, and his elfin girlfriend, Sam, are there, wrenched into wakefulness in this new world of panic and pain, and they’re phoning for me.

I tear back to Spencer. To hold him. To be with him as long as I can. To stroke his soft, sandy hair and cool, smooth skin. To wipe the pink fleck from his pale lips, and the next that slowly wells. And the next.

Vans arrive. Men and women in uniforms lead me outside while they examine him, photograph him, oh God, bag him.

Huddled at our garden gate, we watch in disbelief as a mortuary van turns into our yard and they wheel out our boy on a stretcher and load him into the back.

And he is gone.

Gone.

2

Decorative flourish

THE SEARCH

Sunday, 15 September 2019, afternoon

The afternoon is a blur of unreality navigated by necessities. I phone my production editor: ‘I won’t be coming in today because …’ I choke, and he must ask me to repeat it. ‘Spencer is dead.’ I phone Spencer’s employer: ‘You don’t know me, but my son was starting work with you tomorrow. He won’t be coming in because …’ I choke again.

I phone my three closest friends, my soul sisters since schooldays: Anne in Copenhagen, retired from the United Nations Children’s Fund, endlessly caring and concerned; Gill in St Louis, a dynamic varsity lecturer in English turned driven real-estate agent to support her kids when she settled in the USA; and serenely steady Di in Stellenbosch, who quit advertising to study psychology when her first husband died, then raised babies she had late, as I did, and did counselling.

I steel myself as I move on to Spencer’s young friends. I start with Jean-Luc, JL, in Cape Town, the boy who built Lego and parquet-block supercities with Spence on our lounge carpet through primary school, then studied engineering at the University of Cape Town (UCT) while Spence did it here at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN). JL was our rock at our first intimation, three years ago, that all might not be right with our boy.

Like everyone I call, at first he’s shocked into silence. Then his voice is as thick with emotion as mine. But, like three years earlier, he’s as practical as he is compassionate, and takes over phoning Spence’s other friends.

Minutes later, Viv, Zeus and Ziggy are barking at the gate: JL’s parents, Claire and Vincent Regaud, are there, our companions through kids’ sleepovers, school concerts, camping holidays in the ’Berg. They envelop Chris and me in an embrace of anguish and love. ‘Jean-Luc told us to drop everything and get here,’ Vince gets out at last. ‘We don’t know what else to do so we’re bringing supper. You must eat.’

By that night our fridge is full of food, and flowers overflow every surface: roses, lilies, orchids, azaleas, blooming extravagantly, pungently in jars, buckets, pots. The love keeps flowing and growing around us. Like the questions. And the tears.

Among the most wrenching are those of Amos, the house painter and gardener, who lives with his girlfriend, Knowledge, on our property, part of our extended family for more than twenty years. He collapses on the lawn, shrieking and moaning, and I hold him and we weep together.

When gentle Knowledge arrives from work, the shock triggers one of her periodic fits. Amos snaps a leafy twig from a nearby shrub and beats the soles of her feet, calling down God and the ancestors, urging, ‘Out, Satan, out!’

At 11pm I can phone and message no more. I join Chris in bed. He’s in a deep sleep of exhaustion, but my thoughts churn, my heart burns, a poker in my chest.

Spencer is dead. Noooooo!!!

As the poker twists with those thoughts, it hits me that I’ve forgotten the most crucial call of all. Recently I wrote a magazine piece for Organ Donor Month. Immediately, I’d signed up as a donor and given printouts to Chris and both our boys, asking them to remember my wishes one day. All were on board.

The day has come, only it’s not my organs in question, but Spencer’s – if we move fast. Organ donation, I’d written, allows you to save up to seven lives in the first few hours – with two kidneys, two lungs, a heart, a liver and a pancreas. It’s too late for those, but tissue can be donated even after several days, saving or improving many lives.

I fly downstairs, heart hammering almost as hard as fourteen hours earlier. In my office, I retrieve the little donor card I’d printed out. The Organ Donor Foundation had promised a laminated one that had never arrived.

Now I struggle to read the phone number in yellow on a narrow green stripe at the edge: bad design, bad marketing. I manage to get through, but it’s an answering machine. What if a heart or kidney had been available, when speed is key? The ambulance crew this morning estimated time of death to be around 2am: I leave an urgent message saying so.

Desperate, now, to keep some part of our boy alive, to help him help others, I phone three more times in an hour. Eventually a woman calls back, apologetic. It’s Sunday. I must call the Centre for Tissue Engineering tissue bank at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, part of Tshwane University of Technology, when they open in the morning around 8. WTF!

Monday, 16 September 2019

I call at 8, at 8.30. At 9am I finally reach a Centre for Tissue Engineering public-relations person. She emails condolences and a consent form.

Name and age are extraordinarily hard to write. ‘Spencer Stanley Horning Slabber, 25.’ Names chosen for Chris’s late father and my own, to carry those Stanleys into the future – ended now at less than a third of the old guys’ life spans. Then cause of death. I squeeze in ‘Autopsy being done: possible overdose or aneurism’; there’s no space for ‘or heart attack’. But I already know which I suspect.

I sign that yes, I understand that: ‘1. The tissue is donated to the Centre for Tissue Engineering for the purposes of transplantation. 2. The tissue will be removed in a dignified manner and the process will not interfere with any funeral arrangements …’

At ‘4. Prosthetic implants will be used to reconstruct the limbs where the tissue was removed’, I start to shake.

Then ‘I, the undersigned, give consent for the removal of the following tissues …’ It’s too late for corneas or eyes (oh, those limpid blue eyes) but I circle ‘yes’ for bone and tendons in the lower limbs and bone tissue in the upper limbs (those long, lithe limbs of my 1.8m boy who hiked mountains and swam Midmar Miles), chest cartilage (from that broad chest), heart valves (from that loving heart) and skin (oh, his beautiful, milky skin).

Next to ‘Other (please specify)’, I write, ‘Whatever can help someone.’

*

Chris and I drive to the government mortuary in Gale Street to do paperwork for the post mortem. The place has been plagued by news reports of overcrowded storage facilities, and of unsanitary and difficult working conditions. A waiting room with sticky brown vinyl seats is packed with dull-eyed people, here for the same reason we are, and a few agitated others in search of missing loved ones (like we had been, three years ago).

The staff look tired and taciturn but thaw when they see our son’s ID with his age and photo. ‘So young,’ breathes one. The post mortem, they inform us, will take days. I beg them to hurry, tell them the tissue-donation people need to access him fast. They don’t look hopeful.

Back home, I immediately call the Centre for Tissue Engineering public-relations woman, and a newspaper editor with a kind heart and cop connections. They tell me they’re on it.

Then I ring Spencer’s psychiatrist, something I can delay no more.

Dr K is as stunned as anyone I’ve called. I understand about client confidentiality, I tell her, but to hell with that – our boy is gone. Three years ago, I’d taken him for his first consultation with her and with a counselling psychologist, and after that he’d slipped from us into a professional system that largely locks parents out of the loop. Now, I desperately need answers to a question that’s gnawed at us since: had anything been troubling our son that we didn’t know about? Something he didn’t want us to know? Any issue, any life crisis, any personal secret, however dark, to precipitate this?

She’s quietly emphatic: there were no issues. Our son had had severe major depression and generalised anxiety disorder, as we knew. His problem was a chemical imbalance. But he’d felt terribly guilty for not being able to be happy for us.

Early this year, as we also knew, he’d asked to come off his meds. He was doing a part-time course in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) with a varsity friend, and some applications for posts asked if candidates had been treated for a mental-health problem or were on medication, which they’d heard could count against them (such is the stigma).

Also, he’d battled with his medication side effects – as had we, though we’d accepted and never commented on them: the slight dullness and distance, the weight gain, the sleeping late and lethargy … On the meds, he hadn’t been quite Spencer.

Antidepressants have become a key part of treating depression and anxiety, meant to make you feel emotionally stable again and help you follow a normal daily routine, to relieve symptoms like anxiety and sleep problems, and prevent suicidal thoughts. But opinions vary widely on how effective they are. According to a review by Germany’s Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care, studies in adults with moderate or severe depression have shown that 40–60 out of 100 people who took an antidepressant noticed an improvement in symptoms within six to eight weeks, while 20–40 out of 100 who took a placebo noticed an improvement. In other words, the review said, ‘antidepressants improved symptoms in about an extra 20 out of 100 people’. And over half of all who take them experience side effects, mostly initially, such as dry mouth, headaches, dizziness, restlessness and sexual problems.

These are powerful drugs, as I discovered for myself when I fainted one afternoon and was hauled off in an ambulance and put on a drip, only to discover later that Chris had given Spence my vitamin pills that morning, and me Spencer’s depression and anxiety meds – such was their potency.

Dr K had sanctioned Spence coming off the meds: everyone had a right to try, she’d said; but she’d stressed the need to proceed slowly, and under supervision. She’d tapered down his dose, and told him to see his counselling psychologist to monitor him. But he’d stopped seeing the psychologist two years earlier, when she’d moved rooms, telling us he didn’t need to. Instead, he’d said he would see Dr K every two months, rather than every six. Which he’d done.

And he’d told her, as he’d told us, that he was doing fine.

Tuesday, 17 September 2019

Astonishingly, the post mortem has been done – Centre for Tissue Engineering and editor power! We’re told to collect the results from the officers who’d attended the scene.

I barely recognise Detective Sergeant N from Sunday, but he greets us like old friends in his peeling, stuffy office at Mayville police station, where not even the ceiling fan works. He laughs wryly and mutters a comment in Zulu when we tell him why we’re there and points to a pile of folders on his cluttered desk. It can take three to six months to get the results from the lab, he says; ‘Some are outstanding for three years or more.’ Still, he too is moved, either by Spencer’s young face yesterday, or by our haggard ones today, and agrees to help ‘facilitate the release of the body’.

Chris and I find ourselves in a police vehicle with him and his partner, belting back to Gale Street. We sign an ‘authority to hand over body and acknowledgement of receipt’, where I certify having ‘received the body of Spencer Stanley Horning Slabber properly cleaned, sutured and prepared for burial’ – though they don’t offer to show him to us and we can’t bring ourselves to ask.

Our detective disappears into a back room and returns with vials of body fluids for analysis. They’re packed between halves of a polystyrene box that don’t quite meet in the middle. ‘Won’t the heat spoil that?’ I ask, horrified.

He and his sidekick make a show of speeding us all back to Mayville to deposit the polystyrene box in a police-station fridge, then obligingly drop us at home, giving hearty traditional handshakes when we climb out.

Our boy’s body released, I call Oakleigh Funeral Home to take him at once to their own small mortuary for the tissue harvesting. It emerges there’s no harvesting team in Durban, so one is flying in from Cape Town. They don’t like operating at Gale Street – ‘the conditions aren’t good’ – and have had experience of Oakleigh, one street and a world away.

We drive straight there and book a 10am Friday slot at Stellawood Crematorium Chapel for Spencer’s farewell. His timing was impeccable: with Heritage Day on the coming Tuesday, most people will be treating this as a long weekend, and varsity buddies in other cities, and our only close family – Chris’s sister and her husband, daughters and granddaughter in Joburg – can fly in.

The funeral director who attends us is as grey-faced as we are. He apologises for occasionally ducking from the room: he has cancer and chemo is taking its toll. From his display shelves, we choose for our boy an eco-friendly ‘Go Green’ casket – a cannily branded version of what was