Kadian, just being

and his briefs are showing. He’s grown four inches. His voice has dropped. His personality is captured beautifully. He engages with the viewers as if they were there.

Two days after Kadian’s death, Finn posted a short film on YouTube. It was a montage of photographs and footage set against one of Kadian’s favourite song’s, Coldplay’s Life In Technicolor II.

I recognised the stream of comic faces and pictures, so it must have been the music that triggered this first taste of a mixed horror and agonised yearning that I now know well.

But then came footage that I hadn’t seen – footage that I might have watched with Kadian two days before.

In one cut, he’s laughing and licking snow as if it’s ice-cream as he turns into the camera. In another, he’s dancing on the ice next to the Potomac River in Washington DC – which still makes my heart thud at the danger of it.

The sequence that leaves me breathless is a mirrored shot of the two standing over a counter, dipping biscuits into milk. Kadian begins dabbing the mushy Oreo over his face. And then breaks into giggles. This sound is one of the most precious gifts alive. My child was a torchbearer of joy, and I will never hear that laugh again.

I used to fear that if I watched it too many times, it might lose its power, the emotional impact might fade. But it hasn’t. It’s not a melody. It’s not a memory. And he wasn’t acting. He was just being.

If I ever want to share Kadian with people who didn’t know him, I send them links. I often hear it’s easy to get a strong sense of his energy, to mistake the experience for knowing him.

I have asked myself how much value there is to triggering these emotions over and over again. Do I imagine that if I replay these things enough, he is going to remain as real as he was when he was with me? I can’t help but wish.

Several weeks before the first anniversary of his death, I switched on Kadian’s mobile phone. It had survived the accident. I checked the last photos he took. There was a sticky bun in a window of a bakery, and the last icecream he ate with a friend.

The last text to me was an audio recording of a cow mooing in a field. My last text to him was: “Don’t let them cut your hair.” (His dad often talked him into it when I was out of town.)

I’m glad for this record, and for the huge library of digital memories. They are powerful and valuable. But I have other soulful moments and memories – in my head. Like the last time I ran my fingers through his hair, cupped the back of his head in my hand and kissed him goodnight, the same way I had done every night since he was a baby. It was before I went back to the United States. Kadian commented that he was glad he would be joining me shortly, so we could come home together.

Because we were never good at being apart. – Guardian News & Media