“That made me giggle, because that’s just something Cash would do,” recalls his mother, Melanie Anderson.
Nearly three weeks after her son’s death, Anderson said she wasn’t sure what the day would look like, but all of the laughter coming from his room made her feel his large presence there again.
“It was happy, it was celebratory. And I never expected that.”
Anderson says Cash died as the result of trying the ‘blackout’ or ‘pass out challenge,’ a trend on video platform TikTok that encourages participants to choke themselves to the point of losing consciousness.
“Anything that you’re doing to ever try and make yourself choke, pass out, blackout, the way you’re doing that is by depriving your brain of oxygen,” said Dr. Ayisha Kurji, assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Saskatchewan.