Stallone asked where his son had gone. That was the call he received on July 13, 2012. On the other end of the line, his mother’s new husband, a doctor he didn’t even know, told him Sage was gone.
Sly didn’t understand and repeated the question. “Where did he go”. The answer was the worst possible: he had died. Sage was 36 years old and was found lifeless in his home in Los Angeles.
The cause was coronary artery disease. Stallone remembers the news as something “so cold” that he hasn’t forgotten it in 14 years.
But a week later, alone in his room, something broke. He let out a wail he says he had never heard before or since. “It was simply pain, sorrow and guilt. It was not human”.
Today, at 80, he still wonders what he could have done differently and whether he should have been there. In his memoir, The Steps, he admits he wasn’t the father he wanted to be.