Grief isn’t the end. It’s where to start from

Four years ago, I got the phone call that every parent dreads.

Without warning, my healthy 25-year-old son Raphaël – a wildlife biologist and ecological activist – had collapsed and died. The trauma catapulted me into a place of almost hallucinatory madness: a territory so tormenting, debilitating, and bleak that I couldn’t imagine how I’d mentally survive it, let alone find joy in the life that remained.

Catastrophes are radicalizing and transformative. You no longer see your life in the same way, and you become a different person. But must grief diminish you, or can it do the opposite?

As the seasons passed, I began to ask if my personal misery and the existential grief that Raphaël and I shared over the desecration of the planet were connected in a way that could lead to a new, more generative way of inhabiting the world.

My pain as a newly-bereaved mother was intense and private, while the pain of the ecological and climate anxiety that formed its backdrop – manifesting as anxiety, depression and helplessness, especially among the young  – was collective, cumulative, and anticipatory. But both kinds of grief had vital elements in common. Both were rooted in love. Both required courage, resilience and compassion. And both would come to teach me how to accept the past, find purpose in the present, and navigate an increasingly unstable future.

In the field of death and dying, one of the most enduring and influential figures is the Swiss psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who in the late 1960s came up with the famous “five stages” of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance to describe the emotional arc of her terminally ill patients. Later she and her colleague David Kessler re-purposed the stages to apply to the grief of the bereaved, and though displaced by other models, the five stages model became deeply embedded in Western culture. Then tragedy struck Kessler, and a new stage of grief entered the equation.

As a psychologist who had spent his whole career supporting the bereaved, Kessler felt he knew grief well. But the unexpected death of his 21-year-old son changed everything. Suddenly, like countless other bereaved parents, he faced the existential question raised in Mark Twain’s adage that “the two most important days in your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out why.” And he came to believe that instead of acceptance embodying “closure,” it marks the beginning of a sixth stage of grief: finding meaning.

This phase made a lot more sense to me than any of the others did. There was no meaning in Raphaël’s death. But I could find purpose, meaning and fulfilment in what I could do, and make happen, in its wake. And if that could apply to personal grief, surely it was also relevant to the ecological grief that is blighting the mental health of millions around the world? Indeed, the meaning stage could be vital to the generation who will pay the brutal price of their ancestors’ mistakes.

In the Nobel prize-winning climate scientist Steve Running’s 2007 extrapolation of Kubler-Ross’ work, he characterizes denial as the belief that the climate emergency isn’t happening, or that humans aren’t the root cause. The anger stage kicks in when you realize your worldview or lifestyle will have to change substantially. Then you bargain, by downplaying the scale of the crisis, or by putting all your faith in techno-fixes. The depression stage manifests when you feel overwhelmed by the extent of the crisis and realize that governments and corporations are not only spinning their wheels but often actively exacerbating the damage. Acceptance entails recognizing that the scale of the challenge is irrefutable, and then looking actively for solutions because “doing nothing is unconscionable.”

Enter meaning. But where could I find it for myself, let alone see how it might scale up to apply to collective grief? As I met other bereaved parents, took daily swims in the freezing Danish winter sea, re-connected with the natural world, and abandoned my secular, rationalist understanding of consciousness, I remembered what Raphaël always said to me when I belittled my contribution to the cause we shared. “Do what you can, where you are, with what you’ve got.”

The previous year I’d co-founded Extinction Rebellion’s literary activist group Writers Rebel, whose mission is to put literature in the service of life on Earth. But when Raphael died, I stopped my activism. I couldn’t face the zoom calls.

Yet doing nothing was, and remained, unconscionable. What, I began to wonder, could be more meaningful than honoring my son’s memory and the world I love by being active rather than crying on the couch? Even if I fail?

Eight months after Raphaël’s death I took my turn on a makeshift podium in the freezing Copenhagen wind and made a speech in front of the Danish national radio and TV station which, like most media organisations across the world, has failed to treat the emergency with the urgency it deserves. I felt raw and nervous, but I felt his presence, and when I quoted him – “I won’t stand aside and watch the world burn” –a huge cheer went up. As writer after writer spoke, there was a sense of growing energy. Intense conversations about the role of literature in an era of crisis followed, and within months, the Danish writers group Forfattere ser Grønt was born.

Raphaël always described activism as the best antidote to depression that he knew. Now I felt the truth of it. Yes, my son was dead. And yes, the interconnected systems that support life on our planet were dying. But it wasn’t too late for one of them.

I joined Writers Rebel’s weekly zooms again and helped organize a live online tribute to the planet’s most critically-endangered species with contributions from literary names including Margaret Atwood, Ben Okri, Elizabeth Kolbert, Amitav Ghosh, Lydia Millet, Wu Ying-Mi, Homero Aridjis and Emma Thompson. Later, the notes I’d been writing to myself as therapy began morphing into a grief memoir, and later still I founded the Rebel Library, an online resource recommending some of the best climate and ecological literature across all genres. And yes, it all felt meaningful.

But activism isn’t the only route from grief to fulfilment. For those paralyzed by climate depression, just doing something new, or doing something familiar more mindfully, can germinate what the eco-philosopher Joanna Macy calls active hope: not the amorphous hope of wishing on a star, but the practical hope of rolling up your sleeves and embodying change. Intentions are fine, but the meaning lies in the doing – be it cheering up a friend, transforming a patch of urban scrub into a garden, switching to a meat-free diet, taking time to observe a creature in the wild, or lighting a candle for the dead.

Just a few months before the electrical signals in Raphaël’s heart catastrophically misfired, I found a passage in his notebook which showed he had a premonition that he would die young – but that his sense of purpose would stay vividly alive in the collective.

“I’ll not be dead until my dream is, I’ll not fade away until my vision does, I’ll not be gone until all my hopes are.”

It took his death for me to understand why I was born.

It can’t take a civilizational collapse for humanity to understand why we belong here.

It needn’t. And it mustn’t.

 

This is an edited version of an article first published in the New York Times in April 2024

How death taught me how to live

As a young mother, I was haunted by the terror that one day a child of mine would die. It took root after my first son was born, and by the time I was pregnant with my second, it was unbearable. Superstitiously terrified told that if I told anyone, it might come true, I kept it secret. But it was killing me. And then one day I cracked.

In another place and time, I might have gone to a village wise-woman, or a priest, or a shaman. Instead, I booked an appointment with a therapist.

“I’m going to lose a child,” I told him. “I don’t know which one. But one of them will die.”

When he said without hesitation “We must take this seriously,” I was flooded with relief. Over the next few weeks, we explored where my conviction came from. The source was painful, and very private, and led to me making a small pilgrimage to lay a ghost – real or imagined – to rest. The strategy worked, and as my young boys grew up into healthy, active men, the old dread stayed firmly dormant.

And then on the 6th February 2020, the phone call came. The boys’ father – by now my ex of 20 years – was crying. Immediately, the terror was back. He didn’t need to say a word. I just thought: Which boy?

It was our younger son, Raphaël. A wildlife biologist and environmental activist, and a prominent member of Extinction Rebellion, he was awaiting trial for vandalizing the Brazilian Embassy in London in protest at the trashing of the Amazon. My biggest fear had been that he’d go to jail. But now, at 25, and fitter and healthier than he’d ever been, he was dead. He’d been planning a documentary about anti-poaching units in South Africa, and was taking an intensive physical training course there in preparation. He’d collapsed on a group run – and they couldn’t save him.

His father, brother and I were in three separate countries, thousands of miles away, and it took us more than two days to reach the place where he died, and speak to the paramedics who tried to save him. There is footage of him running, filmed just ten minutes before he fell. He’s singing as he runs, and encouraging the others to sing too. He’s happy, and in in his element.

How can someone be so alive one minute, and then so dead?

It made no sense.

His body was on its way to a morgue an hour’s drive away. We had to see him. He lay on a trolley, wrapped in a plastic sheet, with his head and upper chest visible. It was only when I saw how stark his freckles were against the pallor of his skin that the fill horror of it crashed in. I wanted to die too. If there’d been an option that would had spared my loved ones pain, I’d have taken it in a heartbeat.

But there were other imperatives. The pandemic was on its way. Hastily, we had him cremated, and took his ashes to London, where we held a big, wild, tearful memorial in celebration of his life. And then an eerie nothingness. The first phase was over.

Back home in Denmark, I knew that I was no longer myself. But who was I now? I simply didn’t know. The world had atomized.

And then came lockdown, a mass cocooning which in the madness of my grief, seemed only fitting: my son was dead, so of course the whole world should come to a stop: how could it not?

The pandemic suited me and Raph’s stepfather. We didn’t want to interact with people. Every day, for nine months, I cried for Raph the hilarious baby, Raph the vocal, serious toddler, Raph the brilliant, eccentric boy, Raph the campaigning zoologist committed to saving wildlife. And Raph the dead body in the morgue.

I never relished my crying storms but I always felt better afterwards, grateful for the pressure change that followed, and perhaps instinctively aware that to resist the pain of my grief would only defer the process: that succumbing to the agony was – paradoxically – a vital part of my healing. If I didn’t fully acknowledge the pain, how could I ever metabolize it?

Around this time I came across a line by the Danish author Karen Blixen: “The cure for everything is salt water: sweat, tears, and the sea,” and I rolled it around in my head as I began swimming every morning in Copenhagen harbour, until summer changed to autumn and became winter and the sea was so cold that the thermometer was coated in a huge bulb of ice. And there, in the freezing water, I discovered another kind of release: the wild freedom of being a creature that existed nowhere but in the present moment. Sometimes Raphaël  swam with me too: I could sense him underwater, his long hair streaming behind him, urging me on.If I could survive hypothermia, I told myself, I could survive the death of my son, and if I could survive the death of my son I could survive hypothermia. That first winter, my harbour swims became the physical and spiritual proof of my capacity to endure the unthinkable. There was nothing masochistic about it: it was a vital, regenerative fix.

And I talked. I talked to him – as I still do- but more and more, I reached out to other parents who had also lost children and not only survived, but thrived. These mothers and fathers became my new role-models, and they were generous with their wisdom. It’s said that when a mother elephant loses her child, the other elephants in the herd form a circle around her, to give her comfort. When my fellow-bereaved joined my elephant circle, it felt complete.

But in the end, you can only do the work of grief alone. For me this meant searching for some kind of meaning – not in the loss of Raph’s life, which will never make sense to me, but in life beyond it. Words have always been my way of processing my thoughts and feelings, and over the months the books I read, and the words I wrote, became a way of looking around, and back, and forward. Forward was the hardest, because what was there to look forward to?

Alongside Raph’s birthday, there was a date I dreaded in particular: the anniversary of his death. The first year was brutal. But by the third year, I had learned to frame it not as a trauma trigger but as an opportunity to celebrate Raph as he deserved, and as he’d have wanted: with gratitude that he’d loved and been loved, that he’d lived his life to its full capacity, and that he’d left a mark.

We think, when we’re in thrall to a deep emotion, that it will stay the same for ever. It doesn’t. But I realized that while the passage of time helped, it still needed my active assistance in the healing process. So now, when I get a sudden flashback to the morgue, I put a smile on Raph’s face and imagine him saying: “I didn’t die. I lived.” It’s not just wishful thinking, because it’s exactly what he would say. Knowing him so well, his thoughts and ideas have become my compass, my reference point, and part of an ongoing conversation that feels vivid enough for me to know that although he’s physically gone, he’s still very much around.

The grief lies deep in me, and always will. But I have grown bigger around it. When I laughed for the first time after Raph died, I felt him cheering. He cheered again whenever I swam, or immersed myself in nature. He approved when I got a puppy, and when I began volunteering on a grief helpline. He rejoiced when his brother got married, and again when he became father to twin girls who have given the family more joy that we could ever have imagined. When I hold my granddaughters in my arms, I feel Raph’s arms around us all.

The world doesn’t stop when someone you love dies: it only pauses. But the pauses forge vital connections to our deepest selves, and as we emerge from them, changed, we find the world, and our relationship to it, has altered too.

Since Raphaël’s death, the ongoing destruction of wildlife habitats has been as devastating as he feared it would be. He spent his last months in a frenzy of activity, as if on some level he knew his days were numbered. A few months into my grief, I found a passage in his notebook that confirmed he did. It is a love letter to activism, and to a future worth fighting for – before and after his own death.

“I wonder how long it will take, or if we’ll ever get there. Perhaps we’ll reach this brave new world in a decade, perhaps we’ll still be moving towards that long after I’m dead,” he writes. “When the light leaves my eyes, and I pass on, do not weep for me, for I am not dead. All that I ever was and ever will be lies in the flame of passion that consumed me: the same flame that burns in all those who believe in what I believed. I’ll not be dead until my dream is. I’ll not fade away until my vision does. I’ll not be gone until all my hopes are.”

Raphaël will stay with me for as long as I live. But his legacy belongs to all of us.

 

 

The most likely cause of Raphaël Coleman’s death was undiagnosed hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which caused the electrical signals of his heart to catastrophically misfire.

First published in The Observer, 2024

My son’s ark

It’s the end of the 20th century and my elderly father, who is a violin-maker, has built a microcosmic world. The ark is a floating animal sanctuary, a larder, a breeding-ground, a time-capsule, a social science experiment, a panic-room – and a toybox. It’s a gift for my son , who is three. It has a white cabin complete with portholes, a red roof, and a yellow detachable gangplank. The flat-bottomed hull is yellow, with a line of blue waves to indicate the waterline. It’s unseaworthy, but  doesn’t care. He loves it fiercely.

The ark is the perfect gift for Raphaël, because what my father grasps about him instinctively is not that he’s a little Noah, but that he’s an animal – and that while many children gradually disconnect from their innate creaturehood,  Raphaël will never lose sight of his. As a baby, he slept with a cat in his pram, lulled by feline purring. He loved making the animal noises: the cow’s moo, the cat’s meow, the dog’s bark, the fish’s mouth going pop pop pop.  His favourite video was a documentary about the legendary giant squid. Rigid with awe, he’d watch the hyper-realistic animation of Architeuthis attacking a whale five times its size, latching on with its suckers, then pulsing its titanic body and streaming through the darkness. The creatures of the deep seemed to speak to him in a way no human could.

At three, Raphaël loves not just the birds, squirrels, foxes, frogs and insects in our back garden and the animals in the zoo and in the city farm, but their plastic replicas. He and his brother have an impressive collection: cow, elephant, dog, camel, moose, sheep, lion, tiger, bear, ostrich, snake, chicken, goat, crab, shark, stork, scorpion. Now that the animals have a home, he walks them up the gangplank of the ark onto the narrow deck, or he takes off the red roof and stores them in the hull. In and out they go, endlessly. Sometimes he sorts them into categories. Land animals. Sea animals. Flying animals. Dinosaurs.

“Arks are to save the animals that are alive so they can have babies,” his brother argues. “And dinosaurs are extinct.”

But Raphaël doesn’t understand death yet, let alone extinction. Everything he loves is magic and draws breath.

Four years after my father gives Raphaël the ark, I am freshly divorced, and we still haven’t finished unpacking our removal boxes when my father has a fall, goes to hospital, and dies of septicemia.  Raphaël crawls under the bunk bed and cries for his grandfather. He says he wants to die too. Rocked by my own grief, I can’t explain death to him, except to say that when something dies it turns into a new form of energy, but what the hell do I know? Does death mean the end of consciousness? What if consciousness isn’t generated by the brain, but is instead a vast electro-magnetic entity with which the soul merges when the body expires?

Does my dead father, transformed into energy, know that Raphaël will recover from the brutal summer and autumn of 2001, and stop wanting to be dead? Does he know that Raphaël will inherit his skills in craftsmanship? That with the ark parked in a corner of his bedroom next to his gerbils, he’ll go on to build a rabbit-cage, and carve a crossbow; that as a young teenager he’ll strip copper wire from old flex and make ingenious chain-mail necklaces; that when he leaves school he’ll design his own elaborately beautiful tattoos; that he’ll whittle coconut shells into jewelry to give to girls? That Raphaël’s love of what he calls the Wild will deepen and evolve? That he’ll study zoology, and become a wildlife biologist and photographer? That he’ll work in jungles and on beaches and up mountains? That he’ll study the Eyelash Palm Pit Viper and track jaguars in Costa Rica, work on sea-turtle and dolphin conservation projects in Greece and Fiji, and fall in love with a trafficked night-monkey at a rescue centre in in Bolivia? And that back in the UK, he’ll become an ingenious and multiply-arrested Extinction Rebellion activist, and be charged with criminal damage after vandalizing the Brazilian embassy in London in support of the indigenous rainforest protectors murdered for the sake of livestock feed?

Will he also know that my son will never have his day in court?

Will he know that on 6th February 2020, at the age of 25, Raphaël will collapse while running, and that because his heart contains the ticking bomb called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, it will stop beating? For ever?

Does he know now that Raphaël, too, is dead?

“My son died.” I had to learn to say that.

His death in February 2020 wasn’t the only thing that had been brewing for years and arrived suddenly. It coincided with a flashpoint in history. In a short space of time, it became clear that the pandemic was a symptom of the planet’s anthropogenic malaise. It hit the world like grief. It had the same muscularity, the same survival instinct, the same refusal to loosen its jaws. Like grief, it would not just change the trajectory of untold lives, but shine a clear sharp light on all that we are losing, and what we will die without. It is commonly said of losing a child: “You get through it, but you never get over it.” This wisdom applies not just to bereaved parents, but to the grief – past, present and anticipatory – of a civilization in the midst of an existential trauma. The future we expected has changed shape.

For months after the electrical mis-firing that caused Raphaël’s heart to stop, my own heart ached. It was as if a mineral had accreted in there, forming jagged crystals. It was blood temperature and a muddy dark purple. Mostly it just sat motionless behind my sternum, but occasionally it shifted its weight and tortured me in a new place. I wanted, urgently, not to be me. Like Raphaël, when he was seven, I wanted to die.

Raphaël grieved for this planet in the way all wildlife biologists do. He grieved for all the species he knew would become extinct in his lifetime. He grieved for their habitats. He grieved for the trafficked and abused animals he worked with: creatures so traumatised by abusive humans and so disconnected from their natural habitats that they would never survive independently in the Wild. He grieved over the fact that 66 percent of the planet’s mammal biomass is livestock reared for meat, while only 4 is percent is wildlife – of which a million species are on the brink. When he met any threatened species, he told me, he felt that in recording it, he was also writing its obituary. No splendid poison frogs, no more smooth handfish, no more spined dwarf mantis, no more nazareno, no more Bonin pipistrelle bats, no more pipewort, no more hundreds of thousands of other species of plants, insects, fish, mammals and reptiles and invertebrates. It’s said that when a creature becomes extinct, it dies three times: first physically, then in language, and then in memory itself. Raphaël died physically. His second death – in language – won’t happen for as long as his name is still spoken. But our memories die with us. When that happens, will my son die a third time, and become extinct?

Nothing needs to become extinct. I’ve learned that. We can stop it. I don’t want to die any more, and I care about the future more intensely than I ever did. While Raphaël would have seen the rolling crisis in which we live as a  symptom of the world’s lethal imbalance, he’d  also have seen an opportunity to redress it. If there is a tiny aperture at the heart of every crisis through which the light comes in, he’d have spotted it. Widened it. Let in more light, and watched it spread.

I have tried to do the same with my own apocalypse. Although it’s vast to me, and it hurts like hell, I have begun to re-frame my loss as a small one in the great scheme of things. As I write, other mothers are losing their sons in far more horrific circumstances.

Raphaël’s toy ark now sits on the floor in my living-room, filled with plastic animals, and perhaps another child will play with it one day.

Sometimes, I still have to say “my son died.”

But secretly I add the thing that matters most. My son lived.

And he still does. I feel his energy. He’s living another story now, alongside his grandfather. And one day I’ll see them both again, along with all the others I have loved who were there one day, and then were not.

Until then, I picture him on the deck of the great ark of discarnate creaturehood, or shoaling in the floodwaters with the mackerel. I see him soaring in the sky with vultures. I hear the rustle of foliage as he rampages through the tree-canopy with the howler monkeys. I smell him burrowing in the earth with the foxes, chicken-blood on his fur. I sense him flitting darkly with the bats and moths. I feel him pulsing alongside the great Architeuthis.

And I think: how lucky I was. And am.

 

This article first appeared in Dark Mountain magazine, 2024

What is it like to lose a child?

I’m in an airport bar in Houston, Texas, and I’m falling apart. Three hours ago I was in a rented apartment researching a story I was working on. But now, suddenly, unthinkably, I’m on my way to South Africa, and I need a drink, urgently.

When the barman hands me my glass of Shiraz I fumble and drop it. It shatters on the floor, and everyone looks at me.

“I’m sorry,” I tell the barman him as he mops up the red stain. “My son just died.”

Back behind the bar, he pours me another glass.

“He’s called Raphael,” I tell him, unable to use the past tense. “He’s 25. He’s a wildlife biologist and environmental activist. He’s on a physical training course, preparing for a documentary he’s making about poaching. He was running in a group. Then he collapsed. And they couldn’t save him.”

At 25, Raphael was in better shape than he’d ever been. How could someone so bursting with health, charisma, joy and plans, just stop existing? Nothing made sense.

Writing is how I make sense of things, so on the 27-hour journey to Johannesburg, I began a long letter to Raph, which at some point morphed into letter from him to those he’d left behind. To this day I still don’t know which of us wrote what. It was as if the two of us, in some dimension of consciousness, had merged. On the stopover in Dubai, I wrote a mass mail to break the news to those who loved him, with the terrible request that they pass it on. After that, words failed me.

Every parent’s worst fear is losing a child, and when the condolences began to pour in, the most common reaction was: “I can’t even can’t begin to imagine what it must be like.” But in my shellshocked state, I couldn’t even begin to imagine it either. It was too surreal.

Until it wasn’t.

A few days later, before the autopsy, Raphael’s father, brother and I were allowed to see his body in the morgue. It was only then it truly hit us he was dead. A corpse isn’t a person. It’s the shell they leave behind. When we saw him lying in a plastic body-bag – so beautiful, but so very dead – the world changed for ever.

And so did we. Who were we now, and what were we supposed to do? We didn’t know. If Raphael were here, he’d probably tell us. But he was gone. His presence was a huge absence, and his absence a huge presence.

Who was this boy I’d mothered, and what did he become? From childhood he’d instinctively known what so many of us selectively forget in adulthood: that we are animals. He loved the company of his fellow-creatures in any shape or form. He’d spend hours in the garden observing ants, squirrels, snails, birds, woodlice and urban foxes, then come indoors and march his plastic animal collection up the gangplank of his toy ark, naming them as he went: sting-ray, duck-billed platypus, dragonfly, cuttlefish, archaeopteryx.

He didn’t ask questions about wildlife but developed his own theories, which were usually wildly wrong. “Squirrels act crazy because they’re drunk on rotten apple juice,” he told me once, with the seriousness of a tiny teacher. He idolized his older brother Matti, who was his best friend, his role model, and his personal psychologist. The only other person capable of calming his seizure-like tantrums was David Attenborough: Raph would watch his terrifying documentary about the giant squid Architeuthis again and again, silent, motionless and wholly mesmerized.

So it was no surprise when he opted to study zoology. As a student in Manchester, he founded the international wildlife workers’ network The Wildwork, and went on to work and volunteer in wildlife sanctuaries across the world – where he began to realise just how critically threatened wild ecosystems are. By the age of 23, back in the UK, he was a prominent activist with Extinction Rebellion, running its fledgling social media team, live-streaming events, and planning actions. I was proud of him. And worried. I have no idea how often he was arrested, but before his death my greatest fear was that he’d do time in prison for vandalizing the Brazilian Embassy in protest at the devastation of the Amazon rainforest.

Now that he was dead, that fear seemed laughable. It was his heart I should have worried about. The most likely cause of his death, it turned out, was a symptomless cardiac anomaly – commonly known as “athlete’s heart” that kills at least twelve young people every week in the UK.

Five years on, there’s still a Raph-shaped hole where he should be, and I miss him every day. Whenever I’m struggling with something, I talk to him, and I feel his answer. His death re-ignited my own commitment to environmental activism by viscerally reminding me how fragile life is for every species, our own included. And that the life he led – jam-packed with curiosity, experiment, love, playfulness, and deep commitment to protecting the planet’s wildlife from destruction – isn’t honoured by endless grief. It’s honoured by celebrating life, and living it with purpose.

If someone had told me on the day my son collapsed and died that I’d not only survive the horror of losing him but come to enjoy my life again, and even thrive, I wouldn’t have believed it. But it’s true. Resilience is a seed that we carry inside us. It germinates in emergencies and sends out roots and shoots. And if we tend to it, it grows.

Children learn from their parents – but how often do we stop to ask how much we’ve learned from them? Perhaps we should all do it more. Physically, Raph isn’t here. But his spirit is very much alive. So even in death, he keeps on teaching me. And every day, in the generosity, variety, energy, beauty and wildness of the natural world he loved, I feel his active presence.

Raph’s death will never make sense to me. But his life made sense.

So don’t think of me as that poor woman whose son died.

Think of me as that lucky woman whose son lived.

 

(first published in Woman and Home magazine, 2024)

The List of Impossible Things

At the top of the list of impossible things I wanted in 2020, after my son Raphaël’s sudden death, was for him to reappear, alive. He’d tell us it was all a misunderstanding. The paramedics had managed to revive him after all, and he was going to continue the life as a son, a brother, a friend, a lover, an activist. Most of all, his mission to protect endangered wildlife wasn’t over. He was 25: it had just begun.

My second wish was to disappear, and escape from the hell of living in my own skin: to be granted the grace of not being me, if only for five minutes.

Third on the list was the wish to fall asleep and wake up again in five years’ time, having been magically catapulted past the deepest pain, and feeling closer to “my normal self”.

No great spoilers here, but there’s a reason I call it the List of Impossible Things.

You can read the rest of Liz’s blog article on The Compassionate Friends website here.

your-wild-precious-life

The books which have inspired Liz to write Your Wild and Precious Life

My son’s death will never make sense to me. But it has taught me that it’s possible to find meaning, collectively and individually, in the loss of what we love. And in finding them, transform. Resilience is a seed that we all bear inside us. It germinates in emergencies. It sets down roots in astonishing and unexpected ways. And if we notice it, and tend to it, it blooms.

Liz Jensen’s son, a zoologist, conservationist and ecological activist, was twenty-five when he collapsed and died unexpectedly. She fell apart. As she grieved, forest fires raged, coral reefs deteriorated, CO2 emissions rose and fossil fuels burned. Your Wild and Precious Life is the story of how a mother rebuilt herself, reoriented her life and rediscovered the enchantment of the living world. Set against the backdrop of climate and ecological catastrophe, it’s an argument for agency, legacy and the wild possibility of hope after devastation.

These are the books which have inspired Liz, we hope they do the same for you.

Read more at the Uk bookshop website here

 

Dear Reader: a letter from Liz

Dear Reader,

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand

That this, too, was a gift.

A friend sent me those words by the poet Mary Oliver after my son Raphaël, a wildlife biologist and climate and environmental activist, died suddenly in February 2020. He was 25, and my world had collapsed. Was my friend actually suggesting that his death might be gift?

But after the first excruciating months, I began to see that there was deep wisdom in Oliver’s poem. Natural disasters, like those brought about by the climate and ecological emergency that defines this era, transform landscapes. But private disasters transform inner landscapes, too. In recognising the parallel between my own grief and the civilizational grief that shadows all of us, I began to sense that every catastrophe, framed as an opportunity to change and grow, can generate something radically new and vital.

Your Wild and Precious Life: On Grief, Hope and Rebellion began as a series of notes I wrote on my phone, lying on the sofa cocooned from the pandemic and lost in my own despair in the wake of Raphaël’s death. I’m a private person, so initially, I didn’t envisage writing a memoir. But as my grief began evolving into something as meaningful and generous as it was crushing, I realised I had learned lessons which might give heart to others. I hoped that by describing the small miracles that began to emerge from my box of darkness I could help others navigate both personal and existential pain, and eventually emerge– as I have done – into a state of peace and active hopefulness that once seemed impossible.

These miracles came after trying everything that might offer meaning: a grief group, a session with a medium, gardening, meditation, swimming in sub-zero temperatures, observing birds, meeting other bereaved parents, and re-engaging with activism. Each experiment showed me, in very different ways, that there is still joy to be found in this life, alongside the possibility of renewed balance on a planet in unprecedented crisis. I felt that I owed it to Raphaël, to others struggling with loss, and to the precious home that we all share, to offer what I have learned.

The result is this book. I hope it speaks to you.

Warmest wishes

Liz Jensen

your-wild-and-precious-life-sm

Your Wild And Precious Life

PUBLISHER
Canongate Books
4 Uxbridge Street
London W87SY
liz-jensen

The best books about psychic powers, consciousness, and the quest for the numinous

Liz writes on ‘The best books about psychic powers, consciousness, and the quest for the numinous‘.

liz-jensen

 

Read More

The write way to fight

A protest against BP at the National Portrait Gallery in London CREDIT: Jamie Lowe

WHEN WRITERS REBEL (WR) formed to become Extinction Rebellion’s (XR’s) literary wing in the summer of 2019, our aim was to put literature in the service of the threatened ecosystems that sustain us.

One of our inspirations was the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 book, The Great Derangement, which criticised literary fiction’s failure to address climate and ecological breakdown.

“It’s our job, as writers, to make imaginative leaps on behalf of those who don’t, can’t or won’t,” he wrote.

His book unsettled me. He was right that most fiction wasn’t rising to the occasion, but I wanted him to be wrong.

Then, in the early summer of 2019, I spotted a tweet by novelist Monique Roffey asking if there were any other writers concerned about the climate and the ecological emergency. I responded – and so did the novelist and academic James Miller.

Read more (outside link)

A LETTER TO MY NATIVE COUNTRY

brexit

Dear Great Britain, aka the United Kingdom, issuer of my passport, former colonial power, home of Sir David Attenborough and manufacturer of good crisps, Royal scandals, comedy shows and inventor of the word “sorry”-

So, you got Brexit done.

But are you great? Are you united?

As someone born within your shores I am supposed to have acquired a stiff upper lip but after the 2016 referendum, while my beloved 85-year-old uncle – a diehard Leaver – celebrated with a glass of Laphroaig, I cried.
“I’ve been waiting for this for 40 years,” my uncle told the family, triumphant.

How can you love someone whose political views you cannot share, and whose flawed political choices will be felt by generations to come?
Ask any Brit.
You keep on loving them but you shelve the issues that divide you. Call us konfliktsky, but we’ve all learned to avoid discussing Brexit if there’s a chance someone’s going to end up shouting “you just don’t get it!” and thumping a table.

And our uncle was old: what was the point? So we turned the other cheek, and entered the first three stages of Brexit grief: denial, anger and bargaining, hoping against hope for a second referendum that would stop you jumping down the toilet of history and flushing. We signed online petitions to save you from your own worst impulses, and listened to sober warnings from manufacturers, economists, farmers, scientists, and health experts about the mayhem to come.

But by then, just as in America, “expert” had become a dirty word, and false information was being openly, shamelessly, presented as fact. People were energized by the idea of change. A big departure from the status quo is always dramatic. And slamming doors is fun.
Who doesn’t like the kick of feeling curmudgeonly and righteous and powerful and brave? I get it.

We confronted our own door-slamming uncle. Why was he wishing this on his grandchildren?
He was unrepentant.
“Bureaucracy,” he said. “Corruption.” He took the long view.
“It’ll all work out,” he said.

But not for him.

I cried at his funeral, but I cried more in December 2019 when a majority of my compatriots elected the huckster who will always be Johnson to me, and never “Boris”. (By the way, a little warning in your ear: it’s his maverick strategist, Dominic Cummings, you should worry about most. He is the architect of the regime that is now taking hold, and that will change the course of your history.)

The fourth stage of Brexit grief set in. The depression we felt was the type familiar to all whose relationship has broken down.

Britain, you made me cry.

But what do the Johnson-Cummings duo care about the emotions of citizens who don’t matter to them? They have a game of hardball to play.
As another hardball-player, Stalin, used to say: You have to break eggs to make an omelette.

Britain, I don’t know you any more. You’ve changed.

You’re not the exciting, diverse, open-minded, progressive, multi-cultural, friendly, jocular Britain we know from your vibrant cities.

Britain, you’ve become a stranger.
Or was this the real you all along?

All your citizens have their own relationship to Europe, even if it’s an absence of a relationship, or an antipathy. Theresa May may have been against leaving Europe – but when she declared “A citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere” she was displaying the parochialism that fuelled Brexit. That Fortress Britain parochialism has prevailed. And Europe is “over there”.
Not to the 48 percent who voted Remain. Or the 1.5 million Britons living in EU countries, more than 18,000 of them here in Denmark.
Or to me.

Britain, I’m hurting.

You revoked our EU citizenship against my will.

****

If my own personal attachment to Europe is powerful, it’s because my children and I wouldn’t be here without it.

The backpacker romance story goes like this: boy from one country meets girl from another country in a third country. If things go well, they have babies.

My parents – an Anglo-Moroccan civil servant and an aspiring Danish writer – met in the 1950s in a youth hostel in the French town of Avignon. In Oxfordshire, where we grew up, our mother taught us to sing “Sur le pont d’Avignon, on y danse.”

Weirdly enough (or perhaps not weirdly at all, perhaps in fact obeying some new divine family rule of procreation), my sister and brother both married foreigners who they met in France: she a Chadian, he a Peruvian. My first marriage was to a Franco-Czech Briton; my second to a Dane I met in Canada.
It’s how we roll.

Thirty years ago, when my elder son was born in Lyon, he became a dual French and British citizen. The birth announcement read:
Bebe: Fabrique en Europe.
That’s how proud his father and I were to have a European baby. That baby now lives in Germany with his Spanish girlfriend, and considers himself French.
Being a child of Europe meant something to us.
It means something still.

*****

A friend recently overheard two elderly ladies in Yorkshire discussing Brexit. They’d voted leave, and they were excited about the future. They agreed that Britain was showing Europe “where to stick its regulation cucumbers”.
One asked, excitedly: “Do you think they’ll bring back the farthing?”

The farthing was a currency belonging to the non-decimal era of guineas, pounds, shillings, and pence. The farthing was Britain’s smallest and cutest coin. Worth a quarter of a penny and the size of an øre, it was withdrawn in 1961, when the Yorkshire-women would have been teenagers.
That’s how far back they wanted to go.

Put the great back in Great Britain was an inspired slogan. It got people where the Brexiters wanted them: in the land of fuzzy nostalgia for a semi-imagined past. In the land of the farthings. Like Make America Great Again, it depended on the most modest of its words to do the emotional work.
Back.
Again.

Back to what, and when?

*****

There’s no questioning an island. Surrounded by the blue of the sea just as the black of space surrounds Earth, an island’s geographical boundaries are indisputable. It is a world in miniature. No wonder so much fiction is set on islands. They are the perfect setting for stories of conquest, isolation, experiment, independence, quarantine, purity, escape, exceptionalism.
They can be anything you want them to be.

And what about you, Britain?

At the moment, I can’t help thinking of the Andaman Islands, whose natives, fearing attack, shot arrows at the rescue planes coming to help them after the 2005 tsunami.
But you will get no rescue planes. The Johnson-Cummings regime has shot them down in advance. You have until December 31st to secure an EU trade deal, but they have declared their refusal to extend negotiations beyond that.
Brexit, come Hell or high water.
Brexit, do or die.

Ah, the power of words. The power of stories. From the time you were first populated by humankind, you’ve been a tangle of narratives made up of history, folklore, culture, geography, politics, religion, and myth.

You’re the Britain of Beowulf and the Great British Bakeoff, Camelot and Coronation Street. Of pomp and circumstance and badger-baiting and silly hats; of Shakespeare and Harry Potter; of Cromwell and Jack the Ripper and double-decker buses; of fish and chips, Agatha Christie, Empire, the Industrial Revolution, the Blitz, the Beatles: we could all name a thousand things. You’re an island, but you’re also – like all notions of nationality – a fiction.
You’re whatever anyone wants you to be, squared.

****

One of the things I love most about you was that you’ve always been spacious enough to absorb and assimilate new people, ideas, and cultures and make them your own. And you have always contained conflicting identity narratives. But what alarms me now is how these identity narratives have become more violently opposed than I have ever seen them in my lifetime.

Will it really “all work out” as my uncle assured us?

I don’t know. Nobody does. But since I am a writer of speculative fiction, and therefore an amateur futurologist, I will make a few guesses about the decade to come.

The Johnson-Cummings regime will become ever more ruthless and authoritarian. There will be an ongoing erosion of democracy, the emergence of home-grown neo-fascinsm, and a polarization unseen in your history.

Your new myths will be spun fast and energetically. With most of the British billionaire-owned press under Tory influence, and the BBC swiftly and strategically brought to its knees, the Johnson/Cummings government will effect a massive re-branding exercise. It will be cheap, too: they can rely on most of the popular media voluntarily taking on task of shifting hearts and minds. In the months to come, buoyed by their election triumph, your government will ruthlessly follow the Trump playbook, cutting oxygen from the institutions designed to keep the nation fair and safe, and to ensure that no ruler is above the law.

Alongside that, what Margaret Thatcher started when she infamously claimed there was “no such thing as society” will be brought to its logical conclusion. The merciless dismantling will start with Parliament. With the court system. With public service broadcasting. With the integrity of the NHS. London will become a key money-laundering hub of the financial world, a Cayman Islands a few miles from Europe.

When the deadline of 31st December comes around, there will still be no trade deal with the EU. But instead of being a source of shame, it will be spun in such a way as to become a source of national pride: you’re the proud, plucky little island state that has always punched above its weight, surrounded by envious foreigners. The day will be marked by wild Fuck Europe parties, fireworks, and celebrations. You’ll have finally, definitively, made a clean break and got Brexit done.

And because this narrative is emotional, it will be effective. It will energize a proportion of your inhabitants as effectively as World War Two, the heyday of Johnson’s hero, Churchill.
And because by now you’ll be in catastrophe mode, this neo-Churchillianism will take on a life of its own. We won’t fight “them” on the beaches, but in the shopping aisles. If Italian tomatoes are too expensive, we’ll dig “Victory gardens” as we did in wartime. And we’ll eat American chlorinated chicken, free at last from the “tyranny” of food standards.

Thanks to the weak pound and some smart Merrie Olde England branding, tourists will flock in. And what will they see? First and foremost, the aggressive pedaling of tourist tat, and alongside it the prevalence of the Union Jack. But this sudden blossoming of red, white and blue will not be hyggeligt: unlike the Danes, your citizens aren’t born with a deep affection for their national flag, so the epidemic will be an overt signalling of allegiance to Brexitism. Just as the English flag (the Cross of St George) is associated with the far right, the Union Jack will be the chosen identifier of aggressively unrepentant Leavers. By the same token, “Disloyalty” and “treachery” will be applied to those who dare to voice dissent in public.

Alongside that, nativism will become a thing. Brexit was never just about Europe. It was a big NO to immigrants in general – even though some of those immigrants themselves voted leave. And because part of the great Brexit con was to conflate EU citizens with brown people, the “true” Britishness of dark-skinned British citizens will be increasingly questioned. More than ever, people of colour and/or with foreign accents will be told to “go back to your own country”. Racial abuse and violence will continue unchecked. (And should anyone be in doubt about the depth of British racism, I give them Meghan Markle).

Meanwhile, scientific collaborations with the EU will dry up, and the “brain drain” that began in 2016 will accelerate because the young and the educated want a decent future.

Your cultural love affair with the United States will re-ignite and strengthen. Europe was just a flirt: this is the real thing. Perhaps you might even end up as a satellite state? This I can imagine too, in the version of you that is left to coming generations by the new regime. Because if Europe is your past, a declining, paranoid America will be a large part of your future.

In anticipation of this, the Johnson-Cummings spin machine will continue to push the idea that because of the “special relationship” you’ll get shiny new trans-Atlantic trade deals. But before they get too excited, they should re-read The Art of the Deal. In it, Donald J Trump writes: “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward. I aim very high and then I just keep pushing and pushing to get what I want.”
Every deal has a winner and a loser. Is the loser likely to be Trump?

You can fool some people some of the time, but not all the people all of the time. When more and more of your citizens realize they have been sold cynical, misanthropic neoliberalism dressed up as a defense of British identity, you’ll see an intensification of the civil war of narratives about what kind of country you are, and what you want to be.

And the dissenting political currents? I don’t know. I’ve been burned by my own wishful thinking these past three and a half years. In December’s election, while all the Tories needed to do to win was to keep saying Get Brexit Done, Jeremy Corbyn’s fatally-split Labour party didn’t even have a proper slogan.

****

With my amateur futurologist’s hat on again, I make one final prediction.

That after Brexit, the most important issue of all will force its way in and belatedly claim all your energy and attention: the issue that was too big to see. It was there all along, looming over us, hiding in plain sight. When we were all obsessed with Brexit the climate emergency seemed small and far away.

Now it is huge, and upon us. And we were looking the other way.

During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, he was said to have a sign over his desk reminding him of the most important issue facing most Americans: IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID.

In the years to come I see you stumbling along a path with no clear way forward. Written above you in the skies, and in the skies of the entire world, will be a huge sign reminding your rulers of the existential problem that matters most.

IT’S THE CLIMATE, STUPID.

Because there will indeed be Hell and high water, do or die.

If I sound depressed about you, Britain, it’s because I’m still deep in Brexit grief.

So is there anything at all on the plus side?

Yes. I can feel it.

It’s there in Trump’s America and it’s already manifesting within your shores: a new kindness and concern in the air among those who are alarmed by the direction you are taking. A comradeship among dissenters; a sense of collective responsibility; a channeling of Michelle Obama’s words: When they go low, we go high.

And a resolve among those who care about the young and the coming generations to take a “long view” far longer than my uncle’s, and act on it.

So I refuse to give up hope, Britain, however hopeless you make me feel.

It was nice knowing you.

Or thinking I did.

Let’s meet again one day, in a more generous place.