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