Essays, articles and short fiction by Liz

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]