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Grief in the time of Covid: some reflections on lossApril 4, 2020 - 9:13 pm
Writers Rebel is bornOctober 24, 2019 - 10:50 pm
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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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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‘. Read More