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)