Guest blogs

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. 

What the three wishes had in common was the avoidance of pain. But as the months and years went by, I began to realise that pain has a brutal but vital purpose.

The tears came every day, like a hurricane blowing through me – and tormenting as those crying jags were, they helped me. Early on, I became aware of a spiritual dimension that soon became my touchstone. And more slowly, as I went to grief groups, took up cold-water swimming, got a dog, wrote a grief memoir, and began volunteering on a crisis helpline, other parts of me expanded. And although life didn’t suddenly become wonderful, it became incrementally more generous. My marriage deepened. New friends appeared. My older son married and became a father, and a new role opened up for me. 

Soon after Raphaël died I remember asking another bereaved mother if it becomes any easier as the years go by. “Yes,” she said. “Because you get better at dealing with it.”

She was right. It’s still tough, and I still loathe it. But I have learned how to brace myself for his birthday, for Christmas, for Mother’s day and the anniversary of his death; to pre-empt trauma triggers on TV, navigate the question of how many children I have, and to enjoy Raphaël’s friends entering new phases of their lives. And most of all, how to celebrate the tiny moments of every day that offer satisfaction, even if it’s as mundane as eating a piece of chocolate, re-potting a plant or putting my dog under the shower to hose off the stuck poo. 

Today, when I look back on my list of Impossible Things – Raphaël coming back alive, my own obliteration, and the magical sidestepping of grief itself, I realise that it was only in turning away from the impossible and towards the possible that the inner shift I needed could happen.

Raphaël didn’t reappear alive. He’s still dead, as he always will be. Yet he’s very much alive to me in ways that will be familiar to many other bereaved parents. I often feel his presence, and believe that somehow, and somewhere, he’s still around, and keeping me company. Many grief psychologists see this kind of thinking as “magical” or delusionary, as if they are party to some (unproven) specialist knowledge about the nature of consciousness. But even if they’re right, I’m not interested in shedding my belief that his energy is still here. It keeps me going, lightens my darkest hours, and reminds me on a daily basis that there is more to this world than the human eye can see. It allows me to share precious moments with him. I might see a beautiful bird, or delight in my twin granddaughters – the nieces he never met - giggling in their bath, or become immersed in a landscape he’d have loved – and say: isn’t this great, Raphaël? And I’ll feel his smile.

And no, I didn’t get to be anyone but me, even for a nanosecond. I still live in my own skin and can’t escape it. But I have become a different me: the me who accepts her son’s death as an ugly, shocking fact and doesn’t ask why this tragedy struck, but instead feels grateful for every day Raphaël lived, and for the richness of his time among us. His life was short, but it was the fullest life I’ve ever known.

And no, I didn’t sleep through the last five years and emerge feeling normal. If I could turn back the clock and be my old self again, with Raphaël alive, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But given that’s not on the cards, what use do I have today for the woman I was before 6th February 2020? And what is “normal” anyway?

Five years since Raphaël’s death my grief - always a shape-shifter - is still morphing. Despite the spoken and unspoken expectation that I should “move on”, if it means leaving him behind me, I don’t want to. Being the parent of a child, whether dead or alive, is a lifelong state. And since love transcends the physical, wherever I go, my son comes with me.

I’ve quietly let go of my List of Impossible Things.

Somehow, together, Raphaël and I have come up with a modest new list of things that might be do-able. 

Guess what it’s called. 

Liz Jensen is a novelist and the mother of the wildlife biologist and ecological activist Raphaël Coleman, who died at the age of 25 from an undiagnosed heart condition. She is the author of eight novels and the grief memoir Your Wild and Precious Life: on Grief, Hope and Rebellion, published by Canongate.

www.lizjensen.com