On turning grief into action

and stepping into transformational activism

I lost one of my uncles this summer.

René, my mum’s brother, died at the start of July. He, a coach driver by vocation (my mum once joked that he found his calling in Lourdes, where he went on pilgrimage by coach as a young man) who loved few things more than organising coach trips and hitting the road, has departed for his last journey.

When I arrived back home a couple of days after his funeral, my mum shared with me the tribute she had read out by his grave. “Bon voyage, René. We love you. Adieu little brother.”

As I silently read her words of farewell, tears rolling down my face, she told me about the crowd that thronged my hometown’s church and of the beautiful eulogies given by his children, adding, “Of course he knew how much he was loved. But I still wonder whether we said it enough, you know, while he was still here…”

We are often more tender to the dead than to the living,
though it is the living who need our tenderness the most.
Robert MacFarlane, Underland

I embarked on an onli…