Forever Young by Carsten Jensen

a tribute by Iggy’s stepfather

There is just about nothing that makes death feel as unjust and meaningless as when a young life is lost. It is life itself that is sabotaged.

I met Raph when he was just six years old, and we were so very close.

It is beautiful to promise the dead that we will never forget them. But it is also so much more than a mere matter of remembering and reminiscing when it is a beloved child who has gone. To abruptly have your better, more hopeful half torn away and to be robbed of your deepest, most sincere investment in life is a form of amputation. The phantom pains of grief will remain eternally present.

Those of us who have been left behind, hope to seek refuge in the normality that existed until just a moment ago, and which we thought would last forever and turn to the alleviating rhythm of everyday life. But we are elsewhere. The darkness has taken us hostage. And yet, life in the realm of shadows must continue.

“I will never forget you”, is what we say in our eulogies to the dead. But when it is our own child, then it is as though our own genes, our entire body, something greater than the notion of “me”, refuses to accept the final verdict of death. I see it in his mother’s eyes, I hear it in her voice, the irrevocable loss of the most precious thing in life. I was not Raph’s father. But I feel it too.

His passing will affect me deeply for the rest of my life. It is also because I see in him the hope that a new generation has kindled for us all amid a planetary crisis.

Who was Raph Coleman? As a child, he was wise beyond his age, incredibly well-read, and someone who loved to lecture the adults with his always-astonishing knowledge. He was a child actor, featured in the popular British comedy Nanny McPhee, where he with great talent played Eric, who was a version of himself: a little red-haired boy who was always up to mixing explosive chemical ingredients. He played many roles, won awards, and could have made a career as an actor. But he wanted to be a scientist – not to blow things up like Eric, but to save the planet.

At the age of eighteen, he travelled the world alone. He became a zoologist, looked after tigers in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, spent a year in the Costa Rican jungle,  and half a year in Indonesia, where he obtained a scuba diving certification among the few unscathed coral reefs that remain on this planet. When he was not found in remote, inaccessible locations, he practiced parkour, the breakneck urban sport involving daring leaps across rooftops and chasms of cement.

But first and foremost, it was Extinction Rebellion that would define Raph’s life; the British movement of environmentalist activism that brought the London traffic to a halt and reached sixty countries within just a few months. Raph was one of the first and most active members of Extinction Rebellion. Under the name Iggy Fox, he managed the group’s use of social media, spoke at protests and was repeatedly detained. In April, he was due to appear in court following an allegation of having covered the Brazilian embassy in red paint as the Amazon was in flames. Not wanting to rely on a lawyer, Raph was drafting his own defence speech when he passed.

There is a video of his arrest. Two enormous cops are leading Raph away with closed, stern looks on their faces. But Raph is smiling. There is a resilience to his smile – not a smile of cheap triumph, but of certainty that he is doing the right thing. It is this smile that is Raph’s gift to us. In the faces of young people, we find a certain kind of expectation, a light in their eyes, a vital idealism that we must not betray. This is who Raph was.

Death has extinguished Raph, but it has not extinguished the light that burned within him. No one who knew Raph has been unaffected by this light, nor will they forget it, and so he lives on. If we, who have been left behind, are to leave this darkness, it is this light that must lead us. Raph must become our guide, leading us not into the death that enveloped him, but away from it again.

Often, it is the deteriorating passage of time, the many compromises of life, its demands of adjustment, the erosion of the soul – to which we are all exposed – that extinguishes our light. We get to live for so long, and yet we end in a sombre resignation – that is, if disappointment does not turn into aggression, an anger over the missed opportunities that we do not dare direct inwards and instead aim at others.

When I think of Raph, I see something that will never die: a fragment of eternity, a beam of light, that lives forever in the young. We think that it is us, the older generations, who have something to give to those who are younger. We think that it is we who are passing on the baton of life to them. But I think it is the other way around. The young remind us why we live and of the purpose of life. They remind us about the gift that we must not put away even before we have opened it, simply out of distraction.

The young remind us of our abilities and the talents that we have neglected. We are always far greater and richer than the world would have us believe. What does it mean to believe in yourself? Is it life what the increasingly unforgiving labour market and disciplinary educational system would have us believe? Is it only shameless, egotistical self-promotion and ruthlessness that counts? Should this be the vision of the younger generations that want to survive and thrive?

No, todays’ young people have something else within them. I have spoken with young people across the world, from Afghanistan to California – and everywhere I see in their faces the same thing I saw in Raph’s, the most beautiful thing in any human: the belief that they have something to offer to others. They step into our world, not as its conquerors, not in triumph, but with humble respect for the laws of nature, with gentle hands driven by care. That is what is new. That is what is edifying. It is in this respect that they are the educators of the old generation, not the other way around.

That is what I see in the smile on Raph’s face, as he is carried away from the Brazilian embassy by the two police officers. His short life reminds us of our duty to live.

There is a video that documents Raph’s last moments. He is not seen, only heard. He was deep within one of the wildlife reservations of South Africa, as a member of a group that combats illegal poaching. Together, they are running across the savannah, singing. Raph is leading the song. The others respond. Then he sings again. They respond. Suddenly, it is quiet. A life has abruptly come to an end.

The Polish poet Wisława Szymborska has written the wisest poem about death. “There is not a single life / that for a single moment / has not been immortal. / Death always arrives exactly that moment too late,” she writes. Because we always manage to give a part of ourselves, no matter how early we pass away. Raph was given so few years, but he lived as though he deep down within his cells knew how scarce time was. And he gave us so much.

The internet holds many traces of Raph, holding speeches in the squares of London, or working in the jungles that he loved. But it is a video of him dancing, which he shot and edited himself, that I find myself returning to. It is recorded in the outskirts of Bangkok in an abandoned shopping mall that the jungle is slowly reclaiming. Amidst the crumbling concrete, collapsed stairs and gaping holes spanning multiple stories, Raph is improvising his own breakneck, masterful freestyle dance. His dance is a tribute to happiness, to the pure, vital existence in life, and it shows how Raph, in everything he did, gave so generously of his rich self.

Thank you, Raph.