One day, Liz Jensen’s son, Raphaël, meets death in the garden. It’s a bird: a great tit that he picks up and brings inside. ‘‘I found a sleeping bird,’’ he says to his mother, who explains that this particular bird will not be waking up. They dig a hole for it and hold a funeral. “Not a bird any more, we tell him. Underground, it will rot and magic into something else. But this makes no sense to him. He puts snail shells on the little grave and howls.”
At the age of 25, Raphaël meets death again. He is on a training run in South Africa, preparing to make a documentary about anti-poaching organisations, when his heart suddenly fails. For Jensen, it is a moment of “kairos”, the ancient Greek conception of time that “disrupts chronology, foreclosing the future we reckoned on and forcing radical change”.
In Your Wild and Precious Life, Jensen asks: what transformation can take place, in the midst of “a misery that approaches madness”? She is a novelist, someone for whom “words metabolise thought”, and so on the plane, flying to see her son’s body, she writes a sort of prayer, or spell: “Raph, you are a force of nature, and now you are one with that force. You are water, you are chlorophyll, you are moss on a stone, a bird’s feather …”
How does anyone survive the loss of a child? And how could it be anything but madness? Jensen experiences it as a reverse pregnancy, as though “my son was dissolving inside me, cell by cell”. She smashes glasses, stares blankly into space, drops things in the supermarket. “Grief brain is like baby brain but without the joy.” Like an expectant mother, she seeks out others, and discovers “a silent army of grieving parents walking the same path I’m treading now”. A friend whose son died by suicide in his early 20s tells her how she went into phantom labour while meeting the priest for coffee before the funeral.
Like pregnancy, grief has its stages. The famous five – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – theorised by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the late 60s. Then there is a sixth stage, suggested more recently by psychologist David Kessler after his own son died: meaning. Grief is not just loss. There is the potential for rebirth too. “We hear about post-traumatic stress,” Jensen writes. “But we hear less about post-traumatic growth, post-traumatic regeneration and post-traumatic spiritual awakening.”
Jensen’s awakening begins with birds. There’s the bird that appears near the site of Raphaël’s death when Jensen shouts his name, “a small bird with a theatrically long tail … exactly the colour of Raph’s long russet braid”; the blue-breasted seabird that swoops for her as she swims; there are great tits in various guises. Jensen comes to see these animals as signs that her son is near; signs that, after death, things really do magic into something else.
After he dies, Jensen begins hearing her son’s voice. He offers her comfort, encouragement. She sees him too: sometimes tiny, sometimes large as life, performing cartwheels and headstands in the middle of a support group for the bereaved. The madness of grief is something that many go through, especially after a sudden loss. But is it madness? Or is it, as Jensen comes to believe, a sort of proof, if such a thing were possible, that there is more to life than can be measured?
The idea that those we love do not simply vanish when they die, but transform and diffuse – as matter, energy, perhaps even spirit – into the world around us is a proposal with quietly radical implications. Raphaël was, among many other things, a climate activist, and his is not the only death to haunt the pages of this raw and urgent memoir. Jensen’s focus shifts between her own grief, and a mourning for lost nature. Towards the end of the book, she imagines her son again, shapeshifting – from gingko leaf, to bat, to tiger, spider, sea-turtle, viper, jellyfish, droplet of water in a cloud, bed of moss, bacteria, elephant, dragonfly. “All of it is richer. All of it is stranger. All of it matters.”
• Your Wild and Precious Life by Liz Jensen is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
