I recently lost someone I cared deeply for to a disease I also battled years ago. A different version, with an inescapable outcome.
This is a shadow of the past that I wish would never cross the threshold of our lives again. Since then, I never entirely escaped its grip. While my cells are now out of reach, my soul stays marked, checking for its trace whenever I hear someone died too young.
If I were to win the lottery, or had the talent and grit to build and sell a company, I wouldn’t buy fancy cars or a yacht. I would start a fund to back European healthtechs and research labs. Especially the ones fighting paediatric cancers, the most abhorrent of these diseases, striking the most defenceless of us.
I would do it so more people keep the chance to have those conversations. Most of the loved ones I lost were taken by these diseases. And even decades later, I long for the conversations I can’t have anymore. I wish I could ask them how they are, and ask their advice when I feel lost.
I would have loved for them to meet my child, the most important person in my life. It aches that they won’t see who he becomes and, hopefully, all the great things he will accomplish. On this blog I try to imagine desirable, sustainable futures, and the ways we could build them. I don’t dream of a future with immortal people. I dream of a future where people have the chance to live and die in dignity.
In France, where I live, there is a current debate on Assisted Dying. On something that is at once a revolution and an ethical dilemma, the debate has stayed largely healthy and serious. Rare enough to be worth naming.
I am myself a longtime proponent of Assisted Dying. When my mortality was tested the most, this is something I would have felt relieved to know existed, even if I was nowhere near requiring it.
In the meantime, I still talk to the loved ones I lost. In a way at least. A part of them live inside me. I carry their lights and continue to say their names.
Grief comes in various shapes and forms. I grieve those conversations, as I grieve a world that is no more. But I resolve to be the torchbearer, to bring past lights and help spark new ones, so our children can have those conversations, in an ever-habitable and dignified world.
To desirable futures,
Thomas