Äddi Camille.

The world is now too dangerous for anything less than utopia. – Buckminster Fuller

Camille Gira’s sudden and untimely departure touched the hearts of very many people in Luxembourg and rippled through our communities like the revelatory electricity of a summer storm lightening seeking expression.

Attending the moving and beautifully sparse ceremony on Saturday for me brought home the different facets of this very particular human being that was much loved by many different people of different political colours, backgrounds and ways of looking at the world.

Many of his close political and private allies and friends have commented on his roles inter alia as a community leader, a visionary, a political ‘Fuuss’, an environmentalist. They emphasised his qualities of courage, humility, humour, connectedness, truthfulness, sociability, persistence, and his unwavering belief in political dialogue and the weight of the better argument, the place of humans among other beings, the way in which he helped to birth so many different projects both at local and national levels, his love for Luxembourgish songs like the Hexemeeschter, the way in which he was always prepared for meetings and deeply knowledgeable of his political dossiers and the contexts surrounding them, his optimism and his capacity to draw out the qualities in people invisible to others.

My mum called me on Wednesday evening to tell me. Like everyone else, I was gutted by the news, and I could not shake the mental image of him breaking down in the middle of that essential speech about a piece of legislation (about the new nature protection law supposed to be voted on that day) he had been working on for many years.

In some ways, certain shadow aspects of the political game, and our society are revealed by his death: the stress of taking responsibility in a representative democracy or the insane workload of politicians who take their job seriously. I can also relate to the way in which ecocide and ecological/social collapse just break people’s hearts, because we may be fighting, but at the moment, we’re not winning.

It was a heavy blow. For four nights, through uneasy interrupted sleep, I reflected, and wrestled with the immediacy of death and grief. A million deaths but you never know who will shine light on this darkness we’re in as humanity.

In my dream last Thursday, I saw the procession of the generations, and along with my age peers, I was moving along and down, watching as adults of younger generations pulled into view. As I turned to look at the older generations, I watched them fade away into the ground.

In scattered dreams around dawn last Friday, I dreamt that I had lost an important elder and it terrified me, but also challenged me to position myself.

In our culture, we don’t really have a word for elder, mainly because of our failure to respect wisdom stemming from age, since our culture is often very ageist.

Since Thursday, I have been grappling with the questions that emerged for me:

How to reconcile doing what’s good for all beings with what’s good for me?

How to approach the viscous nature of resistance to change and the incredible power bound up in the current economic system?

How to face the mess we’re in without going crazy?

How to deal with the acceleration of systemic crisis?

How to be changemaker that makes a difference?

I then realised that this was not just about me and how I will take action and commit to being a changemaker in my changed circumstances in 2018. It is about all of us realising Camille’s legacy, namely the fact that one person can have a lot of impact, despite all cries to the contrary. So it is also about taking individual responsibility in whatever way we can, not drowning in fatalism (e.g. ‘nothing we do will change anything at this point’) or dissing the efficacy of any (broadly political, and not necessarily party political) action with the privileged response of ‘I am not interested in political action’. At the very least, we need to get out of denial regularly and muster the courage again and again to face the mess that we’re in with regards to ecological and social collapse and find ways to take effective action, at whatever level is working for each of us and with a view to serving the entire community. Let’s support one another in that aim, because, as Buckie Fuller has said, the world is now too dangerous for anything less than utopia.

Äddi, Camille. I will remember you.

25.05.2018

Photos: Lex Kleren, Norry Schneider.