I hate doing obituaries, and I find myself doing more and more as the years slide by and Greenpeace ages and the number of people with a history longer than a decade with the organisation declines to a smaller and smaller handful.

Now Sjoerd is gone.

I take these things seriously — someone thanked me for helping articulate their grief, and I guess at a personal level this is also part of the way I deal with these deaths: there’s a job to do, I have to pull myself together, try to put aside the grief, and put words to paper which say something about their life.

It’s a duty, but a duty I hate and a duty which can never live up to the objective: this is a person’s life I’m trying to sketch, and nothing I know of them and nothing I can successfully communicate of what I know of them can ever do them justice.

And in a case like Sjoerd’s, for all my affection for him I can’t really say I knew him. I worked side by side with him for years, saw him every day, had lunch with him every week, and yet I never set foot in his home. After we were no longer working on the same team together, how often did I drop by his desk to chat? I didn’t know him. I knew a thin slice of him as a colleague. And that’s all I can capture, because it’s all I know. And in the end, that’s just not good enough. Continue reading →