aiming for.” “Our joint work,” Hans wrote, “is finally being turned into an
enjoyable text that will help a global audience to understand the world.”
When we announced Hans’s death, an avalanche of condolences
immediately poured in from friends, colleagues, and admirers from all over
the world. Tributes to Hans were all over the internet. Our family and friends
organized a ceremony at Karolinska Institutet and a funeral at Uppsala Castle,
which together beautifully reflected the Hans we knew: brave, innovative, and
serious-minded, yet always looking for the circus around the corner; a great
friend and colleague and a beloved family member. The circus was there.
There was a sword swallower onstage, of course (Hans’s friend, whose X-ray
you saw at the beginning of this book) and our son Ted did his own
homemade trick with a bandy stick and helmet. (Bandy is a bit like ice hockey
but friendlier.) We concluded with Frank Sinatra’s anthem “My Way
.
” Not
just because Hans always did it His Way, but because of a lucky accident of a
few years earlier. Hans didn’t care much about music and he always insisted
he was totally tone deaf, but his youngest son, Magnus, had once heard him
sing. Hans had accidentally called Magnus from his pocket and, completely
unaware, left him a four-minute voice message. This recorded Hans driving
through traffic while singing loudly and lustily to Frank Sinatra’s defiant
anthem. This was just so Hans. You have seen his list of global risks but it
couldn’t stop him from singing on his way to work. Two thoughts at the same
time: concerned and full of joy.
We had worked with Hans for 18 years. We had written his scripts and
directed his TED talks, and argued with him for hours (sometimes months)
about every detail of them. We had heard all his stories many times and had
them recorded in many forms.
Working on the book had been painful in the last months of Hans’s life but
was strangely comforting in the months immediately after his death. As we
completed this precious task, Hans’s voice was always in our heads, and we
often felt that he was not gone but still in the room beside us. Finishing the
book felt like the best way to keep him with us and to honor his memory.
Hans would have loved promoting this book, and he would have done it
brilliantly, but he knew from the moment of his diagnosis that that was not
going to be possible. Instead, it falls to us to continue his mission and ours.
Hans’s dream of a fact-based worldview lives on in us and, we hope now, in
you too.
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