OUTRO
In September 2015, Hans and the two of us decided to write a book together.
On February 5, 2016, Hans received a diagnosis
of incurable pancreatic
cancer. The prognosis was bad. Hans was given two or three months to live
or, if the palliative treatments were very successful, perhaps one year.
After the initial horrible shock, Hans thought things through. Life would
continue for a while. He would still be able to enjoy time with his wife,
Agneta, and his family and friends. But day-to-day,
his health would be
unpredictable. So within a week he had canceled all his 67 planned lectures
for the coming year, as well as all planned TV and radio appearances and film
productions. Hans was so sad to do it, but he realized he had no choice. And
this dramatic change to his professional life was made bearable by one thing:
the book. Following the diagnosis there was pleasure in the sadness as the
book turned from being a burden on top of other tasks to being Hans’s
intellectual inspiration and joy.
There was so much he wanted to say. Over the next months, in our
enthusiasm, the three of us pulled together enough material for a very thick
book: about Hans’s life, the work we had done together, and our latest ideas.
Until the very end, he remained curious and passionate about the world.
We agreed on the outline for the book and started to write it. We had
worked together on challenging
projects for many years, and were used to
constantly fighting over how best to explain a particular fact or concept. We
were quickly humbled to discover how easy the collaboration had been during
the years when we had all been well, and how terribly difficult it was to
maintain our usual sharp and combative way of working now that Hans was
ill. We almost failed.
On the evening of Thursday, February 2, 2017, Hans’s health suddenly
deteriorated.
An ambulance was called, and into it Hans took printed copies
of several chapters of the latest draft, his scribbled notes all over them. Four
days later, in the early hours of Tuesday, February 7, Hans died. He had taken
comfort over those last days from the drafts, discussing them with Ola from
his hospital bed and dictating an email to the publishers, which said that he
thought we had at last achieved “exactly the kind of book we have been
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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