Ineke’s tribute to Jeremy 

 

Jeremy had a unique eye. He stunned me with his photos when we walked the beaches of Nature’s Valley, South Africa during our first get together in May 2012. He made me see the sand, the see, everything around me in new ways. He told me that he had a dark room as a young child in his parents’ home in St Louis, Missouri, USA. In later years I would urge him to take up photography in a serious way. He wasn’t interested. That was not where his focus was.

 

Jeremy’s focus was on communicating with other human beings, animals and nature.

 

“I discovered people late in life”, he once said to me.

When I asked him: “what was there before people?” He said “frequencies…” and indeed, he rather looked for frequencies on the car radio than listen to music. He would be delighted when he would find the unexpected; on our drive through Botswana en route to Namibia in 2014, he found Radio Dakar, broadcasting from Senegal in West Africa; blasting American country music whilst we were looking at zebra’s crossing. It was apparently an America supported radio station.

 

Frequencies and People …it became a life, a career and a calling in community radio and TV that took him all over America and to such places as Nicaragua and Egypt.

 

Jeremy’s creative genius, technical wizardry, legal acuity, generosity and hands-on approach helped shape community broadcasting culture. He was a man with a mission, collaborated with many people and accomplished many things. I trust that many of those are present here and will share their memories and anecdotes. Two men stand out for me: Lorenzo Milam and Michael Couzen: the latter I had the pleasure to meet and I know that both will come up in the anecdotes that will be shared.

 

I want to mention three great women:

Together with Cammie Enslow, Jeremy started KDNA in St Louis, Missouri.

He started  started KFAT in Gilroy, California With Laura Ellen Hopper and together they had a daughter: Elsbeth. He started KYES, an independent commercial TV station in Anchorage, Alaska with Carol Schatz and he married her. In a balloon! KYES, by the way, was the first Alaskan TV station to turn digital in August 2003, 18 months before other TV stations in Alaska did so.

 

Jeremy’s legacy is alive in many of the people gathering here today and through all of you, in many others that are not present and may not be known to us. Jeremy’s life is a wonderful, living work of art. 

 

I am Jeremy’s last life partner.

 

Jeremy found me when he was ready to embark on his last big adventure: discovering who he was beyond his identity as the Radio and TV Broadcasting Tech genius and guru. He opened himself up to new experiences such as: sleeping in a tree in a dry riverbed in the African bush whilst baboons were screaming around us; sleeping on the ground in a game park next to the fence where the lions roam; he could dance with rhythm (!)  to African music he had never heard before;  When he noticed the improvised electrical wiring in an informal settlement, he got out of the car, approached the amateur electricians and told them that Eskom should train them and give them a job because they obviously had talent! And when there were political protests in our village that had gone violent and were even reported on the front page of the Washington Post, Jeremy actually drove around to check out what was happening: “they all waved at me” he reported back. Jeremy was totally fearless in a natural, unassuming way and this was part of his magic.

 

Jeremy was keenly aware of the cognitive and physical decline caused by his condition of meylodysplasia but he never expressed self-pity or despondency. As the disease started to degrade his brain and body, his personality subsided and his spirit started to shine through more clearly. He became very kind and loving, but he kept his sharp wit, the twinkle in his eyes and his funny word-play games. His lightheartedness, fearlessness and generosity came from deep within his being and no disease could take that away from who he was.

 

Jeremy refused to consider spiritual perspectives that were not acceptable to an educated, atheistic western mind: “prove it”, he would say, when I dared to challenge his (dare I say it?) limited understandings.

 

His hesitance to accept the spiritual dimension of who we are as human beings ran deep: In June 2018, Jeremy had a near death experience (NDE). He never tired telling our friends that he came back because of me. I knew that. I was lying next to him on our bedroom floor urging him to fight and come back to me. His was a typical textbook NDE: there was the white room, the tunnel, the people familiar to him that gave him a choice of walking through the tunnel or turning back to life on earth. And then there was his profound behavior change afterwards which, we, his friends and I, never tired reminding him of: he had become so much more kind and loving after his NDE. Yet, at the end of his life, nearly 7 years later, Jeremy proudly told me that he had found the explanation for his NDE: there was a chemical in his brain that had the function to make him feel good whilst he was dying; it was just a hallucination after all.

 

I am exceedingly glad that he knows better now: freed of his ailing body and brain, Jeremy is now able to explore frequencies in ways we, cast in our physical human bodies, cannot even begin to imagine.

 

I want to end my tribute with a toast of gratitude to this loving, truthful, gifted, rebellious, light-hearted and generous spirit that was Jeremy David Lansman, my beautiful man:

 

Thank you, Jeremy, for all that you were to me; there is too much to mention. The memories are still flooding me, my cup runneth over.

 

I am grateful that we had the time and the space to build a beautiful simple life together where we both had the freedom to evolve into more of ourselves, in truth and in love; just as we had promised each other on our wedding day.

 

“Thank you for this magical place”, you would often say, even in your last days.

Jeremy, so much of that magic was you.

It still is.

Let your magic unfold into the Unknown and please keep me in touch with what you are up to.

 

 

Ineke,

Somersrust

Grabouw

15 February 2025