November 7, 2026

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To everyone who knew and loved Evelyn,

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Today is the fourth anniversary of the death of my much-beloved husband on 7 November 2022. Evelyn was my partner, my friend, my inspiration, my teacher, and my fiercest champion. The world knew him as a financier and a philanthropist, a man of remarkable reach. I knew him as the person across the breakfast table: generous, funny, endlessly curious, and absolutely certain that happiness and health are the greatest gifts in life and that a life means little unless it is spent in the service of others.

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Robert Frost poignantly wrote, “and they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs”. This is a cruel reality of life and death, but over the years, I have learned that grief does not arrive and then leave.

 

It moves in, and it becomes a companion. There are mornings when his absence is the first thing I feel, and evenings when a song or a passing phrase brings him back so vividly that I have to stop where I stand. I no longer apologize for this. Love does not end because a life does, even when life and love continue.  Grief simply changes its address, and it asks something new of us.

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What it has asked of me is to carry his work forward and to honor his name. 

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Evelyn gave in every way imaginable.  Whether he funded a friend’s struggling business, or sent a stranger to university or for an exciting gap year or slipped a £5 note into the pocket of the bank clerk to bet on the races that day, I have been delighted by the many stories of his miraculous good deeds for hosts of people.  But the most lasting legacy of his generosity is his creation of the ERANDA Rothschild Foundation in 1967 when he was only 36 years old.  He chaired it until the end of his life, directing its support toward medical research, education, social welfare and the arts.  

 

He never just gave money; he engaged with recipients and gave everyone he could a positive steer and supportive encouragement. He cared most about young people who were never handed an advantage, and about the scientists laboring toward treatments for Alzheimers and the illnesses that take our parents and grandparents from us too soon. He loved the natural world, too; the charity he helped found to protect elephants was pure Evelyn, serious and tender at once.

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To continue his work as the Chair of the ERANDA Rothschild Foundation is the honor of my life, and I will be honest that it is also the hardest thing I have ever taken on.  Today, we have an endowment of over £200m.  My duty is to see that it is given in a manner that honors his wishes and his legacy.

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A legacy is not a monument to be polished and left untouched. It is a living thing.  The ERANDA Rothschild Foundation is Evelyn’s living legacy and his alone.    

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I have found comfort in a truth from the Jewish tradition. At the close of a funeral, the prayer that is spoken, the Mourner’s Kaddish, says nothing at all about death. It is a blessing. It praises life and asks for peace. I have returned to that thought more times than I can count since Evelyn died: that even at the very end, standing at the graveside, what we are left holding is a blessing. That is how I have chosen to understand this chapter of my life. 

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His life was a blessing. The work for the ERANDA Rothschild Foundation that he leaves behind is a blessing. And the task of carrying it on is a blessing too.

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So this is my promise, written here where his memory lives. I will tend to what Evelyn built. I honor his legacy and his deepest wish to make the world a better place.  I will keep giving where he gave, and keep reaching toward the causes he held dear. I will try to be worthy of the trust he placed in me, and of the extraordinary life we were lucky enough to share.

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May his memory be a blessing. It is, and it always will be, to me.

 

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With love,

 

Lynn

Lynn Forester de Rothschild