Ellen DeGeneres is keeping Stephen “Twitch” Boss close; therefore, she honored him at her Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund campus in Rwanda. DeGeneres and her foundation paid tribute to the late dancer and former The Ellen DeGeneres Show co-executive producer by planting a tree in his honor.

“As we celebrated the one-year anniversary of our Ellen Campus this past week, we took a moment to recognize a very special person who left us too soon,” the gorilla conservation fund informed on Instagram. The fund planted a tree alongside a plaque that reads: “In Memory of Stephen ‘tWitch’ Boss and the light he brought to the world.”

“tWitch brought light to so many and was a wonderful friend to @ellendegeneres,” they added. “In his honor, we planted this tree, so he will be forever remembered on the campus.”

After learning about the passing of tWitch, Ellen took to social media to share a video about her friend and former collaborator. “Everyone is in pain and trying to make sense of it, and we’ll never make sense of it. The holidays are hard, I think, anyway, but to honor tWitch, I think the best thing that we can do is to laugh, hug each other, play games, and dance and sing. That’s the way we honor him, is we do the things that he loved to do, which is dancing,” she said.

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“He loved music, he loved games, so we do that,” DeGeneres continued. “And I know it seems hard, it seems impossible, but that’s how we honor him.”

“[Boss] was pure light, as everybody in the comments said. If you knew him, you knew that. If you didn’t know him, you saw it. Let’s honor him and think about him and send love to one another,” Ellen concluded.