It’s only now, Tuesday night, that I have enough moments of calm to reflect on the Sunday morning scattering of Eileen’s ashes. Also not helping is my website being down, and the internet providers taking their grand and glorious time reactivating it, and the fear of losing almost everything I’ve written in the past four years looms very large.
Anyway, there was about 20 of us meeting at Eileen’s, and we walked about a quarter mile to a trail called Parkland Walk, which most London joggers and bikers seem to know about, as they were all there in force. Some got arrogant about having their regimen disrupted by this gaggle of old farts, but as I’ve found over the past week, there’s a TRUCKLOAD of people out there with little or no sensitivity.
Ashes weigh a lot more than I expected, as the bag carrying them was the size of your average lunch bag, but weighed almost as much as a sand bag! And it took a good ten minutes of tossing steady handfuls onto the vegetation before it felt lighter. Still, it felt good to be outdoors for the first time in many months without wearing multiple layers of clothes!
The key moment was one engineered by Birgit Voss, who will become my flat mate in just over a month (Yes, I’m leaving Dagenham!!). Birgit grabbed some violets from Eileen’s back garden, and brought along a small spade. Since it had rained the day before, the soil was damp along the Walk, and Birgit found an opportune spot to plant the violets, scattering ashes over the top. Upon seeing that, I totally LOST it. The significance of Eileen’s remains being used to hopefully build a new life jabbed me in my heart, and I walked away in tears for about the 100th time in the last month.
When later in the day, the BBC pop chart revealed that “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead” had zoomed up to #2, I remember thinking of how Eileen, a staunch leftist/feminist/activist, would have been entertained by the events of the past week. Perhaps she and Maggie have already had words.
On Monday, another small contingent of friends joined up with me at her place in a further celebration of who she was, and we must have had a bit too much wine, for a couple hours later, I stormed into political arguments with a couple of conservative FB “friends.” As they were speculating on how the liberal media will show Obama being the gallant knight in his reaction to the Boston bombings, I threw a few scuds their way. I wound up un-friending two people, in separate exchanges, and to one my parting shot was the not-so-intellectual “Consider yourself unfriended, you right wing FUCK!” Since these were people Eileen was advising me to un-friend months ago, I’m sure she was sending down that glowing smile.