Grieving/Celebrating

I spent this morn­ing doing “needed things” as Doug calls them, a good way to keep occu­pied. And I’ve come home to read the grow­ing list of trib­utes to Ave­line and lost myself in memor­ies of her. 

I wish I’d gone to Arcanacon to play Chil­dren of the Revolu­tion, now. I haven’t been to a role­play­ing con in years, but it would have been a great trib­ute to her.

Yes­ter­day’s shock is wear­ing off and today, sad­ness creeps in along with a sense of bless­ing for having been someone a person as amaz­ing as Ave­line coun­ted as a friend.

Many people are saying that Ave­line’s com­mit­ment to polit­ics and revolu­tion­ary zeal have spurred them to act. She and I inspired each other at this, I think. I feel I have a respons­ib­il­ity to her to make good my decisions to pursue my act­iv­ism pro­fes­sion­ally rather than just on the side – like her work in Can­berra as a speech writer for a Sen­ator – whether it’s edit­ing a polit­ical magazine instead of one that encour­ages the usual con­sumer stuff or work­ing for an NGO in some capa­city. Her grasp of Marx­ist and anarch­ist theory was second to none; mine is out­dated and I think I might set myself a refresher course to take up the mantle. I have some­thing else to learn from her, too: she was as polit­ical as me and more rad­ical, but inspired others, whereas I think I often put people off and seem like I’m lec­tur­ing. If I can chan­nel her accept­ance of others, her lead­er­ship, clar­ity and coher­ence, and in my turn inspire polit­ical engage­ment, I will honour her memory in the best way possible.