Emerson's UK memorial service: the recap
Emerson Milford Dickson's UK memorial service did indeed take place as planned on the afternoon of Saturday 18th March 2023 at Forest School. It was, more or less, everything I wanted it to be; there’s very little within my control that I would change about how it went. I know more people wanted to attend than actually could, due in part to a train strike; other factors like road works didn’t help and the weather before the event wasn’t favourable, though it all dried up by mid-afternoon.
Happily, we were able to stream the event live. If you want to see what happened, I would recommend not watching the live stream but instead watching the high-quality recording instead. That said, it may be more efficient just to read the text of the tribute instead.
((quietly, before the service starts: Matt Nathanson, "Mission Bells"))
Welcome, everyone, and thank you for coming today. We're here today to remember and celebrate the life of Emerson Milford Dickson, who was taken from us far too young on Sunday 15th January. I would like to extend my thanks to everyone here at Forest School for their kindness in letting us use this room, known as the Upper Library, for the ceremony; this is a room with many happy associations for us because we held Thanksgiving dinners here over the years. Thanks and fondest wishes, also, to everyone who would love to be here in person but can only be here online, whether friends or family, with particular love to Sarah, Emerson's sister.
I’m sure that everyone here today, whatever your own beliefs, will agree that we should do our very best to live a good life, and to support others to do so. These are values we all share as human beings, so people of all faiths and people of no faith are all welcome here today. In the course of the ceremony, we will hear stories from Emerson’s life, some poetry and some music, and there will be time for reflection, when you can remember Emerson in your own way or in terms of your own faith. Emerson loved singer-songwriters; maybe his favourite from the last decade was Matt Nathanson, so the start of the service was marked by him performing "Mission Bells", a song that Emerson once wrote would always remind him of 2013.
Emerson was born on 23rd April 1980 to Lynn and Roger Milford. He was born in the city of Athens in the state of Georgia, within the United States of America. He was assigned female at birth and given the name Megan Rose Milford. Sarah joined the family two and a third years later. They lived in a small wooden house about twenty miles south of Athens. Many cats often came to visit; notable among them was a big ginger tabby that the family called Desmond.
Emerson's early memories were happy ones. He particularly enjoyed spending time with Granny and Pop, his mother's parents; Pop was a railroad man, who also raised money and awareness for the Shriner Hospitals for Children, later as a clown with the Shrine Circus. Emerson's early passions included softball and he quickly became a voracious reader, not least at the public library in Watkinsville. He continued to cherish many of the friendships he made in the Oconee County school system for the rest of his life.
Life wasn't easy in those early years. On Emerson's first day at high school, his parents had to wake him to tell him that Pop had passed away, after they had spent just the previous week at Pop's house. Unfair redundancy and land deals affected the family harshly, times became tougher still and Emerson would later reflect that there were points during his childhood where he felt that he was the adult in the household, effectively raising his sister Sarah.
He chose to stay near the people and places he loved and attended the highly selective Emory University. He joined a sorority called Alpha Phi where he made many more lifelong friends; pledging for sorority life was so far away from his parents' hippie existence that it was partly an act of rebellion against his parents!
After two years, he transferred to Agnes Scott College, which proved even more to his taste; he loved it there so much that Sarah followed him to the women-only college, and the year where they were both students was a particular joy. He graduated with enough credits for two BA degrees, one in classics and the other in American History. His university time included a long romance with Blair, who attended the nearby Georgia Institute of Technology. Athens is the city where the University of Georgia is situated, and the two schools have a traditional football rivalry; Emerson was always firmly on the Georgia side of it, but his devotion to Blair was such that he watched more games at Georgia Tech's stadium.
Happy memories of Watkinsville library pointed him towards a graduate course in library science, and his love for history inspired a focus in archives. He studied a Masters course at Simmons University in Boston, where fellow students, roommates and friends of friends also became very dear to him. He combined grad school with work at the Massachussets Historical Society, which was very rewarding at first, but after a beloved line manager left, became extremely frustrating.
Emerson always loved stories. An early love was The West Wing; not just the TV show, but also its fanfiction, particularly the pairing of characters Josh and Donna. From there, he fell into Harry Potter and its fandom. Much of this was conducted on an early social media web site called LiveJournal. Emerson made more and more friends through LiveJournal, and in 2003 a mutual friend called Richard introduced us to each other. This feels like a good moment to play part of a track from a band Emerson always loved, the Indigo Girls, called "History of Us".
((the Indigo Girls, "History of Us", start to end of first chorus))
Late in 2003, Emerson started making plans to visit London for the first time he'd ever left the country. At about that time, Emerson and I were starting to talk more and more often. What was intended to be a trip for Emerson to see a place became a trip, at least in part, for Emerson to see a person. We hit it off quickly in London in March 2004 and decided to see if we could make a long-distance relationship work. Emerson moved back from Boston to Athens for a year, where he was able to work at the Watkinsville Public Library which he had so loved growing up; another source of joy that year was getting to live with Sarah. The house was too quiet without cats and so Xander and Toby joined the family very soon afterwards.
Our long-distance relationship worked well enough to the point where we wanted to give a no-distance relationship a try, and after 18 months I proposed marriage just before Thanksgiving Day 2005. Emerson moved across late in 2006 to live with me in a town called Middlesbrough in the north-east of England; we had a glorious wedding ceremony in Athens in March 2007.
Emerson found work at a local library and a team who made him feel really at home. It was never an easy place to work; the library had very few resources, many of the patrons were abusive and even the well-meaning ones were so far from cosmopolitan that Emerson repeatedly got asked where he was from because people couldn't believe anyone would travel from the USA to work near Middlesbrough. Emerson still threw himself into his job as much as he had done for everything else he'd ever tried. Emerson suffered increasingly with back pain, but also with worsening mental health. Relationships with his parents were getting ever more strained.
Emerson had finally felt able to start to say "no" to his parents by about 2010, for the sake of his own health. Eventually, in 2012, he chose to cut ties with them altogether, which was a terrible wrench. His father died in 2013, but Emerson's trip across to Georgia for the funeral made it clear that he had done the right thing. That said, his love for his father remained strong; Emerson had four tattoos, his favourite of which was based on his father's draughtsmanship and loves.
Emerson always missed a lot about the US, not least the food; one of his happiest achievements is that he brought across the Thanksgiving tradition and enjoyed organising and preparing wonderful, bounteous feasts almost every year for his family and for his family-by-choice.
Emerson enjoyed visiting new places, though he much less enjoyed the travelling process. He loved getting to go to Singapore and Thailand, and later Malaysia and Hong Kong, to see former Boston housemate Elsa. He was well travelled through the US, loving an impromptu crazy road trip, and he was delighted to be able to go to see the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. He visited Belgium and France, Spain twice and Italy three times, notably to Rome in 2016 to finally get to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band live in concert.
The local library service eventually closed Emerson's branch, replacing it with just a single room in a nearby building. Emerson had to look elsewhere, and his increasing focus on young adult literature pointed him towards school librarianship. He won a position working at the library of Forest School and so we moved 250 miles to London. Once again, he had found someone to work under who was kind, supportive and an extremely good complement for his skills; Archie acted as senior librarian for five years, but Emerson took more and more of the responsibility, sharing it with his brilliant and his very dear team.
As ever, Emerson threw himself as hard as he possibly could into his work. Forest proved to be an environment where his enthusiasm and initative were positively welcomed, and he was much more than just a librarian. He edited the school magazine for five years. His love for puzzles made him an ideal sponsor for a puzzle society at the school. He oversaw two classes putting together independent research projects to earn an Extended Project Qualification, where some of his best students put together undergraduate-quality work, even before turning eighteen.
Emerson always wanted to run a library where everyone could find books featuring people like themselves, and he was always keen to represent the underrepresented in his collection. He took particular pride in ensuring representation of, and information about, those with a wide variety of sexual and gender identities. This led him to be a very natural ally to act as staff support for Forest's emerging Pride Society, a respected authority figure with the authenticity to share his story, and yet not with the occasionally unhelpful connotations that might have arisen from being a teacher.
Emerson never had difficulties accepting his love of people of all genders. He was attracted to people based on their heart, not based on whatever they might have had between their legs. As years passed, he became less and less satisfied with his body. He had long felt that his experience as being assigned female at birth had never totally suited him, no matter how hard he tried to fit in as a woman. A great deal of soul-searching and research led him to question his gender; for a while, he considered himself non-binary and then eventually he realised that he had been a man all along. It was a great weight off him to remove the most obvious indicators that might cause people to misgender him, and he was grateful for all the love that his friends showed him, particularly at Forest School.
He took joy and pride in being part of the panel judging the first Children's and Young Adult category of the Polari Prizes. These are the UK's only awards celebrating books that explore the LGBTQ+ experience. This wasn't the first award he had judged; he had spent two years as part of the panel of librarians who awarded the Carnegie Medal to an outstanding new children's or YA book, as well as the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration. These were immense judging commitments keeping him busy reading, and re-reading, and thinking and discussing year-round.
Emerson enjoyed the challenge of summing himself up. On Facebook, he got it down to just a dozen words: Librarian, teacher, archivist, crafter, immigrant, sibling, partner, cat lover, queer, liberal, geek. They're all important parts of him, but if I had to pick just two, they would be "cat lover".
In late 2020, our fifteen-year-old cat Toby, a dear stripy sweetheart, lost a lot of weight and a lot of the joy in his behaviour over the course of just six weeks or so. His kidneys had failed. Saying goodbye to Toby was horribly difficult; afterwards, even more so than before, Toby's brother Xander was as close to Emerson as any other member of the family.
A quote from Silver on the Tree seems appropriate at this point.
'Such loving bonds,' Merriman said, 'are outside the control even of the High Magic, for they are the strongest thing on all this earth.'
In 2021 and especially in 2022, Emerson could see Xander fading away over time in the same way Toby had, and Emerson was keen to spend every single day he could with Xander. Xander was smart and silly and handsome and empathetic; for someone who had loved cats like Emerson had done for the whole of his life, for someone who had devoted a large part of his online presence in loving memory of his dear Dessie kitty, Xander was Emerson's cat among cats. Xander's kidney function declined so badly towards the end that, eventually, the hardest decision was actually a very easy one to take on December 20th last year.
You occasionally hear of people apparently deliberately hanging on for some reason before their body will let them go; I am convinced that Xander's passing made Emerson's body try less hard. After a little warning about the state of Emerson's heart last year, but far too little warning, I'd gone to bed before him on Saturday night nine weeks ago today, and found his body on the sofa on Sunday morning, which came as a horrible shock. His passing was found to be from "high grade coronary artery atheroma"; it seems that his coronary artery got furred up so badly that blood couldn't get through to his heart. The position in which he was found suggests he passed away peacefully in his sleep.
Emerson was brilliant. He was kind. He was tremendously hard-working. He wasn't just incredibly intelligent, he was also highly practically capable and he was hilarious and he looked great. I remember him as being all of those things but I also remember him as depressed, anxious and unhappy, mostly about the way the world is going. I remember him fondly, I remember him lovingly, I remember him in almost everything I see or do, particularly here at Forest School.
We're all here to celebrate his life. I have some more stories about Emerson to share, a little later, and hope other people have stories to share as well. Before my dear friend Alex pays his tribute, Emerson loved the singer-songwriter Tom Petty; the song that Tom might have written about Emerson is, of course, "I Won't Back Down".
((Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “I Won’t Back Down", start to end of second verse))
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shinytoaster’s tribute:
Driving home from an afternoon of board games and friends in Brighton in early January, I was thinking to myself that I couldn't remember the day I met Emerson.
Our friendship was forged in words and stories and books, so I know that it was during our fandom days, when having friends from the Internet was new and exciting and concerning to parents.
Possibly it was in the summer of 2003 at a friend's cooperative houseshare somewhere in Boston. We had curry for dinner, and later somebody to whom I am now married drank six espressos at a combination lesbian bookshop and coffee bar. Or maybe it was in the summer of 2004 at a get-together in New York? Was I in a cab on the way to that Mexican restaurant with him when we learned Ronald Reagan had died? Or was that someone else?
And now I'll never get to ask him if he remembered.
At his annual Thanksgivings, so cruelly curtailed of late by Covid, Emerson would make us go around the table, one by one, and talk about the things we were thankful for in the past year. It was a moment anticipated by all and dreaded by some, a delightfully chaotic collision of American openness and exuberance and British reticence and embarrassment. As an agent of chaos, I always greatly enjoyed the squirming the tradition induced in my compatriots.
And I believe that collision of cultures characterised much of Em's life, with one foot in both countries and a heart too big for either, and my friendship with him.
So I thought I'd go round the table and say what I'm thankful for today. I'm thankful, first of all and rather selfishly, for the last day Lowell and I got together with Em and Chris and our friends before his sudden and untimely passing on Saturday night. Emerson was happy and thriving and on excellent form, holding court with his knitting and a can of Coke that was always tucked into a Georgia Bulldogs insulated can holder. Because of course it was.
I'm thankful that after Em came to the UK in the mid-00s we got to spend 20 years (maybe 19) of time together and got to know each other, even though there was usually 200 miles of M1 (and 60 miles of A1/M to Teesside in between us). Most of the time it was when he came down to that London, but sometimes we went to Middlesbrough for Thanksgiving, which is when we got to see Em at his best, that is to say, coordinating his entirely correct Southern Thanksgiving with military precision, in a kitchen that was filled with steam and delicious smells and never, ever big enough. By hook or by crook, Em had usually managed to source all the right ingredients he needed, by which I mean imported, American ones, possibly as a result of some arrangement he may or may not have had with a friend who worked on one of the big American bases in North Yorkshire. Some things just can't be substituted, although I believe the turkey was always from Asda.
Even after he and Chris came down to London, any visit to their home would reveal a trove of American consumables, boxes of Ziploc bags, Dawn washing up liquid (which I know now to be infinitely superior to Fairy), pumpkin pie mix, even canned tomatoes because apparently ours just aren't right. I wondered if customs at Heathrow ever asked to see inside his suitcases? 'Are these your tumble dryer sheets, sir?'
I'm thankful for the times we got to spend together more recently, after Em and Chris moved to London. Before the pandemic, Lowell was often back and forth to Seattle and Chris was still away up North a lot, so as I don't do well on my own, I'd sometimes take the Victoria line all the way out to Walthamstow and walk down Hoe Street to hang out with Em, Toby and Xander. We did nothing more than chat, entertain the cats, drink Coke, and entertain the cats, but I always appreciated the gift of Em's home and time.
I'm thankful that towards the end of his life, Em got to live with truth and authenticity after he began his transition. Life in this country has become intolerable for trans and non-binary people, and as the news these past weeks constantly showing us, both here and in America we are taking retrograde steps.
As someone who has always been at peace with his gender identity I can't imagine what bravery it must take to navigate this time and place safely, so I'm thankful for the example Em set and that he had the courage to lead the life he led, and I'm thankful and grateful that he trusted us to let us meet him for a second time.
Finally I'm thankful for what he meant to others, for his activism and advocacy of diverse stories, and for his support and boundless love for queer youth. Our schools and libraries need more people like him, and to those gathered here today from Forest's community, I hope you will continue his work, because when queer kids are valued and loved and supported, queer adults will thrive.
I was of course dimly aware that I would probably live to see off about half of my peers but to face up to that reality so early is a shock and this is a hard loss to bear.
There was so much more Coke to drink and so many more books to recommend.
((Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run", last verse, chorus and outro))
chris resumes:
That was, of course, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band with "Born to Run", in honour of Emerson's trip to Rome to see him.
One of the best things about living in the woods was the number of cats who came to visit their house. Emerson knew and loved at least twenty, perhaps thirty, different cats out there. Foremost among them was a big ginger tabby that the family called Desmond, who was most often seen with another cat that the family called Molly, both named after characters in the Beatles' Ob-la-Di Ob-la-Da. Emerson and Sarah both loved Desmond more than any of their other cats growing up. However, Emerson once tried to give both Desmond and Molly away to one of his schoolmates with a particular surname, just so that the cats could fulfil the destiny foretold in the song and, once and for all, become Desmond and Molly Jones!
Emerson threw himself as hard as he could into life at Oconee County High School and he always fondly remembered the friends he made there, taking great joy in the rare opportunities he had in later life to catch up. He participated in a great number of clubs, with particularly great affection for Latin Club which led him to be able to go to Latin Convention one year, where the highlight was a real-life chariot race! His Latin teacher, Angela Bell, was particularly inspirational and he long, fondly remembered the pop culture tunes to which she had set Latin grammar mnemonics. It was a joy to meet up with some of Emerson's school friends at the US memorial service and discover that they still remembered how to decline Latin nouns to the tune of the theme from The Addams Family!
He participated in a considerable number of college-level classes, and was part of not only the school's math team but also their academic bowl team under the beloved Roger Bailey. The school yearbook for his graduation class, a 300-page hardback, has an index so most of the students can quickly find and refer to the two or three pages on which they appear. Emerson's entry in the index lists him appearing on seventeen... and he's written on another nine that the indexers missed.
Perhaps most influential of all on him was Drama Club. Emerson received the highest SAT score among his peers in one sitting which earned him the title of Star Student, a unique distinction among a cohort of 309. This meant that he had the privilege of naming a Star Teacher; he chose Bill Gabelhausen, who taught his Drama II and technical theater classes, for Emerson called him "a teacher, director, confidant, friend and inspiration", and Emerson was sufficiently inspired by him to think about teaching as a vocation.
Emerson became a published author as an undergraduate, co-writing "DeKalb County in Vintage Postcards", one of a series of Postcard History books, alongside another member of the DeKalb Historical Society. This book involved searching the archives of an area where a tiny town was founded as a railway terminus. This town, accordingly took its name from there and originally known as Terminus. Later on, it was renamed to Marthasville after the first name of the governor's daughter, but that wasn't the town's final name. That governor's daughter also had a middle name of Atalanta, and that points - give or take a letter - to the name by which the area is known today.
Emerson always retained his love of stories and reading, particualrly about a pairing between the characters Derek and Stiles from Teen Wolf. Once every couple of years he would write fanfic as well as read it; his work attracted tens of thousands of views and thousands of kudos by way of appreciation. His favourite story of all was the The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper, and it was of great joy to him that he once got to meet Cooper at a youth librarians event and tell her of his admiration of her work. At a young age, Emerson memorised this prophetic poem:
"When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back:
Three from the circle, three from the track,
Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;
Five will return, and one go alone.
Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long;
Wood from the burning, stone out of song;
Fire in the candle-ring, water from the thaw;
Six signs, the circle, and the grail gone before.
Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold,
Played to wake the sleepers, oldest of the old;
Power of the the Greenwitch, lost beneath the sea,
All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree."
In 2003, a group of friends on the West Coast of the US started an event called Puzzled Pint. It's a monthly, low-key, casual puzzle event played by teams within pubs; think of a pub quiz, but replace the trivia with puzzles of all sorts: word puzzles, ciphers, logic puzzles, picture puzzles and many more. I tried out a set of Puzzled Pint puzzles on some of our friends, and this reminded Emerson how much he loved solving puzzles and how much he enjoyed spending time with those who enjoyed solving them, particularly our dear friend Dan. When Dan started to organise Puzzled Pint more regularly in London, Emerson loved to travel down for it; this grew into solving an occasional escape room together, and even to teaming up to play London's leg of a global puzzle hunt called DASH.
Emerson was not only abstractly intelligent but also extremely broadly knowledgeable. He took part in the Learned League trivia contest, and he more than held his own even among the likes of Jeopardy! and University Challenge champions in one of the contest's top divisions. He loved solving the New York Times crossword, building up an unbroken streak of over five hundred consecutive daily solutions by the time he passed away.
Moving to London was attractive partly because of work, but also partly because so many of our friends live here: fandom friends, puzzle friends and others. Within six weeks of starting at Forest School, he led his first school trip, taking kids to a book signing by the authors Cassandra Clare and Holly Black. He'd known them for years, but more importantly, they knew him - and when the kids found they knew him, he became pretty damn cool very quickly!
He edited the school magazine for five years, producing meticulously designed, brilliant accounts of everything taking place at Forest. This meant his summers usually saw him work even longer weeks than he did during the school year. The deadlines meant he sometimes had to go without sleep two nights in a row just to get everything done. His editorship will be seen as a golden age for the Forest School magazine, and it's only a shame that his daily library duties kept him so busy that he wasn't able to make the time to try to apply his academic background to Forest School's considerable archives.
I find it difficult to say anything negative about Emerson, but Susan Cooper says it well again: 'Every human being who loves another loves imperfection'.
We all know that he could be stubborn, that he had a clear plan about a good way to do things. I don't believe he was ever controlling out of any sense of want; sometimes he just needed things to be done his way. To stretch for a criticism: very occasionally, when he went to see a panel or a speaker on a topic about which he was passionate, if the panel were to ask for questions from the audience, Emerson would be keen to share his knowledge and perspectives with the speakers. Towards the end, he recognised he was doing this, and would even joke about it being "this is more of a comment than a question". At one level, this is constructive and helpful. At another level, when your contribution is eight or ten times as long as any of the questions that other people have asked...
And so, to some final words... about final words. I don't know for sure what my final words to Emerson would have been; that Saturday night was like any other, with no indication that it might be his last. However, far more nights than not, I made sure the last three phrases I said to him were, in some order, "I love you", "sleep sweetly", and "night night". And yet, when the time came to say goodbye to our dear Xander cat, Emerson had chosen some very deliberate and very meaningful last words to say to him: "go and find Daddy and he'll feed you some cheese".
Emerson wasn't religious. Neither am I, neither is Sarah, we never talked about afterlives. I can't bring myself to believe that Emerson will now be playing with Toby and Xander and Dessie and Daddy and the others he had loved and lost along the way, but I cannot think of a lovelier or more comforting story.
Time, perhaps, for us all to spend a minute reflecting on Emerson's life. Perhaps Emerson's single favourite singer-songwriter of them all was Bill Mallonee, a fixture of the music scene in Athens, sometimes performing solo, sometimes with his band, Vigilantes of Love. Their 1995 album Blister Soul offered this song, "Parting Shot".
((Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Parting Shot", first verse))
We're coming towards the end of the service. We're here to pay our last respects to Emerson, and we do so together and we do so in support of each other. The grieving and mourning and remembrance will never ever end. It's wonderful to share a physical space with so many of the people who were important to Emerson; I know there are many others who would love to be here but cannot. (Maybe I shouldn't have picked a day with a train strike...) Emerson and I got together at a time when the idea of an online friendship was something inherently different to an offline one. These days, I cherish and love the fact that so many of us can be together virtually, even if not physically.
Many thanks, again, to Forest School, not least because they will be very kindly providing some refreshments at about 3 o'clock, and we have the use of this room until 5 o'clock. I would invite you all to stay here awhile and share more memories of Emerson and stories of his life. Two of our dear friends, Caroline and Dan, have created a set of puzzles celebrating his life and interests, which you might well enjoy, particularly in this good company. These are deliberately short and light, so while I know there are some hardcore puzzle fans here, this set of puzzles has been designed to be accessible to everyone. Whether the demands of life permit you to stay for longer or not, I wish you a safe journey home.
There is no physical collection, but it would mean a great deal to me if you were to donate in Emerson's name to one of two causes that were very dear to him, the Celia Hammond Animal Trust and the Trevor Project. The Celia Hammond Animal Trust are a small local charity who provide care and refuge for cats and kittens. It doesn't matter whether they're domestic cats or feral cats, young cats or old cats, calm cats or angry cats, cats that everyone will want to adopt or cats that which will take much longer to find a forever home, Celia Hammond Animal Trust will take them in. The Trevor Project is an international charity with a simple mission: to end suicide among LGBTQ young people by providing 24/7 crisis support services.
My own life has often not been happy, but Emerson - and my relationship with him - was always the happiest thing in it. I thank you all for being here today, in person or online, yet I offer my biggest thanks of all to Emerson. I thank him for living a life where he gave so much to everyone else, and for throwing as much of himself as he possibly could into helping and loving others, in everything he did. I know he touched a great many lives; whether he happened to know you personally or not, he made people's lives better.
As we end our ceremony today I hope you have gained some comfort from being here together, in person or online. As you return to your work, your homes and the routines of your daily lives, please remember how you felt sharing these moments. I'd like you to take away your own memories of Emerson and his place in your lives. In our relationships and friendships; in the work of our hands and minds; and by our example, some essence of us remains. So Emerson will always be part of our lives; and by remembering him we will be paying him the greatest tribute.
This chapter in the story of our lives may close, and although there will be many more chapters, these pages will never be forgotten, these pages will always be a part of that story. It has been said that if we do live on in any way after death, it is in the hearts and memories of those that knew us and loved us. I know that Emerson will live on in our hearts and in our memories.
((quietly, as people are leaving: 2 Unlimited, "Nothing Like The Rain"))
In practice, there were a few infelicities in the reading, but nothing too serious. We couldn’t actually get the Bruce Springsteen excerpt to play, in practice, because the school’s Windows network picked a very inconvenient time to force an upgrade on the machine we had linked up to the audio system.
That said, there was one unexpected event that more than made up for it. Forest School has had a cat wander around its grounds more frequently in recent years; one day, it visited the library, and this was a red letter day about which Emerson tweeted in delight. The very same cat came and visited the room where we were giving the tribute, while were giving it. (There is a photo of the cat curled up next to two 24-packs of Coke that I had brought in, and few things – if any – could have been a more suitable or appropriate blessing.)
Many thanks to all those who came in person, or attended virtually via the livestream, or just sent warm thoughts. Many thanks also to everyone at Forest School who kindly let us use their wonderful facilities and provided a lovely finger buffet, with drinks, after the event.
I regret not having taken more photos of Emerson in his later years, and especially not having recorded more video or audio of him, but this was largely by his choice. That said, I was very grateful to everyone who stayed behind a little after the ceremony for a group photo; behind the group you can see the Forest School cloister and its dining hall. Not everyone likes having their photo online, so I’ll not say who was who, but sorting them by order of their first name gives a very pleasing A to Z: Alex Scroxton, Archie Black, Carina Griffiths, Caroline Hardman, Chris Dickson, Dan Lester, Dan Peake, David Percik, Denis Lundie, Ellen Fragaszy, Elsa Oliver, Freya Crawford, Gary Male, Iain Weaver, Ingrid Black, James Curtis, Lowell Kapp-Meroney, Lucy Mungur, Mark Rigby-Jones, Meigan Teo, Nick Parish, Phil Hannay, Richard Nicholls, Rob Linham, Sarah Hannay, Sinead McHugh, Sophie Campbell, Zoey Dixon. There were other attendees who couldn’t stay around for the photo as well.
After the service, there was not only a photo and a buffet, but also a chance to visit the Forest School library and see how it reflected the work done by Emerson and his team. There was also a delightful tribute in the form of a set of puzzles for teams to solve, created by Caroline and Dan. These puzzles are available online for you to try, as are the answers. (The metapuzzle answer is not a dictionary word, but should be very clear from context, especially in light of a recurring theme of the tribute.)
Ever since then, I’ve been doing OK enough, though the grieving is a near-constant process. Days with work are easier for me because they have a clear structure; non-work days are very easily spent rooted to a seat or in bed. There are still plenty of things to do and take care of just by way of estate administration. In the longer term, I have no idea what I’m going to do, but that’s OK; I don’t need to answer that question right away, and I have the rest of my life to find an answer.
Happily, we were able to stream the event live. If you want to see what happened, I would recommend not watching the live stream but instead watching the high-quality recording instead. That said, it may be more efficient just to read the text of the tribute instead.
((quietly, before the service starts: Matt Nathanson, "Mission Bells"))
Welcome, everyone, and thank you for coming today. We're here today to remember and celebrate the life of Emerson Milford Dickson, who was taken from us far too young on Sunday 15th January. I would like to extend my thanks to everyone here at Forest School for their kindness in letting us use this room, known as the Upper Library, for the ceremony; this is a room with many happy associations for us because we held Thanksgiving dinners here over the years. Thanks and fondest wishes, also, to everyone who would love to be here in person but can only be here online, whether friends or family, with particular love to Sarah, Emerson's sister.
I’m sure that everyone here today, whatever your own beliefs, will agree that we should do our very best to live a good life, and to support others to do so. These are values we all share as human beings, so people of all faiths and people of no faith are all welcome here today. In the course of the ceremony, we will hear stories from Emerson’s life, some poetry and some music, and there will be time for reflection, when you can remember Emerson in your own way or in terms of your own faith. Emerson loved singer-songwriters; maybe his favourite from the last decade was Matt Nathanson, so the start of the service was marked by him performing "Mission Bells", a song that Emerson once wrote would always remind him of 2013.
Emerson was born on 23rd April 1980 to Lynn and Roger Milford. He was born in the city of Athens in the state of Georgia, within the United States of America. He was assigned female at birth and given the name Megan Rose Milford. Sarah joined the family two and a third years later. They lived in a small wooden house about twenty miles south of Athens. Many cats often came to visit; notable among them was a big ginger tabby that the family called Desmond.
Emerson's early memories were happy ones. He particularly enjoyed spending time with Granny and Pop, his mother's parents; Pop was a railroad man, who also raised money and awareness for the Shriner Hospitals for Children, later as a clown with the Shrine Circus. Emerson's early passions included softball and he quickly became a voracious reader, not least at the public library in Watkinsville. He continued to cherish many of the friendships he made in the Oconee County school system for the rest of his life.
Life wasn't easy in those early years. On Emerson's first day at high school, his parents had to wake him to tell him that Pop had passed away, after they had spent just the previous week at Pop's house. Unfair redundancy and land deals affected the family harshly, times became tougher still and Emerson would later reflect that there were points during his childhood where he felt that he was the adult in the household, effectively raising his sister Sarah.
He chose to stay near the people and places he loved and attended the highly selective Emory University. He joined a sorority called Alpha Phi where he made many more lifelong friends; pledging for sorority life was so far away from his parents' hippie existence that it was partly an act of rebellion against his parents!
After two years, he transferred to Agnes Scott College, which proved even more to his taste; he loved it there so much that Sarah followed him to the women-only college, and the year where they were both students was a particular joy. He graduated with enough credits for two BA degrees, one in classics and the other in American History. His university time included a long romance with Blair, who attended the nearby Georgia Institute of Technology. Athens is the city where the University of Georgia is situated, and the two schools have a traditional football rivalry; Emerson was always firmly on the Georgia side of it, but his devotion to Blair was such that he watched more games at Georgia Tech's stadium.
Happy memories of Watkinsville library pointed him towards a graduate course in library science, and his love for history inspired a focus in archives. He studied a Masters course at Simmons University in Boston, where fellow students, roommates and friends of friends also became very dear to him. He combined grad school with work at the Massachussets Historical Society, which was very rewarding at first, but after a beloved line manager left, became extremely frustrating.
Emerson always loved stories. An early love was The West Wing; not just the TV show, but also its fanfiction, particularly the pairing of characters Josh and Donna. From there, he fell into Harry Potter and its fandom. Much of this was conducted on an early social media web site called LiveJournal. Emerson made more and more friends through LiveJournal, and in 2003 a mutual friend called Richard introduced us to each other. This feels like a good moment to play part of a track from a band Emerson always loved, the Indigo Girls, called "History of Us".
((the Indigo Girls, "History of Us", start to end of first chorus))
Late in 2003, Emerson started making plans to visit London for the first time he'd ever left the country. At about that time, Emerson and I were starting to talk more and more often. What was intended to be a trip for Emerson to see a place became a trip, at least in part, for Emerson to see a person. We hit it off quickly in London in March 2004 and decided to see if we could make a long-distance relationship work. Emerson moved back from Boston to Athens for a year, where he was able to work at the Watkinsville Public Library which he had so loved growing up; another source of joy that year was getting to live with Sarah. The house was too quiet without cats and so Xander and Toby joined the family very soon afterwards.
Our long-distance relationship worked well enough to the point where we wanted to give a no-distance relationship a try, and after 18 months I proposed marriage just before Thanksgiving Day 2005. Emerson moved across late in 2006 to live with me in a town called Middlesbrough in the north-east of England; we had a glorious wedding ceremony in Athens in March 2007.
Emerson found work at a local library and a team who made him feel really at home. It was never an easy place to work; the library had very few resources, many of the patrons were abusive and even the well-meaning ones were so far from cosmopolitan that Emerson repeatedly got asked where he was from because people couldn't believe anyone would travel from the USA to work near Middlesbrough. Emerson still threw himself into his job as much as he had done for everything else he'd ever tried. Emerson suffered increasingly with back pain, but also with worsening mental health. Relationships with his parents were getting ever more strained.
Emerson had finally felt able to start to say "no" to his parents by about 2010, for the sake of his own health. Eventually, in 2012, he chose to cut ties with them altogether, which was a terrible wrench. His father died in 2013, but Emerson's trip across to Georgia for the funeral made it clear that he had done the right thing. That said, his love for his father remained strong; Emerson had four tattoos, his favourite of which was based on his father's draughtsmanship and loves.
Emerson always missed a lot about the US, not least the food; one of his happiest achievements is that he brought across the Thanksgiving tradition and enjoyed organising and preparing wonderful, bounteous feasts almost every year for his family and for his family-by-choice.
Emerson enjoyed visiting new places, though he much less enjoyed the travelling process. He loved getting to go to Singapore and Thailand, and later Malaysia and Hong Kong, to see former Boston housemate Elsa. He was well travelled through the US, loving an impromptu crazy road trip, and he was delighted to be able to go to see the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. He visited Belgium and France, Spain twice and Italy three times, notably to Rome in 2016 to finally get to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street band live in concert.
The local library service eventually closed Emerson's branch, replacing it with just a single room in a nearby building. Emerson had to look elsewhere, and his increasing focus on young adult literature pointed him towards school librarianship. He won a position working at the library of Forest School and so we moved 250 miles to London. Once again, he had found someone to work under who was kind, supportive and an extremely good complement for his skills; Archie acted as senior librarian for five years, but Emerson took more and more of the responsibility, sharing it with his brilliant and his very dear team.
As ever, Emerson threw himself as hard as he possibly could into his work. Forest proved to be an environment where his enthusiasm and initative were positively welcomed, and he was much more than just a librarian. He edited the school magazine for five years. His love for puzzles made him an ideal sponsor for a puzzle society at the school. He oversaw two classes putting together independent research projects to earn an Extended Project Qualification, where some of his best students put together undergraduate-quality work, even before turning eighteen.
Emerson always wanted to run a library where everyone could find books featuring people like themselves, and he was always keen to represent the underrepresented in his collection. He took particular pride in ensuring representation of, and information about, those with a wide variety of sexual and gender identities. This led him to be a very natural ally to act as staff support for Forest's emerging Pride Society, a respected authority figure with the authenticity to share his story, and yet not with the occasionally unhelpful connotations that might have arisen from being a teacher.
Emerson never had difficulties accepting his love of people of all genders. He was attracted to people based on their heart, not based on whatever they might have had between their legs. As years passed, he became less and less satisfied with his body. He had long felt that his experience as being assigned female at birth had never totally suited him, no matter how hard he tried to fit in as a woman. A great deal of soul-searching and research led him to question his gender; for a while, he considered himself non-binary and then eventually he realised that he had been a man all along. It was a great weight off him to remove the most obvious indicators that might cause people to misgender him, and he was grateful for all the love that his friends showed him, particularly at Forest School.
He took joy and pride in being part of the panel judging the first Children's and Young Adult category of the Polari Prizes. These are the UK's only awards celebrating books that explore the LGBTQ+ experience. This wasn't the first award he had judged; he had spent two years as part of the panel of librarians who awarded the Carnegie Medal to an outstanding new children's or YA book, as well as the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration. These were immense judging commitments keeping him busy reading, and re-reading, and thinking and discussing year-round.
Emerson enjoyed the challenge of summing himself up. On Facebook, he got it down to just a dozen words: Librarian, teacher, archivist, crafter, immigrant, sibling, partner, cat lover, queer, liberal, geek. They're all important parts of him, but if I had to pick just two, they would be "cat lover".
In late 2020, our fifteen-year-old cat Toby, a dear stripy sweetheart, lost a lot of weight and a lot of the joy in his behaviour over the course of just six weeks or so. His kidneys had failed. Saying goodbye to Toby was horribly difficult; afterwards, even more so than before, Toby's brother Xander was as close to Emerson as any other member of the family.
A quote from Silver on the Tree seems appropriate at this point.
'Such loving bonds,' Merriman said, 'are outside the control even of the High Magic, for they are the strongest thing on all this earth.'
In 2021 and especially in 2022, Emerson could see Xander fading away over time in the same way Toby had, and Emerson was keen to spend every single day he could with Xander. Xander was smart and silly and handsome and empathetic; for someone who had loved cats like Emerson had done for the whole of his life, for someone who had devoted a large part of his online presence in loving memory of his dear Dessie kitty, Xander was Emerson's cat among cats. Xander's kidney function declined so badly towards the end that, eventually, the hardest decision was actually a very easy one to take on December 20th last year.
You occasionally hear of people apparently deliberately hanging on for some reason before their body will let them go; I am convinced that Xander's passing made Emerson's body try less hard. After a little warning about the state of Emerson's heart last year, but far too little warning, I'd gone to bed before him on Saturday night nine weeks ago today, and found his body on the sofa on Sunday morning, which came as a horrible shock. His passing was found to be from "high grade coronary artery atheroma"; it seems that his coronary artery got furred up so badly that blood couldn't get through to his heart. The position in which he was found suggests he passed away peacefully in his sleep.
Emerson was brilliant. He was kind. He was tremendously hard-working. He wasn't just incredibly intelligent, he was also highly practically capable and he was hilarious and he looked great. I remember him as being all of those things but I also remember him as depressed, anxious and unhappy, mostly about the way the world is going. I remember him fondly, I remember him lovingly, I remember him in almost everything I see or do, particularly here at Forest School.
We're all here to celebrate his life. I have some more stories about Emerson to share, a little later, and hope other people have stories to share as well. Before my dear friend Alex pays his tribute, Emerson loved the singer-songwriter Tom Petty; the song that Tom might have written about Emerson is, of course, "I Won't Back Down".
((Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “I Won’t Back Down", start to end of second verse))
shinytoaster’s tribute:Driving home from an afternoon of board games and friends in Brighton in early January, I was thinking to myself that I couldn't remember the day I met Emerson.
Our friendship was forged in words and stories and books, so I know that it was during our fandom days, when having friends from the Internet was new and exciting and concerning to parents.
Possibly it was in the summer of 2003 at a friend's cooperative houseshare somewhere in Boston. We had curry for dinner, and later somebody to whom I am now married drank six espressos at a combination lesbian bookshop and coffee bar. Or maybe it was in the summer of 2004 at a get-together in New York? Was I in a cab on the way to that Mexican restaurant with him when we learned Ronald Reagan had died? Or was that someone else?
And now I'll never get to ask him if he remembered.
At his annual Thanksgivings, so cruelly curtailed of late by Covid, Emerson would make us go around the table, one by one, and talk about the things we were thankful for in the past year. It was a moment anticipated by all and dreaded by some, a delightfully chaotic collision of American openness and exuberance and British reticence and embarrassment. As an agent of chaos, I always greatly enjoyed the squirming the tradition induced in my compatriots.
And I believe that collision of cultures characterised much of Em's life, with one foot in both countries and a heart too big for either, and my friendship with him.
So I thought I'd go round the table and say what I'm thankful for today. I'm thankful, first of all and rather selfishly, for the last day Lowell and I got together with Em and Chris and our friends before his sudden and untimely passing on Saturday night. Emerson was happy and thriving and on excellent form, holding court with his knitting and a can of Coke that was always tucked into a Georgia Bulldogs insulated can holder. Because of course it was.
I'm thankful that after Em came to the UK in the mid-00s we got to spend 20 years (maybe 19) of time together and got to know each other, even though there was usually 200 miles of M1 (and 60 miles of A1/M to Teesside in between us). Most of the time it was when he came down to that London, but sometimes we went to Middlesbrough for Thanksgiving, which is when we got to see Em at his best, that is to say, coordinating his entirely correct Southern Thanksgiving with military precision, in a kitchen that was filled with steam and delicious smells and never, ever big enough. By hook or by crook, Em had usually managed to source all the right ingredients he needed, by which I mean imported, American ones, possibly as a result of some arrangement he may or may not have had with a friend who worked on one of the big American bases in North Yorkshire. Some things just can't be substituted, although I believe the turkey was always from Asda.
Even after he and Chris came down to London, any visit to their home would reveal a trove of American consumables, boxes of Ziploc bags, Dawn washing up liquid (which I know now to be infinitely superior to Fairy), pumpkin pie mix, even canned tomatoes because apparently ours just aren't right. I wondered if customs at Heathrow ever asked to see inside his suitcases? 'Are these your tumble dryer sheets, sir?'
I'm thankful for the times we got to spend together more recently, after Em and Chris moved to London. Before the pandemic, Lowell was often back and forth to Seattle and Chris was still away up North a lot, so as I don't do well on my own, I'd sometimes take the Victoria line all the way out to Walthamstow and walk down Hoe Street to hang out with Em, Toby and Xander. We did nothing more than chat, entertain the cats, drink Coke, and entertain the cats, but I always appreciated the gift of Em's home and time.
I'm thankful that towards the end of his life, Em got to live with truth and authenticity after he began his transition. Life in this country has become intolerable for trans and non-binary people, and as the news these past weeks constantly showing us, both here and in America we are taking retrograde steps.
As someone who has always been at peace with his gender identity I can't imagine what bravery it must take to navigate this time and place safely, so I'm thankful for the example Em set and that he had the courage to lead the life he led, and I'm thankful and grateful that he trusted us to let us meet him for a second time.
Finally I'm thankful for what he meant to others, for his activism and advocacy of diverse stories, and for his support and boundless love for queer youth. Our schools and libraries need more people like him, and to those gathered here today from Forest's community, I hope you will continue his work, because when queer kids are valued and loved and supported, queer adults will thrive.
I was of course dimly aware that I would probably live to see off about half of my peers but to face up to that reality so early is a shock and this is a hard loss to bear.
There was so much more Coke to drink and so many more books to recommend.
((Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run", last verse, chorus and outro))
chris resumes:That was, of course, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band with "Born to Run", in honour of Emerson's trip to Rome to see him.
One of the best things about living in the woods was the number of cats who came to visit their house. Emerson knew and loved at least twenty, perhaps thirty, different cats out there. Foremost among them was a big ginger tabby that the family called Desmond, who was most often seen with another cat that the family called Molly, both named after characters in the Beatles' Ob-la-Di Ob-la-Da. Emerson and Sarah both loved Desmond more than any of their other cats growing up. However, Emerson once tried to give both Desmond and Molly away to one of his schoolmates with a particular surname, just so that the cats could fulfil the destiny foretold in the song and, once and for all, become Desmond and Molly Jones!
Emerson threw himself as hard as he could into life at Oconee County High School and he always fondly remembered the friends he made there, taking great joy in the rare opportunities he had in later life to catch up. He participated in a great number of clubs, with particularly great affection for Latin Club which led him to be able to go to Latin Convention one year, where the highlight was a real-life chariot race! His Latin teacher, Angela Bell, was particularly inspirational and he long, fondly remembered the pop culture tunes to which she had set Latin grammar mnemonics. It was a joy to meet up with some of Emerson's school friends at the US memorial service and discover that they still remembered how to decline Latin nouns to the tune of the theme from The Addams Family!
He participated in a considerable number of college-level classes, and was part of not only the school's math team but also their academic bowl team under the beloved Roger Bailey. The school yearbook for his graduation class, a 300-page hardback, has an index so most of the students can quickly find and refer to the two or three pages on which they appear. Emerson's entry in the index lists him appearing on seventeen... and he's written on another nine that the indexers missed.
Perhaps most influential of all on him was Drama Club. Emerson received the highest SAT score among his peers in one sitting which earned him the title of Star Student, a unique distinction among a cohort of 309. This meant that he had the privilege of naming a Star Teacher; he chose Bill Gabelhausen, who taught his Drama II and technical theater classes, for Emerson called him "a teacher, director, confidant, friend and inspiration", and Emerson was sufficiently inspired by him to think about teaching as a vocation.
Emerson became a published author as an undergraduate, co-writing "DeKalb County in Vintage Postcards", one of a series of Postcard History books, alongside another member of the DeKalb Historical Society. This book involved searching the archives of an area where a tiny town was founded as a railway terminus. This town, accordingly took its name from there and originally known as Terminus. Later on, it was renamed to Marthasville after the first name of the governor's daughter, but that wasn't the town's final name. That governor's daughter also had a middle name of Atalanta, and that points - give or take a letter - to the name by which the area is known today.
Emerson always retained his love of stories and reading, particualrly about a pairing between the characters Derek and Stiles from Teen Wolf. Once every couple of years he would write fanfic as well as read it; his work attracted tens of thousands of views and thousands of kudos by way of appreciation. His favourite story of all was the The Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper, and it was of great joy to him that he once got to meet Cooper at a youth librarians event and tell her of his admiration of her work. At a young age, Emerson memorised this prophetic poem:
"When the Dark comes rising, six shall turn it back:
Three from the circle, three from the track,
Wood, bronze, iron; water, fire, stone;
Five will return, and one go alone.
Iron for the birthday, bronze carried long;
Wood from the burning, stone out of song;
Fire in the candle-ring, water from the thaw;
Six signs, the circle, and the grail gone before.
Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold,
Played to wake the sleepers, oldest of the old;
Power of the the Greenwitch, lost beneath the sea,
All shall find the light at last, silver on the tree."
In 2003, a group of friends on the West Coast of the US started an event called Puzzled Pint. It's a monthly, low-key, casual puzzle event played by teams within pubs; think of a pub quiz, but replace the trivia with puzzles of all sorts: word puzzles, ciphers, logic puzzles, picture puzzles and many more. I tried out a set of Puzzled Pint puzzles on some of our friends, and this reminded Emerson how much he loved solving puzzles and how much he enjoyed spending time with those who enjoyed solving them, particularly our dear friend Dan. When Dan started to organise Puzzled Pint more regularly in London, Emerson loved to travel down for it; this grew into solving an occasional escape room together, and even to teaming up to play London's leg of a global puzzle hunt called DASH.
Emerson was not only abstractly intelligent but also extremely broadly knowledgeable. He took part in the Learned League trivia contest, and he more than held his own even among the likes of Jeopardy! and University Challenge champions in one of the contest's top divisions. He loved solving the New York Times crossword, building up an unbroken streak of over five hundred consecutive daily solutions by the time he passed away.
Moving to London was attractive partly because of work, but also partly because so many of our friends live here: fandom friends, puzzle friends and others. Within six weeks of starting at Forest School, he led his first school trip, taking kids to a book signing by the authors Cassandra Clare and Holly Black. He'd known them for years, but more importantly, they knew him - and when the kids found they knew him, he became pretty damn cool very quickly!
He edited the school magazine for five years, producing meticulously designed, brilliant accounts of everything taking place at Forest. This meant his summers usually saw him work even longer weeks than he did during the school year. The deadlines meant he sometimes had to go without sleep two nights in a row just to get everything done. His editorship will be seen as a golden age for the Forest School magazine, and it's only a shame that his daily library duties kept him so busy that he wasn't able to make the time to try to apply his academic background to Forest School's considerable archives.
I find it difficult to say anything negative about Emerson, but Susan Cooper says it well again: 'Every human being who loves another loves imperfection'.
We all know that he could be stubborn, that he had a clear plan about a good way to do things. I don't believe he was ever controlling out of any sense of want; sometimes he just needed things to be done his way. To stretch for a criticism: very occasionally, when he went to see a panel or a speaker on a topic about which he was passionate, if the panel were to ask for questions from the audience, Emerson would be keen to share his knowledge and perspectives with the speakers. Towards the end, he recognised he was doing this, and would even joke about it being "this is more of a comment than a question". At one level, this is constructive and helpful. At another level, when your contribution is eight or ten times as long as any of the questions that other people have asked...
And so, to some final words... about final words. I don't know for sure what my final words to Emerson would have been; that Saturday night was like any other, with no indication that it might be his last. However, far more nights than not, I made sure the last three phrases I said to him were, in some order, "I love you", "sleep sweetly", and "night night". And yet, when the time came to say goodbye to our dear Xander cat, Emerson had chosen some very deliberate and very meaningful last words to say to him: "go and find Daddy and he'll feed you some cheese".
Emerson wasn't religious. Neither am I, neither is Sarah, we never talked about afterlives. I can't bring myself to believe that Emerson will now be playing with Toby and Xander and Dessie and Daddy and the others he had loved and lost along the way, but I cannot think of a lovelier or more comforting story.
Time, perhaps, for us all to spend a minute reflecting on Emerson's life. Perhaps Emerson's single favourite singer-songwriter of them all was Bill Mallonee, a fixture of the music scene in Athens, sometimes performing solo, sometimes with his band, Vigilantes of Love. Their 1995 album Blister Soul offered this song, "Parting Shot".
((Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, “Parting Shot", first verse))
We're coming towards the end of the service. We're here to pay our last respects to Emerson, and we do so together and we do so in support of each other. The grieving and mourning and remembrance will never ever end. It's wonderful to share a physical space with so many of the people who were important to Emerson; I know there are many others who would love to be here but cannot. (Maybe I shouldn't have picked a day with a train strike...) Emerson and I got together at a time when the idea of an online friendship was something inherently different to an offline one. These days, I cherish and love the fact that so many of us can be together virtually, even if not physically.
Many thanks, again, to Forest School, not least because they will be very kindly providing some refreshments at about 3 o'clock, and we have the use of this room until 5 o'clock. I would invite you all to stay here awhile and share more memories of Emerson and stories of his life. Two of our dear friends, Caroline and Dan, have created a set of puzzles celebrating his life and interests, which you might well enjoy, particularly in this good company. These are deliberately short and light, so while I know there are some hardcore puzzle fans here, this set of puzzles has been designed to be accessible to everyone. Whether the demands of life permit you to stay for longer or not, I wish you a safe journey home.
There is no physical collection, but it would mean a great deal to me if you were to donate in Emerson's name to one of two causes that were very dear to him, the Celia Hammond Animal Trust and the Trevor Project. The Celia Hammond Animal Trust are a small local charity who provide care and refuge for cats and kittens. It doesn't matter whether they're domestic cats or feral cats, young cats or old cats, calm cats or angry cats, cats that everyone will want to adopt or cats that which will take much longer to find a forever home, Celia Hammond Animal Trust will take them in. The Trevor Project is an international charity with a simple mission: to end suicide among LGBTQ young people by providing 24/7 crisis support services.
My own life has often not been happy, but Emerson - and my relationship with him - was always the happiest thing in it. I thank you all for being here today, in person or online, yet I offer my biggest thanks of all to Emerson. I thank him for living a life where he gave so much to everyone else, and for throwing as much of himself as he possibly could into helping and loving others, in everything he did. I know he touched a great many lives; whether he happened to know you personally or not, he made people's lives better.
As we end our ceremony today I hope you have gained some comfort from being here together, in person or online. As you return to your work, your homes and the routines of your daily lives, please remember how you felt sharing these moments. I'd like you to take away your own memories of Emerson and his place in your lives. In our relationships and friendships; in the work of our hands and minds; and by our example, some essence of us remains. So Emerson will always be part of our lives; and by remembering him we will be paying him the greatest tribute.
This chapter in the story of our lives may close, and although there will be many more chapters, these pages will never be forgotten, these pages will always be a part of that story. It has been said that if we do live on in any way after death, it is in the hearts and memories of those that knew us and loved us. I know that Emerson will live on in our hearts and in our memories.
((quietly, as people are leaving: 2 Unlimited, "Nothing Like The Rain"))
In practice, there were a few infelicities in the reading, but nothing too serious. We couldn’t actually get the Bruce Springsteen excerpt to play, in practice, because the school’s Windows network picked a very inconvenient time to force an upgrade on the machine we had linked up to the audio system.
That said, there was one unexpected event that more than made up for it. Forest School has had a cat wander around its grounds more frequently in recent years; one day, it visited the library, and this was a red letter day about which Emerson tweeted in delight. The very same cat came and visited the room where we were giving the tribute, while were giving it. (There is a photo of the cat curled up next to two 24-packs of Coke that I had brought in, and few things – if any – could have been a more suitable or appropriate blessing.)
Many thanks to all those who came in person, or attended virtually via the livestream, or just sent warm thoughts. Many thanks also to everyone at Forest School who kindly let us use their wonderful facilities and provided a lovely finger buffet, with drinks, after the event.
I regret not having taken more photos of Emerson in his later years, and especially not having recorded more video or audio of him, but this was largely by his choice. That said, I was very grateful to everyone who stayed behind a little after the ceremony for a group photo; behind the group you can see the Forest School cloister and its dining hall. Not everyone likes having their photo online, so I’ll not say who was who, but sorting them by order of their first name gives a very pleasing A to Z: Alex Scroxton, Archie Black, Carina Griffiths, Caroline Hardman, Chris Dickson, Dan Lester, Dan Peake, David Percik, Denis Lundie, Ellen Fragaszy, Elsa Oliver, Freya Crawford, Gary Male, Iain Weaver, Ingrid Black, James Curtis, Lowell Kapp-Meroney, Lucy Mungur, Mark Rigby-Jones, Meigan Teo, Nick Parish, Phil Hannay, Richard Nicholls, Rob Linham, Sarah Hannay, Sinead McHugh, Sophie Campbell, Zoey Dixon. There were other attendees who couldn’t stay around for the photo as well.
After the service, there was not only a photo and a buffet, but also a chance to visit the Forest School library and see how it reflected the work done by Emerson and his team. There was also a delightful tribute in the form of a set of puzzles for teams to solve, created by Caroline and Dan. These puzzles are available online for you to try, as are the answers. (The metapuzzle answer is not a dictionary word, but should be very clear from context, especially in light of a recurring theme of the tribute.)
Ever since then, I’ve been doing OK enough, though the grieving is a near-constant process. Days with work are easier for me because they have a clear structure; non-work days are very easily spent rooted to a seat or in bed. There are still plenty of things to do and take care of just by way of estate administration. In the longer term, I have no idea what I’m going to do, but that’s OK; I don’t need to answer that question right away, and I have the rest of my life to find an answer.
no subject
Like you say, even if you don't believe in an afterlife it's a good story to think of sometimes.
Much love.