Knowing Edith changed my life. I met her thirty years ago when I was 28 at the Helsinki WILPF Congress.  I heard so much about her before we met and didn’t believe someone could be so fabulous.  Then she made a speech leading to my first words to her: “I agree with everything you said with every cell in my body.”

We didn’t always agree. I recorded a lot of what she said, and often went back and realised that she was right. I once read 3 or 4 books about Stalin to realise that what she had said was historically and politically accurate. She was careful with her words and said things that continue to guide me.  She once said, “If it’s a sacrifice, go home; movements don’t need sacrifice. They need people overflowing with volunteerism and enthusiasm. Go home and take a bath, rest if you need to, and come back to it when it’s not a sacrifice.”

She was direct like this. She was also encouraging and extremely thoughtful with gifts and support and time. She didn’t fuss. She was always respectful and treated people with decency, even those she disagreed with profoundly. She lived with humility and she also enjoyed life. She really lived her values. When you lived with her she referred to “our car, our house, our fridge”. Sharing was her default.

She put people at ease, people of all ages. When she was 81, I remember walking in on a conversation with an 18 year old friend of mine and she was really listening to him and asking questions about Billy Idol. She and I spent a lot of time together, we shared a lot of tables with a lot of food and a lot of people laughing, discussing, arguing our views on what was to be done. We swam every day in the Lac during a particularly hot summer. We got sprung enjoying The Godfather I, II and III and made poor excuses. We once drank a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream in a criminally short amount of time. We went to Rome one weekend and just walked until we needed more wine and food. We did the same thing in Paris. We enjoyed sitting with Madeline and Dimity under linden trees in rural France. We went to a lot of WILPF meetings, one in Costa Rica where we saw a sloth up high in a tree top chair lift. Observing her with her grandchildren was a gift because she really had fun with them, galavanting, gregarious fun.

We organised meetings against NATO in Budapest, for nuclear disarmament all over the place, wrote statements on the middle east, negotiating with angry angry women to try to find the right form of words.  We giggled and giggled with Eleonore in Osnabruck when Edith wrote a speech in German that was so old fashioned it was like an English speaker talking about NATO expansion in Shakespearean iambic pentameter.  There are many times like this that I will always cherish.

She was never a queen bee but always a worker bee, doing the next thing that needed doing, whether it was leading, writing, cooking, faxing, cleaning; lots of invisible work, listening work, care work. She did a lot of it. She was fascinated with technology and always had a great computer. Her eyesight deteriorated but she read and wrote until very recently. Her early life was hard but healthy. She was fit and strong also from all the skiing and running she and Cam did. She had great legs that people would comment on into her 70s! She will be missed and missed and missed.

Rest in Power dear, dear friend.