Jess

This was the eulogy I wrote - read by my friend Frances because, well, there was no way I would have made it through. 

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There is so much to say about Jessica I hardly know where to start. Everyone who has been in touch has said much the same: that she was warm, loving, kind, funny, and her smile lit up the whole room. But above all else, she was a teacher.

 

She often said that anything could be interesting when looked at the right way, and she loved nothing more than finding the interesting part of something and then explaining it to others. She loved mathematics – geometry, most of all – and thought about the world through that lens the most. Every so often, she would think of a new way of thinking about a thing from a geometric viewpoint and she would enthusiastically explain this to anyone willing to listen. She had a knack for taking complicated ideas and boiling them down to a few simple concepts, even if it was something she had only just learned herself. And she loved to share her knowledge and understanding with everyone.

 

This was reflected most obviously in her work as a lecturer. She poured hours into preparing materials for the courses she ran, and worked hard on adapting and improving the courses over time so that she rarely ran the same lecture series twice. She always had time for her students – in person and even replying to emails from her phone in the evening, so much so that her phone started changing “autocorrect” to “autocorrelation”. Naturally, she embraced this and started blaming “autocorrelation” for incorrect words in her texts.

 

But it wasn't only her students who benefited from Jess's teaching. She helped colleagues and acquaintances with setting up spreadsheets, analysing statistics and presenting data in an attractive and informative manner.  She inspired and mentored several trans people through coming out, even those she barely knew, just by providing a positive example and someone to talk to. She explained board and card games to her friends and family, absorbing the rules from one quick read-through and talking everyone through their first game. She helped several people choose and build D&D characters – stripping away the sometimes overwhelming wealth of options and getting to the core of what people want to play and picking out something they will enjoy.

 

She taught her son to cook, to play video games, to cut the grass, to double check his sums, to always be nice to the admin staff, to offer a cup of tea to anyone visiting the home and to never be afraid to ask a question. She taught me that it was ok to be feminine and that it was ok not to be, that true bravery is when you are scared but do the thing anyway, and that when there is nothing else you can do for someone, you can at least offer a hug.

 

However, the greatest lesson, she taught everyone she met, was to be kind, and to accept and love one another. She didn't teach this consciously, lecturing to anyone or laying down moral codes, but simply in the way she acted, the way she treated other people, and by unapologetically being herself - her geeky, silly, trans, lesbian self – and making us love her just the way she was.