My beautiful wife Sarah passed away on the 27th June 2024 after a long fight with cancer since July 2009. She fought back on 3 occasions but the disease eventually became too much.
I thought the best way of remembering Sarah here was with the Eulogy that I read at her funeral.
– Christopher Newton, Managing Director
I first met Sarah in January 1996.
We had both by chance been invited to a dinner dance organised by the legal fraternity in Retford. The table where I thought I was sitting was full and I went to find another seat. I sat next to Sarah.
She looked incredibly beautiful. I even danced with her, I was that keen and at the end of the evening I plucked up the courage to ask for her number.
Our first date was at Wentbridge House hotel, half way between us and it went really well until she nearly dumped me at the end of it, thinking wrongly that because of our age difference we would want different things in life. We didn’t.
We enjoyed dating until we went on a big holiday to Kenya in the September of that year, where I proposed in the Tsavo East Game Reserve, in a tree house style lodge, overlooking a pool of elephants drinking in the water.
“Are you sure, have you thought about this” she said. You bet.
Wedding preparations were prompt and we married in the following January, about 1 year after we first met. That was 27 years ago. William arrived that May and Lizzie the following Sept. We moved house and I moved jobs. Cramming in life.
She loves her family. Will and Lizzie are everything to her. She loves her animals. Always has done. I’m confident that I made the top 5. She was a great cook, always put in a lot of thought and effort.
A lot of you have told me that you thought she was very chic, always wearing lovely clothes. A few of you have also said that she always gave sound advice when asked.
Her friends were very important to her. She always said that to have a good friend you needed to be a good friend. She had very good friendships, I see lifelong friends, people she was at school with, worked with, local friends and more recent but still very special friends who we met in Grasmere.
She was a good home maker, ensuring that we lived in a beautiful home. We are on our third home in Whixley and I’m sure we’re close to being accepted as locals.
We enjoyed fabulous trips as a family from which we have many happy memories. From our camping trips to France and our old Mondeo blowing up in Provence, to ordering lobster on the Grand Canal in Venice not realising that the price was per ounce, African adventures and our favourite family holidays to Mallorca.
We also developed a love for the Lake District where we spent a lot of happy times. Walking in the Lakes together was what Sarah I enjoyed for a number of years. Up the fells with a picnic in our rucksack, flask of coffee and a kit kat.
The one thing that I remember about Sarah was her passion for art and crafts. She should have done more with this passion. She dragged me around enough galleries for me to know that her work could easily have been for sale in galleries. She loved painting with oils, acrylics and mixed media, going away for weekends painting plein air and attending various classes when she could find them. We will treasure her paintings and sketchbooks. She always recalled her art teacher at school saying if you don’t go to art school I’m going to chop your arms off.
She was a fighter. We all know this and how well she fought for so long. She talked of happy memories growing up with her Mum, Dad, Sister and Grandpa. Time with her two nieces.
When I met her she was a solicitor working for the NHS defending medical negligence claims. Sarah was a massive support to me, backing me without hesitation when I said I wanted to leave my partnership and start our own business. Let’s do it, she said. No small thing with a mortgage and 2 young children.
She subsequently played a key part in the growth of our business working as part of the management team. Work colleagues have spoken about how they enjoyed working with her, how patient and understanding she could be, and how they had a laugh together. She had a strong sense of female equality, believed in the sisterhood and had interesting stories to tell about her time and experience working as a young female solicitor in the legal profession.
Looking back, we have had a fantastic life together. I can’t believe that I’m unable to see her and talk to her. I bet none of you have seen her Morecombe and Wise impersonation. Our sense of loss is hard to accept and at times is overwhelming.
Overall she was a lovely, decent, strong, independent and beautiful woman.
I’m going to end with a couple of quotes.
“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard” – Winnie the Pooh.
What I don’t like about that is saying goodbye – so here is another.
“No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away, until the clock wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life is only the core of their actual existence.” – Terry Pratchett
If you would like to leave your comments with your memory of Sarah please do so below.