Excerpts from the funeral service held at Watermead Crematorium, Aylesbury…

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Sue Vincent, 14th September 1958 – 29th March 2021

‘We prepare to receive one whose life has been well lived…’

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Procession entry music: ‘Vincent’, Don Maclean…

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The best of times, the worst of times…

Sue was born in Yorkshire in 1958, into a family that was about as spiritually eclectic as you can get. The various members were Jewish / Buddhist / Methodist (with High Church for special occasions), with one grandfather who taught her very early about the Qabalistic Tree of Life, the other a Spiritualist minister, and one grandmother a noted psychic, like her mother before her. She attended the Zion Baptist Sunday School with Hindu and Moslem friends…

A better culture for one who was destined to serve as a Priestess of the Western Magical Tradition could hardly be imagined…

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Sue’s first marriage, it seems, was one of convenience, for her mother.

It didn’t last long, and soon after Sue moved to France to become a Nanny.

Here, Sue describes her second husband, Joel…

“We met in the most romantic circumstances in Corsica… Shooting stars, mimosa, a perfect moon… and the saxophone playing ‘Just the way you are’ as we danced under the stars…

I never expected to see him again. We were both far from home… he a wandering musician, I a nanny in Paris. One of those brief, romantic interludes that sometimes grace a moment in time.

But fate took a hand… we met again, had dinner, talked, and talked. But still, once I had returned to Paris I filed him away as a beautiful memory. But a postcard arrived from Nice.  Then the phone rang… and we met in Paris.

He wrote Le Reveil for me then. It was the first song he had written. No one had ever written a song for me before. I would stay overnight and travel back home in time for breakfast Monday morning. The days were filled with music, lunacy, laughter, and love, la vie Bohème lived in good earnest.

We married a few months later and I moved to Vichy, and eventually into a tiny doll’s house of a place, so small even I could touch the beams in the ceiling…

Our first son, Nick was born the next March. Three years later his brother, Alex, followed, but we were living in England by then… Joel’s music was not understood, he had no work, depression set in, and although… because… I loved him, I sent him back to France.”

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Raising two small sons alone in 1980’s Britain cannot have been easy…

Sue eventually met Bernard who provided both stability and support for her young family.

Unfortunately, soon after, Bernard contracted bladder cancer, and although he lived on for another ten years with the condition, it was with Sue as his carer.

It was not to be Sue’s only brush with cancer or life as a carer…

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In 2009 with Sue now a well-paid businesswoman… Fate’s knife twisted again. Her eldest son Nick was randomly attacked in a Bournemouth alleyway and suffered horrendous brain injuries. With the medical authorities calling it murder and against all medical advice, Sue refused to turn off the life support, took Nick home, and became his full-time carer.

It is a testament to both Sue and Nick’s tenacity, strength, resolve, and love for each other, and for life, that Nick is here with us today.

Through Sue’s daily blog chronicling Nick’s recovery, Nick has become as much of an inspiration to people as his mother…

By this time Sue had again taken up her interest in esotericism and was a member of the Magical School, Servants of the Light.

The help of the people at that time involved with running the school, in Nick’s recovery, should also not be overlooked or underestimated…

Continue reading at France & Vincent