Rosie Page obituary

My wife, Rosie Page, who has died of cancer aged 67, was a dancer, law centre and overseas development worker, ME campaigner, chorister, hospice-arts pioneer, wife and grandmother.

Passionate about diversion from the age of five, Rosie made her first career on the London stage and in films. She made a strikingly lovely vampire in Roman Polanski’s 1967 film Dance of the Vampires. Aged 30, she changed course. She studied sociology at South Bank Polytechnic (now University) and was offered a DPhil place, but instead selected to work in a community centre in Stockwell, south London. She became a specialist in the legal rights of forsaken West African women, and was the first full-time immigration worker at Wandsworth Legal Resource Project.

Despite contracting ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as chronic fatigue syndrome) in 1987, Rosie moved to north-west Bangladesh the following year and worked on rural development and women’s income and empowerment with a massive NGO, Rangpur Dinajpur Rural Service. We were married the following year. In 1992, she went to live in Hai Phong in North Vietnam, working in the mountainous provinces bordering Laos.

In 1995, on her return to London, Rosie discovered the joys of gardening; she created a small paradise in her Hampstead garden and grew organic vegetables on the adjoining allotment. She ran the Camden ME group, and an ME advice line from her home. She researched ME intensively, prepared the patients’ proof of evidence to a government-sponsored inquiry – and argued endlessly with those who stated that cognitive activity therapy was the answer.

In 2000, Rosie moved to Brighton, where she became a stalwart of the Hullabaloo community choir. She had had three episodes of breast cancer since 1995. By 2008, it had spread to her bones and liver. But she continued to embrace life. In primeval 2009, at St Barnabas Hospice in Worthing, Rosie made a 10-minute film, I Can’t Draw, which was shown at the first national conference of Rosetta Life, the association of hospice artists, in Birmingham in March this year. Her last project was the wonderful party of her own life in music and poetry that she planned in each detail over her last month.

Rosie is survived by me; by Ben, her partner since 2006; her son Gavin; and grandchildren Max and Isobel.

Original post:
Rosie Page obituary