Sister’s tribute to tragic Tara: She found life just too hard
TRAGIC socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson never realised ‘just being you was enough’, her sister said yesterday.
Santa Montefiore paid tribute to ‘my darling Tara’ during a funeral service attended by relatives and friends from the world of pop music and entertainment.
It was held at the tiny All Saints’ Church in Dummer, Hampshire, where Miss Palmer-Tomkinson grew up on her family’s farm.
Miss Palmer-Tomkinson, a close friend of the Royal Family, died aged 45 earlier this month at her London flat of a perforated stomach ulcer.
The congregation included friends Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Duncan James
from boy band Blue and actor Rupert Everett. The cover of the order of service bore a photograph of a youthful Miss Palmer-Tomkinson playing with one of her dogs and the words ‘music, laughter, friends, couture’. Mrs Montefiore, 47, wife of the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, said: ‘I hope you’re aware of all the lovely things people have written about you, and that you are touched, because you never believed you lit up a room or made people feel special, but you did. You really did.
‘I hope that you are resting, because you found life hard and now it is done.
‘My beloved sister, I don’t think you realized that success is never about the big things, but about the small things, and that just being you was enough.’
Mrs Montefiore, a novelist, said she hoped the angels would wrap their wings around her sister ‘because, although you shrank from embraces in life, you need to be hugged’.