The sister of a Royston woman who died in a car crash said the medical secretary would have been ‘phenomenally proud’ of her partner and step-daughter for going ahead with a charity walk she had planned with them.
Emily Burgess, who is better-known to people in the town under her maiden name of Bedford, was killed when her car collided with a bus near Macclesfield just three days before she was due to take part in the Alzheimer’s Society Memory Walk in Liverpool.
She had signed up for the walk as her grandmother and aunts had suffered from the disease.
The 34-year-old’s brave fiancé Martin Gunther, a member of the Royston Runners before the couple moved to Cheshire in 2012, completed the walk in her memory with his six-year-old daughter Zoe.
Zoe carried her stepmother’s favourite bears in her rucksack and flowers in her hand, and the pair walked with an extra T-shirt in her memory.
Emily’s sister Roddy Bedford described their courage as ‘extraordinary’. She said: “We were saying to Martin, ‘you don’t have to do it.’
“Emily was a very good step-mother. She had been with Martin since Zoe was nine months old.
“My sister was silly but sensible, irreverent yet respectful, childish but mature beyond her years.
“She was very in tune with humanity, she had a real sense of fairness.
“She was always thinking of others. She got people a card for every occasion, she never forgot.”
Emily went to school at Studlands Rise, Greneway and Meridian. She worked at the Priory Cinema in her teens before embarking on a career with the NHS. Before leaving the area, she had worked at Cambridge’s Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
Martin said: “I, and the whole family, are very proud of my little girl for this. Her school even got her up to talk about it and they gave her a certificate for kindness. It was a great event, and beautiful day – Emily was shining down on us.”
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The funeral will take place at 1pm tomorrow at Cambridge City Crematorium in Huntingdon Road.
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