The dresses were still there

Tracey Palmer had a shop’s worth of clothes left when she died. Upmarket pre-loved pieces she had already chosen for other people, from the online business she ran in Catterick. Cancer arrived in the spring. She died in July, aged 61, three months after the diagnosis, at St Teresa’s Hospice in Darlington.

Her sister Emma Martin-Law, their parents Christine and Toby, friends, and volunteers from the hospice laid out her remaining stock on Saturday 29 August in Booth Memorial Hall, on the high street in Catterick Village. They called the day St Teresa’s for Tracey. Joe Willis reported for Richmondshire Today that it raised almost £2,000 for the hospice that had looked after her in her last weeks.

Emma said the hospice fundraising team had helped. Her fiancé Craig baked cakes. The Village Café in Catterick sent more. People came to browse. They left with something from her shop.

“Tracey would have been immensely proud of what her family, friends and the local community achieved,” Emma told Willis. “It was a wonderful opportunity to honour her memory and give something back to the hospice that cared for her with such compassion in her final weeks.”

That is a particular kind of in-memory fundraising. Not a sponsored distance. The work she had already done, hanging on rails and still priced, hers in the way a person’s taste is theirs.

Christine, Tracey’s mother, spoke about the hospice. “I cannot find words to fully describe the wonderful care at St Teresa’s she received during the last weeks of her life. Our family was looked after with such kindness. Nothing was too much trouble.”

St Teresa’s is in its fortieth year. It began as a small home-care volunteer team and now looks after people across Darlington, North Yorkshire and South Durham, including hospice at home and an inpatient unit with en-suite rooms. Family support continues into bereavement. Its Quality Account for 2024-25 says it helps over 1,200 people a year, and that it has a hand in 18 per cent of deaths in Darlington. Core care is free to patients and families.

The money for that comes, mostly, from the same community that filled the hall. The hospice says it costs over £3 million a year to run, and that the majority arrives through fundraising, gifts in wills, and the shops. Nicola Myers, the chief executive, told the Northern Echo that around 70 per cent of running costs are covered by charitable donations. A lot of hospice days get paid for this way: a village hall, and a rail of clothes somebody loved.

Richmond and Northallerton MP Rishi Sunak came, which is how a village sale became a headline with a former prime minister in the photograph. He called it a way of giving something back. The family already remember her. They sold what she had left so the place that had been kind to them could be kind to someone else.