My wife Georgina Towers, who has died aged 43 from a brain tumour, was an art psychotherapist and a “people person”; she was also renowned for her advocacy of human rights.
She volunteered for Freedom from Torture, where she was humbled by its work with survivors; she felt inspired to raise funds for the charity and completed the Dublin marathon and various triathlon events. She was a keen wild swimmer and even completed the length of Wastwater in the Lake District a few months after her second brain surgery.
Born in Dublin, Georgina was the daughter of Jill (nee Hollwey), a psychotherapist and author, and John Brierley, a chartered surveyor and author of guide books. The family moved to live in the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland in 1987. She was proud of her Irish heritage, and often returned to visit friends, but she also embraced every aspect of life in Findhorn, from its spirituality to the wild beauty of the natural surroundings.
She went to the Findhorn Steiner school, then to Pilmuir primary school and Forres academy. She later studied childhood and the arts at Durham University in the early 2000s, and completed a master’s in art therapy at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. This enabled her to help people who had experienced traumatic events to express complex thoughts and feelings through making art – Georgina was a talented potter. She also loved to learn and travelled to other countries to investigate different approaches to therapy, notably the Kitezh community in Russia and the Kyaka II refugee settlement in western Uganda, where she made many friends.
We met in 2002, at a party in a cave in the Forest of Dean – I was then teaching at an outdoor activity centre in Symonds Yat, in the Wye valley, and Georgina was visiting her brother, who was also an instructor there. We moved to Kendal, Cumbria, in 2009 when Georgina started work for the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service in Lancaster and Morecambe; we married in 2012.
Georgina was always completely engaged in the here and now, rarely planning for the future. She continued to indulge her passion for outdoor adventures and remained dedicated to working creatively with various client groups, dividing her time between the NHS, charities and residential children’s homes. Her spontaneity was infectious and she had a prodigious ability to squeeze as many experiences as possible into the time available.
She is survived by me and our daughter, Maya, her mother, Jill, and her siblings, Ben and Gemma.
