A few months ago I wrote about Lucy Vodden (née O’Donnell), the real Lucy who inspired the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” On Tuesday, September 22, 2009, her death was announced by St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, where she had been treated for lupus for more than five years. She was 46-years old.

A spokeswoman for Julian Lennon and his mother, Cynthia Lennon, said they were “shocked and saddened” by Vodden’s death.

Angie Davidson, a lupus sufferer who is campaign director of the St. Thomas’ Lupus Trust, said Vodden was “a real fighter” who had worked behind the scenes to support efforts to combat the disease.

“It’s so sad that she has finally lost the battle she fought so bravely for so long,” said Davidson. She said everyone at the Louise Coote Lupus Unit was shocked by her passing.

The original sketch, whereabouts unknown

The story of the little blond girl with “kaleidoscope eyes” began with Julian Lennon’s watercolor sketch. Lucy O’Donnell was 4 years old when Julian painted the picture of her surrounded with stars and squiggles and took it home to show his parents.

“It’s Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” Julian Lennon told his father, inspiring one of the Beatles’ most enigmatic songs and of course, the rest is history.

Two years ago, Vodden told BBC radio:

I remember Julian and I both doing pictures on a double-sided easel, throwing paint at each other, much to the horror of the classroom attendant… Julian had painted a picture and on that particular day his father turned up with the chauffeur to pick him up from school.

The former classmates resumed their friendship recently after Lennon, who lives in France, heard she was ill. “I’ve been able to help out a bit,” he said earlier this year. “I was so upset to hear what had happened.”

Vodden grew up with a love for children, unfortunately, illness prevented her having her own. She studied nursery nursing and worked with special needs children, running a specialist nanny agency until she began to suffer from the autoimmune diseases psoriasis and lupus in her thirties.

She married her childhood sweetheart, Ross Vodden, in 1996. Julian Lennon, whom she had seen only once since their nursery days, sent a note to the wedding.

The Voddens were two days into their first holiday in eight years when Lucy developed an infection and was taken to the hospital in King’s Lynn, where she died last Tuesday with her husband and family at her bedside, including her father, the writer and doctor Michael O’Donnell. Her elder sister, Fran, said: “She had been so excited about the holiday that she drove herself half the way there, which is incredible, but she got the infection and with no immune system there was absolutely no chance of her beating it at all. She is utterly irreplaceable in my life and I have a nine-year-old son who thinks his life is over without her in it. I have had hundreds of e-mails and every single one says they all remember her smiling and laughing.”