Jackie Campbell and I met last year on the telephone, when she called Battenkill Books (I work there on Saturday’s as Recommender-In-Chief much of the year) and she asked me for some book recommendations. She told me she was coping with a cold Minnesota winter and needed some things to read, she explained in the course of things that her husband Richard had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s when he was 55, and one of her parents also had the disease, she wanted to learn more about it.

I told her I didn’t want to recommend books about Alzheimer’s – perhaps she needed something different to read in that cold winter – and instead suggested some novels and non-fiction books.We clicked right away, we had the same taste in books and looked at life in much the same way. We became friends and I am batting 1,000 per cent on my suggestions with her.

Jackie is beloved at the bookstore, she calls often, she is a voracious reader. She came to one of the Bedlam Farm Open Houses, insisting that she help prepare things,  and I sensed she would be uncomfortable any other way. I was struck by her reserve, her dignity and also by a quiet sadness and resolve. She joined the Open Group At Bedlam Farm, a wondrous incubator for creative people and began a blog, she called it the Quilt Of Missing Memories, I saw right away that Jackie is a natural writer, she says so much in so few words and she says it eloquently. Jackie wrote a beautiful and wrenching piece on Thanksgiving about having a date with the man she loved and shared a life with at his nursing home, and how beautiful it was, even though he no longer recognized her or knew who she was.

A few days before Christmas, Jackie wrote that Richard was dying, and was not expected to live more than a few days. She wrote this morning that Richard died last night, surrounded by his family, a gentle Golden Retriever therapy dog and some hospice singers. “I’m at peace,” she wrote.

In a culture where people complain bitterly when their overnight packages are delayed by weather, Jackie has never complained  about the sickness or loss of her husband. She had no lament to offer about his death or of the great overturning of her life by his illness. She has not turned her sadness into a struggle story, does not pity herself or ask pity from others. Richard is at peace, she wrote, and so is she and her daughter. In her loss, Jackie becomes an unwitting prophet and teacher, she shows us what it means to be a human being.

I have come to see that acceptance is one of the most difficult things in life to understand and embrace. We live in fear and denial of so many things, perhaps death most of all. So it is always a shock to us when it occurs.  Jackie reinforces my lessons of hospice work. Death is almost always sad, but not only that. It offers us the chance for grace and acceptance, for dignity and true compassion. We never understand more about life than we are confronted with the loss of it.

Death and life are not opposite things, they are both part of the same thing and acceptance of one is an embrace of the other.

To life, Jackie, to life. In your peace is a gift to anyone with a heart, the path to awareness and peace for all of us. This is, after all, what it means to be a human being, the only species on the earth with a heart like yours.