More about Jess Jacobs, who died on Saturday–also known as #UnicornJess. (That link will take you to the twitter memorial on Sunday night, but also check out remembrances from Ted Eytan & Carly Medosch). Today I’m re-running a beautiful, and very personal piece (on Medium) from her friend Whitney Bowman-Zatzkin who was a key patient advocate for Jess in Washington DC–Matthew Holt
I attended a walking tour once where the guide was going on about Von Gogh’s quest to paint yellow in the most yellowy of yellow ways. Even NIH articles talk about it. Theories abound.
As we walked, I gained an appreciation for the lengths this guy went to on his quest for a single portrait of yellowy yellowness. I remember the guide saying something like:
“Van Gogh sought his whole career to paint in a way that demonstrated how yellow made him feel.”
The tour was years ago but that line stuck with me. Has anything ever trapped you like that? Like a quest to craft a brushstroke for how something made you feel?
My treasured friend Jess Jacobs died this weekend. She flooded my life with laughter and jokes, expanding what I knew in what it is to love a friend in the very best of ways.
Jess and I met in a classroom at Georgetown where she swiftly passed out in front of me when I returned for the final pitches of my first-ever code-a-thon. Later she’d tell of waking up to a blur of people and a certain bow tie being in focus.
Shortly thereafter, she fainted in front of me again and I soon learned how to trust a new friend and be there for her more than I ever had before. That pattern continued throughout my whole friendship with Jess. She gifted me a new definition of trust and capability.
Some of the scariest words I’ve ever known in health care existed in Jess’ medical profile, yet she was always the outlier redefining what it meant to have those diagnoses.Continue reading…
