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In memory of

Christine Jacob

Aldan, PA

December 25, 1948 - May 1, 2018

Dec 25, 1948 - May 1, 2018

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Christine Jacob, born December 25, 1948, passed away on May 1, 2018, after waiting for the lilacs to bloom - and refusing well into the final days of her life to respond to anyone who called her Mary, her legal first name.

A woman of untold talents, Christine lived many lives. She came to the United States - the story goes - as one of the first children to fly unaccompanied on an Argentine airline. She claimed to have being called Sloopy, as in the song “Hang On, Sloopy” so dubbed from attempts to sneak back into her dorm room at Pacific University. In the 1960s, she saw Bob Dylan in the Hollywood Bowl; she knew of Billy Joel when he was playing piano bars in Los Angeles. Whether it was moderating political forums, baking outrageously deliciously holiday cookies or the Thanksgiving that ruled all Thanksgivings, she mastered all she touched.

She was a hippie who learned to eat sushi in Los Angeles. She filled her walls with art, some of it by her own hand; she filled her bookshelves to the bursting point with poetry, novels and history. Her talents in knitting were unsurpassed, and many of her family and friends have warm things for the winter thanks to her hands.

She was dark-haired and had beautiful brown eyes, and bore two redhead kids, enduring years of questions about whether they were truly hers due to the apparent lack of family resemblance. We were and we are. She taught her kids to love the Rolling Stones and Motown, to make things from scratch, to read and to question authority, about museums and great poets and writers, and how to make coffee very early in our lives. In fact, she brilliantly engineered it so we raced to see who could be the first to bring her coffee before she went to work.

Christine lived in New York City, Whittier and Los Angeles, California, before moving to Rhode Island with her family in 1980. They lived in Newport, Rhode Island until 2001. There, she was active in the League of Women Voters and the National Organization for Women – Rhode Island Chapter, taking her kids poll-running and bringing them on buses to attend protests. Returning to the workplace in the mid-1980s, she worked in insurance, then in the small business banking and mortgage divisions at Fleet Bank and Bank of America. She joined the local Rotary Club at a time when not many women were members. She encouraged her daughter’s friends to play Little League in the 1980s, and never lost her competitive spirit and sense of striving forward. Just prior to being diagnosed suddenly with glioblastoma in December 2017, one of her final acts was to raise money for Planned Parenthood on Facebook. For her entire life, she hated phony people and the patriarchy. She taught her daughter about feminism; she taught her son to respect women.

In later years, she lived and worked in Riverside, California, before retiring to Aldan, PA to be closer to her son. She is a graduate of Whittier (CA) High School, and studied sociology at Pacific University. She is predeceased by her father, John Alegre and her ex-husband, Paul Jacob. She is survived by her mother, Rosalie Alegre, her brother Edward Alegre (Glenda) her two children, Joanna Jacob (Ian L. Pritchard), and Andrew Jacob (Dana), family members in California, friends from all over the nation, and her fellow knitting crew from the Delaware County Library, Primos Branch. She loved her granddaughter Amy the most.

The family would like to thank her neurosurgeon, Dr. Henry Kesler; the Mercy Fitzgerald ICU nurses on duty during Christmas and New Year’s 2017; the entire staff at PowerBack Rehabilitation on Lombard Street; Sandra Gaston, without whose assistance and care we could not have made it through those final weeks, Amanda from Penn Caring Way; and Eleanor Miller and Dr. Stephen Bagley of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, who brought dignity to her when others could not.

A Celebration of Life luncheon will be held Saturday, June 16, 2018 at Trattoria Giuseppe, 4799 West Chester Pike, Newtown Square, from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m. Internment and other arrangements are private. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be either directed to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, or to the Christine Jacob Memorial Fund created to honor her memory with future gifts to youth programs and scholarship: https://www.gofundme.com/chri….

She leaves a giant hole in our lives, though her stubborn nature and tenacity is something we have inherited and hope to honor in the years ahead. Yes, she made us crazy and she was sometimes just Christine (Mom) being Christine (Mom). But no one can, nor will they ever, take her place.

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