Notice

Jerry mailed and emailed this notice in late November 2011.

Dear Family and Friends,
As some of you will already have heard Grace — Grace Wong Kurtz — sadly — heartbreakingly for me and many of us — is no longer alive.
One friend said “Grace was the kindest, warmest and strongest person I’ve ever met.”
Another said “Grace is one of those special people you can never forget. She is smart, talented, vivacious, caring and, yes, she is also obstinate…”

People.
Her openness and generosity and interest in others seemed to have no limit, even while a string of chemos fought with her spreading disease. Others inevitably responded to the genuineness of her attention.
Trained in her native Singapore to distrust and tread carefully, Grace’s built-in warmth and kindness could melt the densest iceberg. In the hospital in July she managed to change a military-style nurse — whose shift, as far as I was concerned, couldn’t end too soon— into a kind of soft and intimate friend.
In our 20 years together Grace was a loving, considerate and devoted wife and, though certainly no pushover, a lively and all-around terrific companion.
It often seemed that we were somehow “created for each other,” to revolutionize and enhance each other’s lives, as though “larger forces” had insisted to crush every obstacle and bring us together and now won’t let what happened be forgotten. When she wanted to give — and to me this seemed continual and in every way conceivable — it wasn’t an act of politeness or any kind of act; it was authentic and came from the depth of her being. Perhaps hardest of all to do without.
Grace was deeply involved with family, and derived great satisfaction and joy from the achievements and companionship of her 3 beloved children, Marcus, Melisa and Marianne, and from their selection of spouses/partners Marnae, Ed and Stig, and from playing with her grandchildren Nevaeh and Mitchell and seeing them grow.
Her recent goal was to be able to meet with Melisa and Ed’s first child Ari, who was to be born October 25, and whom she’d long dreamed of nurturing. But she’d run out of days.
She also devoted considerable effort to keeping in touch with — and in some cases tracking down — her and my aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces, cousins and non-specifiable relations.
She was funny and known for her laugh till the end. She laughed easily, often and fully. My personal theory is that she might have saved several people from cancer’s deadly grip — this cancer had to work so hard to finally silence the laugh that mocked its dirty work that, like an exhausted animal it had to slink back to the cave to nurse itself and try to rebuild its ugly strength.

Resilience & travel.
Her resilence was legendary and inspired many: 8 days after emergency pericardial surgery last year she was on the plane for a 2-week trip to the Middle East.
More than one friend was “in awe of her energy and perseverance and lively spirit.” Her “favorite son-in-law” Ed was inspired to complete his leg of the Tour de France when the rain and 34°F. weather on Alpe d’huez caused 4,500 of his 6,300 co-entrants to abandon the race.
Well, anyone who knew Grace knew that she loved to travel. Still, many were flabbergasted time and again to see how, after a setback or a miserable round of chemo, she rallied herself and flew to some unacquainted district of the planet. Travel was absolutely nurturing to her, and as long as she could walk, she could fly — and she wasn’t about to let any old cancer tell her what she could or couldn’t do, or who she was.
In 2009 she and I had just begun a planned year in an unknown town in southern Italy when overwhelming pain and a metastasis to the lung lining drove her to a 4-day sojourn in a provincial hospital — then home after only 2 weeks. Nevertheless, we made it back to our Italian town — briefly — this past April.

Achievements & Activities. 
On top of her extraordinary human qualities, Grace was brilliant and full of insight, with down-to-earth business sense and judgment that cut to the core. She could be both practical and visionary. She earned a Ph.D. in Microbiology and traveled throughout Asia carrying out training on disease-detecting instruments and giving lectures on specialized subjects in Surabaya, Bandung, Cebu, Sarawak, Brunei, Kuala Lumpur, Kunming and Beijing. She also held a Master’s in medical technology and acquired a first-hand grasp of what patients were thinking about and what they really needed, working and later training others at labs and hospitals throughout Northern California and East Asia.
Besides English she spoke Mandarin, Hokkien, Cantonese, Malay and Teochew, and recently some Italian and Spanish.
She had a thousand interests, a thousand skills, a bursting creativity. She was well-known for her painting, particularly landscapes and waterscapes, many inspired by our travels. Always her preference was to be at the place, outdoors.
She also loved to garden, to talk on the phone, to make short or long car trips, to hike in the woods and mountains, and even to walk and buy groceries and chat with strangers on Clement Street. She enjoyed cooking and was known for her Singapore dishes like chili crab. Eating excellently — and healthfully if possible — was important to her. As regularly as she could manage she did yoga, tai chi, Pilates, walking and other exercises.
In renovating our house and designing the garden over the last year or two she routinely overruled the architects and landscapers with magnificent results. You could say she was a versatile and dynamic woman.
No stranger to hospice, she was the chief caregiver for her first husband Tom, who lived a year and a half after brain tumor surgery. She also cared for her mother for more than 20 years.
She was active in the Church of Latter-Day Saints, especially in the Chinese Branch. She worked with the Interfaith Council and gave lectures to generate interest in genealogy for those with a Chinese background.