She did what any skilled and trained professional would do, she investigated and queried and counseled and listened. And she volunteered a great deal of her time to HIV-related support groups and organizations to further learn of the illness. In the process, she became a major force in motivating other dietitians to follow her lead and share their knowledge. There was little information specific to HIV disease and nutrition at the time. Indeed, many health care professionals were as bewildered by the infection as were the patients trying to endure it. And progress was further halted by phobias and bias.

Jennifer would go on to co-found "hotline" resources and Nutrition Forum groups as early as 1987 for AIDS Project Los Angeles. For the next seven years, she would volunteer her time to host support groups at the Los Angeles Center for Living and assist Project Angel Food with menu selections and home-delivered meals. She would make the time to present bi-monthly lectures on nutrition and HIV/AIDS to confused and frightened newly-diagnosed HIV patients. Her private practice grew and flourished, and her counseling sessions could run for hours. A client left with a renewed sense of hope and direction, of "empowerment". He also left with money in his pocket to buy food and vitamins because she rarely charged individuals for her time whose bank accounts were as ravaged by the virus as were their T-cells.

If Jennifer could have made it to a podium and microphone before millions of people to shout out, "Hey, malnutrition is claiming lives, what are we doing about nourishing the body while fighting the virus?" she would have done it. Instead, she found a way to reach just as many through tireless lectures all over the country. It has been said by Mother Teresa that it is less reasonable to try to do one grand charitable act than to perform many smaller charitable acts reaching as many people but more intimately. Such was Jennifer's style, to reach the masses in smaller numbers with caring, with humility, and with well-founded information.

Of all her accomplishments, however, her greatest joy and gift to her patients was her ability to write it all down in a monthly column in this Newsletter. From 1993, she authored dozens of timely features on hot nutrition topics under the title "Nutrition Power," appropriately titled to empower her readers to make changes and reap the immediate benefits. And Jennifer told it like it was. Any other clinically trained dietitian adhering to strict boundaries of professionalism would have titled an article about diarrhea management, "Symptom Management, Consequences of Secretory Diarrhea". (This author would have titled it that way.) But Jennifer would title it "Shit Happens!" And a few years later, after the introduction of protease inhibitors, she would title a follow-up feature "Shit (Still) Happens!"

She spiced her prose with humor and with cynicism, and she wrote as she talked. She also wrote as she felt. When your life is controlled by being able to make it to a bathroom, if at all, and the mortification and indignity if you don't, then life quite frankly is the shits. Her concern was not so much the effect of a virus on intestinal lymph and mucosal cells as it was on the patient who has to live with this and how he chooses to prevent malnutrition. She was not out to impress her clients, she simply wanted them to trust her.

I for one trusted her with my friendship. I was one of those many colleagues who would become an AIDS-specialist because of her contagious inspiration, her generous spirit, and her undying hope. We cannot choose how we die or when we die, but we can choose how we live. Jennifer lived to the fullest and gave so freely of herself and I was so proud to be a dietitian if those of my profession were models of her. She leaves behind a loving husband Ken, who was her soulmate and partner in life. Some people never find in a minute's passing the love she had with her husband of 12 years. I think perhaps because she was so open with her own vulnerabilities, she was capable of profound relationships. I know her patients respected her greatly for this, particularly as a health professional. Harboring major back pain for so many years, she was not unlike her HIV clients, having to endure "good" or "pain" days with a constant reliance on medication to manage, but to look at her one would never know the depth of her affliction.

She leaves us unexpectedly and much too soon with no time for good-byes. I will miss my friend greatly, and for those of you who did not know her, if you are reading this column, she was your loyal friend too.