“This was not the defining moment in my sister’s life,” said Kathy Knierim, the sister of Jessica White.

Kathy, her mother Sheryl Johnson, and Jessica’s aunt Karen Greer graciously shared their time and stories of the 32-year-old mother of three whose unforeseen death on Wednesday has left not just her family and friends, but her entire community reeling.

Jessie was a resident of Chandlers Valley for the past 12 years, said her mother Sheryl. But Jessie had been born on October 10, 1984, in Easton, Md.

Maryland, her sister Kathy remembers, stayed in her blood no matter how long she stayed away.

“I remember she loved crabs,” Kathy said, the same way she said everything on Saturday, through a thick combination of tears and laughter.

“Oh my God, she loved crabs. I remember coming up one time and I had to bring, like, four pounds of crab meat with me,” Kathy said. “And we sat at her table and we just had to make these two huge trays of crab dip. And she ate it,” Kathy laughs. “She ate that dip for days and days.”

Also like all the stories the three women told, each memory was punctuated by a parturient break. The sound of Jessie’s three children playing at the table across the aisle from the corner booth, where we sat tucked away in the hotel dining room, was sometimes the only thing to be heard as all three laughed, and cried, and quietly savored the memories they had to bear of the woman who has touched so many lives.

“Jessie is the least most likely,” said her mother, to have been a part of the incident that took her life last Wednesday. “She’s a great spirit. Just a glass half full person. Always positive. Loving. Dedicated. You couldn’t…she was just a really really good person. And she didn’t always conform to what everybody thought was the norm. She was fiercely independent and strong. And we’re really gonna miss her.”

“She lived life on her terms,” said Kathy, and all three women nodded deeply.

“I always said she was a hippie,” Sheryl said. “She loved her tie dyes and long hair. She donated her hair to Locks of Love. She would grow it really long, and then cut it. You had to have 18 inches to donate so she’d cut it to here,” said Sheryl, holding her hand at a right angle with small of her back, “and talk about how short it was.”

The laughter is a sad one but one of recognition and adoration, and shared around the table. “We were like, honey that’s not short,” Sheryl said Jessie’s family would tell her.

“Her kids were her life. It was the most important thing to her. She loves her babies. She loves those babies,” Sheryl said. “She didn’t know what to do with a girl, though. She had two boys first and she didn’t find out when she was pregnant with her daughter what she was going to have.”

Her sister, however, told her from the beginning, “It’s going to be a girl and you’re going to love her so differently. It’s not better love or more love,” Kathy said she tried to explain to Jessica, but that it was a different brand of love. “It was like life coming full circle for Jessie,” said Kathy. “When we were growing up it was always mom and her girls against the world. We were very close with our mom. I was excited to see her have that relationship with a daughter of her own,” Kathy said.

Kathy and Sheryl also told Jessie to be prepared because she was going to have a girly girl. One like Kathy. “When she got pregnant with her daughter,” said Kathy, “I told her she was going to be just like me.” And she is, all three women said. Jessie never liked ribbons and bows, pink and lace. But her daughter, 20 months old right now, had been slowly teaching her to love it.

Jessie was a “free spirit” from day one, Sheryl and Kathy said.

Her aunt Karen recalls a day when the girls were being watched by a neighbor while their mother worked during the summer school break. And “Jessie went home,” Kathy said, remembering the story as she told it, “and she called 911. She said she didn’t know where her mom was but that she missed her mom.”

“She missed her mom,” Sheryl echoed, with a nod and a sigh.

Kathy and Sheryl can recall all manner of laughter in their home while Jessie and Kathy grew up. Once, Kathy said, when she and Jessie were younger, they were doing their nightly chore of loading and unloading the dishwasher and Kathy, as the older sister, was the only one doing the dishes, she said. “I looked over at her and I said if you don’t get over here and help me do these dishes I’m telling mom.” Jessie got up, she said, “but she didn’t come help me. She grabbed this knife off the counter and started chasing me around the kitchen with it, so i locked myself in the bathroom.” All three women were laughing hard by this point. “So of course mom comes out to see what the commotion was, and Jessie was doing the dishes and I got in trouble for not helping.”

Jessie, said Kathy, “never met a clutter she didn’t create,” and Sheryl said she “always knew when Jessie was home because she’d leave a trail.”

“She would,” Kathy agreed. “She wouldn’t even touch anything but somehow she’d walk in the door and things would just start flying.” Jessie’s carefree nature was clearly evident anytime she and Kathy tried to travel together. “I’ve got a plan,” said Kathy, “I know where we’re going and when and how we’re getting there. I’ve got everything packed, and spares, and I’m touching everything and I’m telling everybody what we’re doing. It never occurred to Jessie to be concerned with any of that,” Kathy said, gazing through the window to the back of the pool area and through it, probably, to a time decades ago.

Laughter, like clutter, seemed to be what Jessie brought to the world. “We got in the car for a trip one time,” Sheryl said, “and when you’ve been in the car for a long time sometimes you just get silly, you know. So Jessie was trying to tell me about something and she couldn’t think of the word she was trying to use so she turned around, and she looked at me, and she stuck her tongue out and she asked me, ‘can you see it?'”

Another time, quite recently, the week of June 11 actually, Jessie had made a trip to Maryland to see an air show and had stated with her Aunt Karen near Ocean City. “We were laying there in the hotel room in the dark, the lights turned out, and she was laughing about something. Something the kids did, I’m sure, and she just lost it. She was just laying there in the dark, dying laughing, and every time she’d stop she’d look at me and she’d crack up again. We were just laying there. In the dark. Dying laughing.”

Jessie, said Sheryl, “wasn’t perfect, but she was perfect for us. Life wasn’t easy for her,” Sheryl said, as the conversation took one of several turns down a more serious track during the course of that hour Saturday morning, “but she made the best of what she had. She enjoyed it. Strong. You know? She was just internally strong.”

“All that stuff life threw at her,” added Kathy, “she just picked it up and put it in her repertoire and kept it moving. Building blocks for the future, she’d say.”

Sheryl said that during her childhood “there was an incident. It was really traumatizing” for Jessie, Sheryl said. “She needed counseling for a while. And then in high school, one of the ways she coped with that issue from her past is she started talking to other people who’d been through it. She used to tell me, ‘I just want to help them be better, mom. I just want them to feel better.'”

Jessie was perhaps the closest in the family to Sheryl’s mother, Kathleen Johnson. “Her and my mom were like this,” Sheryl said, holding up her right hand with her index finger wrapped tight around its neighbor. Kathleen died in 2008, Sheryl said, and “it hit (Jessie) really hard. She knew more about my mom than any of us kids combined knew about her. My dad used to say, because Jessie used to spend the night with my mom a lot, and dad would say he could hear them laying in bed just talking and giggling and carrying on. She knew things about my mom’s childhood that were never shared with any of us kids.”

“She used to call Jessie her Lil’ Bird,” Kathy said.

“Jessie loved fully and unconditionally,” Kathy explained. “She loved everyone she met. There was no cap for how much love and kindness she could give. She loved people. She loved helping. And she loved those kids.”

“Oh my God she loved those kids,” Sheryl said.

Jessie was a hard worker, Sheryl said. “She worked hard. She made the money. She paid the bills. She supported her family, a family of five. She did that. And she inherited my mother’s ability to save money. She had money saved,” said Sheryl, shaking her head. “I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know how she did that, but she did it.”

Jessie worked at WCA hospital for around ten years, Sheryl said. Just last fall Jessie started working at Warren General Hospital in the Warren Medical Group Orthopedics and Sports Medicine practice. Even there, said Sheryl, “she made a big impact there. She made a difference. The outpouring just from that office,” said Sheryl, has been overwhelming.

Indeed, the community that Jessie had called home for more than a decade rallied in spades in the wake of Wednesday’s incident. A gofundme campaign looking to raise 10,000 raised over 9,000 in a day and a half. It was shared on Facebook over 2,000 times before Jessie’s funeral on Saturday. The money raised from that campaign, said Sheryl, was going toward final expenses and everything left over was being placed in a trust fund for the three children – two sons and one daughter – all under ten.

“If you met Jessie one day for five minutes,” said Kathy, and you didn’t see her again for five years, when you did cross her path again it would be like you all had been best friends that whole time. Her heart was enormous.”

And even if she did have a negative interaction with someone, said Sheryl, “Jessie didn’t hold on to grudges. She never did hold on to anger.”

Kathy said that as girls her and Jessie’s favorite movie was The Lion King. “Oh my God, we drove our mother insane with that movie. We’d watch it over and over, start to finish. We knew every line, every song, every punchline.” Asked who was Jessie’s favorite character, Kathy thought for a moment, smiled, and said “We were Timon and Pumba fans.”

Although, said Kathy, you’d have looked at Jessie, out of the five children Sheryl raised, “and you’d think, ‘that’s the one that’s going to have the tattoo,’ but she never did. As she got older, though,” said Kathy, “it went from nah to I think maybe I do want something. And she called me one night and she’d seen someone out, someone had gotten one done, and she was like, ‘this is it, Kathy.'” The tattoo was the words “Hakuna Matata.”

“It’s such a silly little statement,” said Kathy, struggling to keep from crying in earnest. “It’s such a silly little thing, but it was just her. It was so, so her. I had it on my phone as her ringtone for a really long time.”

Asked whether there was anything I could do for them before leaving after our interview, Kathy had this request: “Do her story justice. Please. Make it so that when these children look up stories about their mother they find this beautiful article about what an amazing person she was. And let them know that she loved them. Give us something that, when the conversations start to get hard, and they’re asking us hard questions, we can pull it out and show them. Something that isn’t from us. Tell everyone what a beautiful, beautiful woman she was.”

I sincerely hope that it goes without saying that Jessica White was a beautiful, beautiful woman, but if it doesn’t, then let me be clear. Jessica White was a beautiful, beautiful woman.