Elizabeth Antje Popkjen Jacques

“It’s always something” may be the final words uttered by Elizabeth Jacques. She was comfy in bed when she said this and there was some issue with the thermostat.

And, you know, she wasn’t wrong (she never was: about air pollution, brown bread, Italian hiking boots, Vermeer, injustice, fairness, blackberry jam and most things people could have opinions about). It is always something.

Although “It’s always something” rings with a kind of Taoist familiarity, her ‘something’ wasn’t about the ‘is-ness’ of existence, it really was about inconvenience and imposition.

To ‘Beppie’, as she was called by her friends, the best moments in life were quiet and cozy, made perfect by tea and biscuits and people who love you. And maybe a cat. But don’t we have to get through a thicket of banal somethings to get there.

Born January 21, 1939, in the soon-to-be German-occupied town of Naarden in North Holland to a petroleum chemist and a Jenever-swilling renegade (both members of The Righteous Among Nations), Beppie began her quest for gezellich and security under the most insecure and inconvenient of conditions: the trauma of war. And, like trauma is wont to do, Beppie’s childhood war years were a constant reminder of the uncertainty of living.

She was in many ways planktonic during her lifetime, going where the current took her, but she steered just enough for that current to deliver her to many brilliant adventures.

She spoke Dutch, some Frisian, German, French and English (better than her American born children): she learned to write Greek and Latin. She enjoyed dancing and once performed for the then-Princess Beatrix. She was a good ice skater (duh, Holland) and played the piano. She could knit, cross-stitch and was an excellent drawer. She was an au pair in Paris and London in the late 1950s. She met and married Raymond William Jacques, a charming US Navy lieutenant from Massachusetts. She moved to the United States in 1961, had two children, one in Wyoming, the other in California. She traveled the highways in a camper, hiked through most of the national parks, (unless it was too hot), and loved summer trips to British Columbia. She appreciated the grandeur of the Western United States but only endured American culture, never becoming a citizen. Man, did she hate fireworks. She loved animals, especially dogs, and they loved her back, giving unconditional love to Frankie, Petra, Elsa, Popko, Emma, and at least 3 cats named Jimmy and one named Willie. She used her language skills as a

teacher’s aide at Wade Thomas Elementary School in San Anselmo, California, where she worked for 15 years. After her children fledged and Ray retired, she completed many of Britain’s iconic long hikes powered by a love of nature and clotted cream: the Pennine Way, Hadrian’s Wall, Coast to Coast and the West Highland Way.

The life of Elizabeth Antje Popkjen Bottema Jacques was rich and involved yet the moments she celebrated were not the marquee ones. She looked for, and lived for, the moment that the dust had settled, the dishes had been washed, the boots were off and warming near the fire, and she had a cup of tea in her hand.

Life is full of inconveniences, people who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground, politicians with no humility, and phones (yep, just phones, all phones). That life is messy and uncertain, but okay that way, is a truth that Beppie never warmed up to but the people that loved Elizabeth Jacques knew that just made the tea sweeter. Elizabeth Jacques had tea for the final time on January 3, 2026 at Maple Ridge Assisted Living in Freeland Washington. She is survived by her two children Frank (Pamela), Cait (Matt), her grandchildren Max, Miranda, Phoebe and Callum, 3 loving nieces (Fionna Bottema, Barbara Ingram, Wytske Bottema) and a nephew (Mark Lambert).