Jeri Flinn lived full life and Pacifica is better for it

As it turns out, Jeri died peacefully in her sleep at home in Pacifica last week. She made it to 66, and for the record she did get to swim with the manatees and watch the tigers. And much, much more.

Struck by Type 1 diabetes at the age of 1, Jeri was tormented by the disease her entire life. But it gave her an almost maniacal drive to survive and make every moment count.

Nine months after Jeri underwent a quadruple heart bypass at the age of 29, we shouldered backpacks and spent the better part of a year seeing the world. We bicycled through the Loire Valley, sailed a dhow off the coast of Mombasa and trekked in the Himalayas.

We enjoyed it so much we did it again four years later. This time we floated down the Nile on a leaky felucca, ferry-hopped through the Greek Isles, wandered the Caucasus Mountains of Russia and rode an elephant through the Golden Triangle region of northern Thailand.

But diabetes was far from through with Jeri. A few years later she endured a second quadruple heart bypass. 

And Jeri was far from through with life. Within months she was off on fresh adventures: kayaking Baja’s Sea of Cortez, rafting the Tatshenshini River through the wilds of Alaska and sailing the coast of Turkey in a wooden gulet.

Then came the big one: kidney failure and a transplant. It forced her to retire at a tragically young age from her dream job as the first female partner at a large and prestigious Silicon Valley public relations firm.

With lots of pent-up energy, Jeri got together with a few like-minded Pacificans in 1997 to clean rubbish from our beaches. They called their new group the Pacifica Beach Coalition.

In the early days the entire organization could fit onto two couches and an easy chair in our living room. Today it’s known as the Pacific Beach Coalition to reflect its wider mission. It is made up of more than 12,000 volunteers and performs 10 official cleanups a month from Daly City to Half Moon Bay and Foster City, plus another 100 cleanups annually with schools and corporate teams.

Since 2019 they’ve removed 330,283 pounds of trash and precisely 1,645,009 cigarette butts from our beaches. 

I was extremely proud of Jeri’s work with the Beach Coalition but must admit it pretty much ruined romantic walks on the beach for us. It’s hard to be romantic when your wife is stopping every two steps to gather cigarette butts and plastic straws. Jeri’s determination to keep our shores pristine never took a break.

Alas, her beach-walking days came to an end when she had three toes amputated and was warned that walking in the sand again would probably cost her the rest.

In 2000, Jeri put her energy toward helping the Pacifica Land Trust, the California Coastal Conservancy and Trust for Public Land to raise the money to purchase Mori Point and turn it over to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area for preservation.

Jeri’s lifelong disease, Type 1 diabetes, is such a relentless scourge — especially for people like her, who were born in the 1950s — that if you somehow manage to survive 50 years with it, the Harvard Medical School’s Joslin Diabetes Center will fly you to Boston, give you a medal and then run a battery of tests to try to figure out how the hell you're still alive.

Jeri received her medal — and then lived another 15 years with the disease.

The other day I came across a quote by Hunter S. Thompson that I thought nicely summed up Jeri’s journey: “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a ride!’”

And she never did watch Dr. Phil.

John Flinn is the former travel editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.