Jane Mackenzie
Born In: Milton, Massachusetts, United States
Born: December 26th, 1930
Passed in: Rumford, Rhode Island, United States
Passed on: February 4th, 2015
Died at home in Rumford, RI, on Feb. 4, 2015, after a long battle with dementia.
Jane was born in Milton, MA, on Dec. 26, 1930, to John Eric Atkinson and Elizabeth Couch Atkinson, the second of four daughters.
She attended Milton Academy, Wellesley College, and Columbia University-Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing,in New York City, where she met her husband, the late Dr. Malcolm Mackenzie. They moved to Gates Mills, Ohio in 1954, and had three children before Jane completed her nursing degree at Columbia in 1966.
The family celebrated her graduation from Columbia with the first of many memorable trips to Nova Scotia, where she later bought and expanded a vacation house in Ingonish, overlooking the ocean. In her later years, Jane and her spoiled-rotten dog Vickie enjoyed whole summers on Cape Breton.
Jane’s professional career focused on home health care. She taught community nursing at the University of Rhode Island, earned a master’s in public health from Harvard in 1976, and served as executive director of the Visiting Nurse Association of Rhode Island from 1977 until retiring in 1993. She lived by Dag Hammarskjold’s dictum: “In Thy service, not mine.”
Jane was predeceased her husband Malcolm, and her sister Celia Atkinson Locke.
She is survived by her sisters, Emily Stabler and Susan Lukens of Washington, D.C.; her son John Mackenzie and his wife Gail of Newark, DE, her daughter Jane Mackenzie Dennison and husband Allen of Rumford, RI, and her son Malcolm 'Kip' Mackenzie and his wife Sandy of Cambridge, MA and Nelson, NH., and many grandchildren.
