Sarah Jane Kirksey passed peacefully on Sunday, December 22, 2024 surrounded by her family on their small farm in Dickerson, Maryland. She was born December 29, 1947, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. In 1969 she married Will Kirksey, who she met while both were working at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility. At Otterbein College she majored in music and after working with deaf children as a social worker she was inspired to become an audiologist. As an adult she moved to Florida, back to Tennessee, and then to Ohio before settling in Montgomery County in 1990. She was a devoted and kind mother, who interrupted her career to care for two children: Eben (born in 1976) and Kate (born in 1980).

Locally she is known as a successful small business owner. After founding Hearing Heath Care in1996, she compassionately cared for a community of patients. She believed the best way to run a business was to treat everyone she encountered with kindness. Her naturally caring personality led her to provide personalized help to her clients—like giving discounts and wrangling free hearing devices from the suppliers for her clients who had difficulty paying. She never needed to advertise: her clients loved her and spread the word. Her clientele included senior government diplomats, a bank president, a Grammy award winning music critic, members of a famous rock and roll band, and prisoners from one of the area’s maximum security prisons (brought in shackled by an armed guard!).

Jane Kirksey had a life-long passion for the outdoors and especially enjoyed hiking, paddling, as well as downtime at the beach. An intrepid leader, she organized and led adventurous family trips: including whitewater paddling down the Westwater Canyon of the Colorado  River, canoe camping on lake Temagami in Canada, and trekking on Mont Blanc’s sea of ice in France. Internationally she travelled to Mexico, Vietnam, England, Kenya, Italy, Greece, among many other countries. After being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2017, she traveled to Australia to go hiking, snorkeling, and boating with her son Eben.

She moved to the farm in Dickerson in 2017 with her husband Will and her daughter Kate, and her first grandchild Luke (born 2016). During the coronavirus pandemic her son Eben also came back to the farm to join the family. Her second grandson, Henry, was born in April 2020. She was excited about using the farm to create a legacy for her family. Marveling at natural beauty, she enjoyed planting flowers, bulbs, and trees on the farm—knowing that these plants would live on for generations. Jane enjoyed strolls through the farm fields with goats, chickens, and especially her grandchildren Luke and Henry.

A celebration of her life is being planned for summer.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations in her honor to either Riverworks Art Center (riverworksart.org) or WUMCO Help (wumcohelp.org), our local charity.