Jacqueline Rae Goss, known as Jackie to all and Jake to her siblings, died on April 26, 2026, at Wake Robin, of complications from primary progressive aphasia. She was 78.
Jackie was a beloved daughter, sister and aunt; an emergency medicine pioneer; an expert mountaineer; and a passionate singer who dedicated every ounce of energy to the people and places she loved.
Born on May 15, 1947, in Summit, N.J., Jackie was the oldest of six and a loving caretaker and protector before she’d even learned to drive. Her three lifelong callings were already visible in her childhood: music, mountains and medicine. Her love of music came first, from intimate concerts where she heard world-class New York musicians up close, from the Far Brook School chorus, and from a trip to Manhattan’s Trinity Church, where she would later recall holding her father’s hand and hearing a pipe organ for the first time. As a teenager Jackie spent summers as a counselor at a camp in the White Mountains run by Bob Seeger — Pete’s brother — where she sang, played guitar and taught outdoor skills.
Jackie was a skier from her earliest days. The family had a cabin high up on the Appalachian Gap at Mad River, and the trail she and her brother Steve cut so they could ski home became one of the area’s best-known but hardest to find unofficial trails. Jackie would go on to become a ski patroller, one of the first women in the country to do so.
In 1966 the family moved to Vermont full time and set to work restoring a stone farmhouse in Charlotte. After finishing high school, she went to Ithaca College and ultimately finished her degree at the University of Vermont. There, she fell in with Vermont’s nascent emergency medical system and never looked back.
She earned her EMT certification in the field’s earliest days and became the nation’s 123rd licensed paramedic, following that with her physician’s assistant license in 1977. Later that same year, the National Ski Patrol awarded her its highest honor — the National Appointment — for lifetime contribution to the patrol. She was 30 years old. When she moved to Smugglers’ Notch Ski Patrol, its medical adviser, Dr. Dave Pilcher (who also ran the MCHV Emergency Department), recruited her to do a study of the state’s emergency services for the Vermont Department of Health. That study turned into curriculum development. The curriculum turned into a vocation. Her contributions to emergency medicine are immeasurable. She traveled to Pittsburgh to learn from the Freedom House paramedics — the Black ambulance corps who effectively invented modern American EMS — and brought their lessons home to Vermont.
As soon as Jackie learned something, she turned around and taught it. She wrote the original text of the Secondary Survey, the protocol that still guides patient assessment for emergency providers worldwide. She gave 46 years to Essex Rescue and decades more to the National Ski Patrol and the emergency departments at UVM and Copley. She taught EMT, paramedic, PA, and OEC classes at the university and across Vermont. When a young EMT once asked her what her certification number was, she replied: “Six. I’ve been around a few years.” In 1993 she took a faculty appointment as the first PA in emergency medicine at UVM. Among her proudest achievements: At one point, five directors of emergency medical services nationwide were her former students. She lectured throughout the world (often in cities near great mountains or peripatetic nieces and nephews). Years after her last lecture, the providers she trained still think of her “sick or not sick” triage lecture when they walk onto an emergency scene.
Jackie was a lifelong mountaineer. As a teenager, she led kids on a spring climb of Mount Washington and got caught in a freak snowstorm. Her party had foul-weather gear; they pulled it on and kept moving. When they came across another group in shorts and T-shirts — some already hypothermic — she had her kids make camp and share their sleeping bags. They sheltered until the storm passed and walked everyone down. As she was fond of saying, “It’s never a crisis if you have the right equipment.” In the 1970s she bought land in Underhill for its panoramic view of Mansfield. She then built a log cabin by hand, aimed it at the view and made it cozy with the largest woodstove she could find. She lived there for most of her adult life, at the foot of the mountain, hosting family and friends, singing along to her favorite choral music, but always ready to jump in her van to respond to an emergency call.
Even after both ankles were fused and knees replaced, she kept climbing, in custom orthotics and boots, her inimitable heel-toe gait familiar to anyone who’d shared a trail with her. At 70, she led her 92-year-old mother and three siblings to summit Camel’s Hump.
The music never left, either. She sang for decades with the Oriana Singers, and each summer she spent a week at Camp Ogontz in New Hampshire, harmonizing with 75 strangers from across the country. “There is teamwork in emergency medicine,” she once said, “and there is teamwork in singing.”
Primary progressive aphasia mercilessly took these passions from her one at a time. Singing went first, as she lost the ability to read music or carry a melody. Advising Stowe’s Ski Patrol and Essex Rescue went next, as did her work on the UVM College of Medicine admissions committee, where she had advocated for applicants with her same grit, real-world experience and caring bedside manner that served her throughout her career. She poured every bit of herself into this … until she could no longer find the words.
In 2020 she moved to Wake Robin to be closer to her mother, Marjorie, who passed last fall at the age of 101. She became a beloved member of the community, using her condition as yet another opportunity to teach. “It is helpful to be patient, and it is okay for you to guess what I am trying to say,” she wrote, “Yes and no answers are easiest.”
She enjoyed conversation right to the end, always happy to hear the voices of those she loved.
Jackie never married nor had children. In lieu of one family she built five: her extended biological family; her Vermont EMS family; her singing family at Oriana and Ogontz; her sailing family on the Schooner Heritage; and her mountain family of patrollers, trail partners and SAR squads. She loved each of them the way she loved everything else in her life — completely and without condition. She left every one of those families better than she found it. To be in one (biological or otherwise) was to know you could never disappoint her, a fact which, in the way such things go, made you spend the rest of your life making damn sure you didn’t.
Jackie is survived by her sisters Deborah of Burlington, Vt., and Terre Murphy of Wexford, Ireland; her brother Duncan of Stowe, Vt.; her nieces and nephews, Tyler, Asher, Tim, Caitlin, Corinne, Alex, Connor and Isaac; and her seven great-nieces and great-nephews.
She was preceded in death by her parents, Marjorie Major and Frank Goss; her sister Meredith; her dogs Ariel and Maddie, both of whom she spoiled rotten and would happily admit it; and her brother Steve, who passed unexpectedly five days before her.
We hope she and Steve found each other quickly and headed off on their next epic hike.
A remembrance will be held on July 25, 2026, 11 a.m., at her beloved St. Paul’s Cathedral in Burlington. All are invited. In lieu of flowers, her family asks that donations be made to your local volunteer rescue squad. If you don’t have one, please consider giving to any of Vermont’s rural EMS teams, which are critical to the health of the state and chronically underfunded.