John “JaySun” Jackie, the vivid and hilarious man-about-town, died on August 11 at Pen Bay Medical Center, where he spent his last days in great comfort. He enjoyed looking out the big window and the unlimited seltzers provided by the cafeteria. He left the world in the loving embrace of his children 11 months after being diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer.

Jackie was born February 9, 1947, in New Britain, Connecticut, to Helen (Rosal) and John Jackimowicz, both second generation Polish immigrants born in the Bronx. He grew up with two older brothers, Andy & Bob, and two younger sisters, Judy & Cathy. He was the first child born in his family with the American-adapted “Jackie” surname. 

He studied anthropology at UCONN and then sought the wisdom of so-called draft counseling groups to boycott participation in the Vietnam War. One of the learned tactics for pleading insanity was forgoing food and water for a week before the military physical – one of many great lengths took to successfully resist the draft. He spent his early adulthood traveling, including what would be a revelatory trip to the Yucatan, before he was arrested and briefly booked under suspicion of “revolutionary politics,” or “having a matchbook.” He spent the year of ‘74 in Nepal, where he met a spiritual guide who administered him psilocybin and named him JaySun Starr.

Jackie first arrived to mid-coast Maine in the summer of ‘79, from Kauai, with his then-partner Shelly Taft, his stepsons Juan and Rua Brock, and his first-born child, Yani Jackie. Before meeting Taft, he had been living on Kauai at the famous Taylor Camp, a hippy colony formed by Americans seeking refuge from government red-scare persecution, campus riots, and police brutality. 

In 1975, Jackie began studying traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture in Boston at the James/Stevens Acupuncture Center. In 1984 he continued his certification process in Surfside, Florida, at the Dale Institute of Personal & Social Health. That year in Key West he met and fell in love with Suzi Drake, who gave birth to his second child, Amelia Jackie. Drake was also the mother to his three step-daughters: Jocelyn (Tate) Tracy, Adriane (Tate) Gonzalez, and, later, Cassie Blalock. After years of oscillating between Florida and Maine, he eventually settled in the Mid-Coast for good in 1994. 

Jackie always preferred gardening to conventional professionalism, as well as playing guitar and singing, making large colorful paintings with glistening lacquer, and meeting friends at the coffee shop to talk. He was joyfully employed by his college friend, “The Coffee Man,” each year at The Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine. Forever a music lover, he was a zealous volunteer at the Mid-Atlantic Blues Festival, and a card-carrying member of Maine Public Radio. In the late nineties he hosted a lewd and witty late-night call-in show on WERU, under the pseudonym John E. Beaver. His hour also featured his favorite music: Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, and Shemekia Copeland.

Many of his friends, children, enemies, and lovers are sure to attach eternal meaning to the material, ephemeral, and spiritual gifts he leaves us with: Hesse’s Siddhartha; a Beatles versus Stones debate; a little of his spectacular vocabulary; his monochromatic outfits; “3-lobster” dinners; a Malcolm X hat; a bright green glass of absinthe. Jackie remained full of charm through the illness of his final year, remarking with an inquisitive smile when he was first diagnosed: “I’ve just never done this before, the dying thing.” A truth-seeker, he leaves us with another little possible thrill, some solace in the idea that there is something left to learn at the threshold of death, and maybe even after that too.