“If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for another.”

—Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

LIFE OFTEN leads you where you least expect to go and where you never imagine you’ll have the courage to prevail.

Looking back 32 years, Julia Quinlan reflects on the day when she and her husband, Joe, were caught in an emotional turmoil. They were trapped in a parents’ nightmare, unable to wake their daughter Karen Ann from the coma into which a tragic accident had plunged her five years earlier and prevent the certainty of her death. Yet through the shared pain Julia and Joe endured, a promise of peace, solace and comfort for others emerged as they worked to create a memorial for Karen Ann. Although the idea was in its organizational infancy in those days, a tiny,
spare hospital office in Newton, N.J., bore a small sign with a big name: Karen Ann Quinlan Hospice.