I can’t say that I knew Dr. Michael Jacobs, who died at the tail end of this summer, well at all. In the beginning, I knew him in the mundane way most year-round Island kids know parent-aged people in the community: as the dad of someone with whom I went to the Tisbury School and, if memory serves, Hebrew school at the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center.

As a kid in the ‘80s on the Island there were (again if memory serves) really two options for medical care: your pediatrician’s office or the emergency room. And so I later knew Dr. Jacobs as someone who had a profound effect on our Island community when he broadened access to health care with the establishment of what all just seemed to call the walk-in clinic. It did, in fact, have a name, Vineyard Medical Services, and in my mind it revolutionized access to patient care on the Island.

Later still, when I returned to the Vineyard after college in the early 2000s to become a cub reporter at this newspaper, I knew him as an interview subject. One of the summers I worked at the paper we ran one of my favorite pieces of content I’ve ever worked on: a recurring feature in the Tuesday paper called The Two of Us that interwove oral interviews between iconic Island duos.

I had the great pleasure of interviewing Dr. Jacobs and his business partner, Dr. Gerald Yukevich, for one of those stories. Last week I emailed Gazette librarian and archivist Hilary Wallcox for a copy. I read the article crying. The breed of doctor that Dr. Jacobs was and Dr. Yukevich still is, is so vital to our national communities and increasingly rarer than rare — practically nonexistent.

This type of doctor — the small-town practitioner who really sees people, who understands the community, heck who makes house calls or gives out their cellphone number (read the article, Complementary Medicine Means Never Wondering, Is a Doctor in the House?, from the June 2, 2008 Gazette for the details on that) — is also deeply personal to me. My grandfather, Dr. David Rappaport, practiced medicine the same way on this Island and my dad, Ron Rappaport, built his legal practice on this model of caring for the community and the human condition.

“The most important thing that people need to appreciate about medicine and physicians is, most of the time — most of the time — the medicine and the medical issues are not terribly complicated,” Dr. Jacobs told me as part of the 2008 article. “What is more of a challenge, and what gives more enjoyment in the encounter with a patient, is the personal relationship that you develop. I always used to tell the residents, it’s the people, not the diseases, that are the most important thing when you’re seeing the patient.”

As we say in Judaism, may the memory of this man be a blessing. His death is one of many our Island has endured over the past year and a half; many of those who have died actively worked to sustain a connected and empathetic way of life here. It is in their honor that we must remain committed to really seeing one another. To greeting each other first as students of the human condition, striving for connection, understanding and curiosity.

I hope to read more about Dr. Jacobs’ impact on our community in the pages of this newspaper before too long.

Julia Rappaport lives in Newton and Chilmark.