He and Jacqui took his children to the Yarralumla Play Station on January 20 last year. They rode the miniature railway and stopped by the animal farm.

When it started bucketing down and they all got pelted with hail, Jake remembered cradling his scared kids. But, when he looked back at Jacqui to check if she was OK, she was smiling and laughing "like she was on this big adventure".

"Just the type of person she was," he said.

"She enjoyed the outing with her great-grandkids, no matter what the circumstances."

Jacqui was the first Canberran to die after contracting COVID-19 on the Ruby Princess cruise ship. The ship's 11-day round trip to New Zealand on March 8 last year has been linked to 28 coronavirus-related deaths and hundreds of cases.

Jacqui's story has been untold until now, with Jake and the rest of the family preferring to remember her in private.

But they are sharing their story as it edges closer to the 12-month anniversary of her death and as the rest of Australia takes time to reflect on how the worldwide pandemic has changed so many lives.

The family said Jacqui was a big personality with a big heart. She loved to party and was always generous, even though she never had much.

Her son Dean Maddison said Jacqui grew up "in the shadows of Windsor Castle", where her dad was a Coldstream Guard, before she migrated to Australia as a "10-pound Pom" in 1966.

Two years later, she settled in Canberra and started work as a tablehand at the Australian Government Publishing Service in Kingston.

The last place Jacqui lived was in Hughes, where she spent more than 30 years in a government housing flat.

It was Jacqui's sense of adventure that led her to save up and book a cruise on the Ruby Princess to New Zealand.

The Maddison family said it was meant to be "the trip of a lifetime" for Jacqui. Her granddaughter Zara Holloway remembered her nan packed days in advance.

"She was getting her outfits approved by all of her girlfriends," Zara said.

One of the last photos of Jacqui was taken on the final night of the cruise: March 18, 2020.

Even though the trip was cut short after the federal government announced coronavirus travel restrictions, Dean said Jacqui "had a ball" on the Ruby Princess.

She got off the ship, caught a cab to Sydney's Central Station, and got a Murrays bus back to Canberra.

Shine Lawyers in July last year announced a class action against Carnival Plc over its handling of COVID-19 cases on the Ruby Princess cruise ship.

Dean said: "I'm just glad that she made it home. I spoke to her that afternoon, and she had a sniffle.

"I said, 'Mum, what's going on'? She said to me, 'Oh, it's just a cold'."

Jacqui's daughter-in-law Bridget Holloway said two days later Jacqui's condition got worse and she called an ambulance on the advice of ACT Health.

Eight days after that on March 29, Jacqui - an active woman who loved water aerobics, theatre and choir - died from coronavirus at The Canberra Hospital, aged 83.

Jacqui's grandson Luke Maddison said: "It happened so quick and I'm sort of still in shock because of it.

"I spoke to her [in the days before she died] and she sounded fine. She said, 'Don't worry about me, I'm OK'.

"I just told her I loved her and I thought she'd pull through."

In the ensuing days and weeks, the Maddison family started hearing more stories about people who'd died or become ill with coronavirus.

Labor MP Ged Kearney's father-in-law Mike was the second person in Canberra to die from coronavirus on April 3. The third person to die from COVID-19 in the ACT was a woman in her 60s, who was also a passenger on the Ruby Princess.

The Maddison family wanted to reach out to people who'd also lost loved ones after the cruise, but they didn't know how.

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It was a gut-wrenching, devastating time that was made worse, Dean said, by the family not being able to give Jacqui a proper goodbye.

"The thing is, mum was 83, she was a diabetic and she had hypertension, but ... she was very well managed," Dean said.

"She went to the doctors frequently [and] she had to get a certificate saying she was fit to travel, which she did no problems."

Jacqui's daughter-in-law Lana Maddison said "she loved life".

For the Maddison family, the pain of losing Jacqui was still very fresh nearly a year since her death.

They were forced to limit her funeral to 10 people because of COVID-19 restrictions, but they still laughed, sang and danced as they remembered the woman she was.

Jacqui's son Stuart Maddison said: "A beautiful thing that one of my friends said about her was that she was everyone's mum.

"You could imagine, we were a bunch of rampaging teenagers ... but she accepted you for whatever.

"You're respectful to your friends' parents and things like that, but people would cross the street to see mum."

The family said they wanted to hold a big memorial service for Jacqui, but the timing wasn't yet right.

The ACT had so far recorded 122 cases of coronavirus - four were currently active cases - and the territory's COVID-19 vaccine rollout only started on February 22.

The Maddison family wanted Jacqui's memorial service to be a celebration of her life - a big party.

"That's what she would have wanted," Luke said.

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