One day in New York City, she had bought a couple of sandwiches and was on the way to Central Park to have a picnic with a friend, when she noticed a homeless man sleeping beneath tattered blankets.

Fern Holland woke up the man and gave him her food. Never mind the picnic.

"If we walk by," she told her friend, "we've missed a chance."

It's yet another story that might give the impression that Holland was too consumed with the idea of relieving other people's misery to enjoy her own life.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," said Stephen Rodolf, one of several friends who spoke at Holland's memorial service Friday. "She loved life. She loved everything about it. She embraced it all."

In Iraq to promote women's rights for the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority, Holland was killed March 9, when gunmen stopped her vehicle south of Baghdad. She was 33.

Representatives from the U.S. Army presented Holland's family with the Defense of Freedom Medal, one of the highest honors that the military can bestow on a civilian. The medal's inscription read "On behalf of a grateful nation."

This was a woman who gave up a lucrative law career in Tulsa to sleep in a mud hut in Africa to work for the Peace Corps.

Who volunteered at a children's hospital in Siberia.