By Gretchen Keiser

“Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face… Then I shall know as fully as I am known.” (I Corinthians 13:12-13)

A little more than five years ago, Mary Jo Fitzgerald moved to Atlanta with her husband and six children.

Marist high school president Father Joel Konzen, M.S., remembers the whole group showing up one hot summer day for a first look at the school most of the Fitzgerald children would attend. They struck him as the kind of family “one hopes for,” energetic, exuberant, filled with questions, concerned about their Catholic faith.

The graciousness of the Fitzgeralds, the unique quality of their family would always have been noticed by those who came in contact with them. But an extreme set of circumstances unfolded that brought the family to the attention of untold numbers of people.

Within a year Mary Jo was beginning to exhibit symptoms of illness and by the end of 1984 knew she had a degenerative disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). She was sick for four years, two in which she couldn’t speak.

She declined physically from walking with a cane to a walker, a wheelchair and a bed. Her vibrant dark-haired beauty and inquisitive talk was gradually sapped by the illness. She communicated through a letterboard by blinking her eyes.

Her mind, however, that had won her valedictorian honors in high school and college, remained as clear and focused as ever. Her faith, a Catholic faith nurtured by her Louisiana family background, by her beloved college, St. Mary of the Woods, and supported by her marriage to Bob Fitzgerald, was tested and challenged by ALS and all that its diagnosis meant to a wife and mother.

It was a faith trial that the Fitzgeralds chose not to bear alone, but to open to others.

When Mary Jo died in November 1988, 600 to 700 people came to the rosary and wake service and a similar number filed the pews and stood in the aisles at Christ the King Cathedral for the Mass the next morning.

The homilist, Father Konzen, said that “adding a postscript in words to the marvel that was Mary Jo is like lighting a single sparkler after an evening of fireworks. I approach it with as much caution as delight. I have the feeling she is saying, knowing herself as she does, and now so clearly, ‘Good luck - better you than me.’”

And yet it is impossible not to try to put into words some part of Mary Jo’s story, which is as much the story of the Fitzgerald family.

“All of us who knew her knew that she held out for us a truth that was somehow not to be learned elsewhere,” Father Konzen said.

In interviews with family and friends, different facets of that insight are revealed. There are some constant themes: Mary Jo’s humanity and her openness in this extraordinary trial; her passionate motherly concern for her own children that sparked similar attention to other people’s children, other children’s problems, other people’s pain.

Her own concern was to give her children an example of dignity and courage in the process of dying. If one adds faith to that list, and includes among her children people of many ages perhaps that is indeed what happened.

“Some people’s lives are like a big, blazing fire on a very cold day,” said Stephanie Korchedk, 27. “You have to draw close to them. You can’t help yourself because when you feel the warmth you realize how cold you are most of the time. You draw near so you won’t die yourself, so you’ll get warm.”

Her dying, and sharing of her faith struggles, was lifegiving, those interviewed say.

For Her Children A Legacy Of Courage

A close friend, Marianne Craft, said she had been changed “completely” by the experience: “my relationship with my family, my relationship with my husband, my friendships, my values. I really do believe that the most important thing is my faith.”

“I never knew you could turn total devastation, total tragedy into a victory. I never knew that,” Mrs. Craft said. Mary Jo’s victory was that “even though she was suffering … up until the very last minute God was her salvation. He was her focus; she died in peace; there was no struggle and after her death it became evident that so many people’s lives were touched. That is a real victory.”

It began in August 1984 when Mary Jo, who had given birth to her sixth child, Meghan, a year earlier, fell on the tennis court playing with her kids. She joked about it,” talked about what a klutz she was,” Bob Fitzgerald recalls.

That same month, on vacation in Bermuda, they rented mopeds and Mary Jo’s took off, hitting a car and sending her to the street. Her leg began to spasm and she couldn’t stop it. But still they made light of it, Mary Jo clowning by wearing a crash helmet on the tennis court. In late September, she went to a PTA meeting at Christ the King school and came home “visibly shaken.”

“I got out the van. It was like I didn’t have any legs at all. I went straight down to the ground,” her husband recalls her saying. He said, “This has really ceased being funny. We’ve got to check into this.”

With deep roots in Louisiana, both Baton Rouge and New Orleans, they had come to Atlanta because of Bob’s position as vice president and general counsel for Southern Bell. In the city a little more than a year, they were now talking to medical specialists.

Mary Jo herself voiced the diagnosis of ALS, more commonly called “Lou Gehrig’s disease,” in a second visit to a specialist. Her husband remembers the doctor “almost fell out of his chair. ‘Who told you that?’” She had been reading voraciously at home, researching illnesses herself. She permitted a muscle biopsy before Christmas, but asked not to be told the results of the confirming test until after the holiday for the family’s sake.

Bob Fitzgerald has become knowledgeable about ALS, but as he describes the awareness that came over them it is the human details that linger: the look of hurt on the doctor’s face as he told them there was not treatment; Mary Jo’s vital refusal to accept that judgment, mentioning diet, research, experimental treatments. Saying there was nothing that could be done “wasn’t in her nature,” her husband said. “She couldn’t accept that for a long time.”

Driving home from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta after a confirming diagnosis they cried and Mary Jo voiced her mission. “What I need to do now is leave the children a legacy of living with courage.” Then she told Bob of course he’d have to remarry. He smiles broadly as he remembers that moment. His response to his wife of 19 years was “You’ve been a wonderful wife and an integral part of my life” but “I think that’s going too far.”

Looking back, their friends are struck by how the move to Atlanta placed the Fitzgeralds in a setting to impact many people. Newcomers, they needed and embraced help from Cathedral parishioners, Marist friends, other people they befriended and welcomed.

Their gracious brick home at the end of a long driveway, with a van parked outside, became the center of a new kind of activity. Many people began to come and go at the Fitzgerals’ home. It began with friendship; it became a spiritual web that changed many people. It continues still.

“It was an evolution,” Bob Fitzgerald said. “Nobody was hit by lightning and blinded for three days” in a Pauline conversion. But the family, who had always been faithfully Catholic, began to weave spiritually more into “everyday human reality.”

Bob brought Communion home nightly to Mary Jo. They prayed and the children were invited, from the high school teenagers to the five-year-old and the baby. “Sometimes they would RSVP with regrets and that was okay.” Bob said.

They told the children about the diagnosis as a group, Bob starting the story and then sort of breaking down. Mary Jo picked up and between them they put the message across honestly and openly. Each child’s response differed as they differed. One had one question, another had a stream of questions. Finally the five-year-old put her hand over her ears and said, “Enough, enough.” In a way, she led the family forward, her father says.

Later she came home from school very angry because someone had told her that her mother was going to die soon. At first her father was angry also, but he and Mary Jo talked to their little girl about death and her hostility diminished. They talked to her that way from time to time over the next four years. When she was seven, she told her father about a prayer she’d prayed: “Lord, let my mother be in my heart. That way I will always have my mother with me.” She was saying, her fathers says, “You know, Dad, I’ve got this thing where I can handle it.”

From the beginning “we gave each other permission to cry, to touch, to hold, to shout” with the warning that anyone who shouted might be shouted back at. They were demonstrative. Family life went right on. As long as she was able, Mary Jo went to school events and every special ceremony that the kids were a part of. She sat at the dinner table with them every night, her eyes moving around the group and communicating, even more, at times, her response to a teen’s outfit, to a piece of family news.

Bob recalls one story, Mary Jo’s immediate response was, “When you come home from school, the first thing you’ve got to do is your homework. Then you can go to your playhouse.”

“She was going to be a mother the way she thought she should mother,” her husband said. “She set high standards and was very unyielding in those standards. It was motivated out of love. That wasn’t always apparent.”

Bob Fitzgerald sees her humanity as being a critical part of her beauty, not at odds with it. She was “so beautifully human and totally human and yet has a spirituality that affected other people.”

“I need all of you. I need your help,” Marianne MacNeill, a friend, recalls May Jo saying to friends often about her illness, her faith, her family’s struggle. One way the need crystallized was into the form of two prayer groups that started to meet Tuesday mornings and Friday mornings in the Fitzgeralds’ den.

The groups varied in size from five to 20 or more people, mostly women, who came to pray for Mary Jo, but found that they were also in need. Bound up together, they became two ongoing groups, one focusing upon a psalm each week and prayer; the other studying Scripture with a teacher and praying for one another’s needs.

The invitation to join the prayer group came “at a hard time in my life,” said Cathedral parishioner Denise Johnston. “I would sit and look at this woman who was valiant - she was - I would think of this woman, her husband, her six children, her age, her beauty, her intellect and I would weep.”

This changed, however, and praying for others and with others became the focus. “I went from a very personal, independent way of worshipping to laying on of hands (in prayer)…learning how to worship intimately with people, with other women,” Mrs. Johnston said. The Friday prayer group is ecumenical, taking as its focus Scripture verses that Mary Jo would suggest, and that would be examined and taught by a group member and Bible teacher, Mickey Land. The group prayed for Mary Jo’s healing, but also prayed regularly for others. “She (Mary Jo) really did take a back seat after awhile,” Denise Johnston said. She was always concerned about the needs of other people, their children, their spouses, their relatives. A poster board in the house was regularly filled with names of people needing prayer and their intentions.

Outside of the prayer groups’ dynamic, there was more that occurred, Mrs. Johnston said. “We went to Mary Jo privately” to talk and hear her counsel. “As she lost her voice I think people even shared with her more. She listened to so much about their deepest, most intimate feelings … She bore a lot of pain for people. That was a ministry behind the scenes. You sat by her bed and you talked to her.”

For the last one and a half to two years, Mary Jo’s questions and answers were spelled out letter by letter, using an alphabet board. She moved her eyes up and down columns of letters until the visitor spoke the correct letter. She would blink once for yes and twice for no. Words were spelled out, although some became more proficient than others at understanding and grasping her direction. “What she said had to say a lot. She had to be incisive,” Denise Johnston said. “On the word board it had to be harder for her. I was so aware that she was very, very intelligent. I was so aware that she expected a lot from herself. There were very high standards there.”

ALS affects nerves and muscles, disrupting the signals sent to muscles from the brain. In the throat area, the power of speech is lost and eating and swallowing are increasingly difficult. Mary Jo resisted reliance on intravenous tubes as long as possible so that the children could still climb on her lap, but eventually she had to permit a gastrostomy tube for feeding because her weight had dropped from 125 to 70 pounds. Eating had become almost impossible for her because of choking spells. Her weight was built back up to 85 pounds with intravenous feeding, but she still looked emaciated, her husband said, because of the disease’s impact on muscles.

The four years she lived with ALS extended beyond initial expectations. There was never a plateau, but “the speed with which she was degenerating clearly slowed,” Bob Fitzgerald said. Nurses and homemakers became a part of family life.

There was stress and conflict, but “there was never a conflict created out of lack of love,” Bob Fitzgerald said. “There were a lot of conflicts arising out of seeking love.”

As a young man Bob Fitzgerald had studied for three years at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Louisiana and at Louvain University in Belgium before going to college and law school.

“Those were three wonderful years. I can’t really tell you how often I called in the Green Stamps I built up during those years,” he said.

Always rooted in sacraments and Catholic tradition, prayer and study became intensive for them, including a trip to Lourdes, to healing Masses in the archdiocese, later tapes, talks and retreat notes that Bob would take and bring back to digest and discuss with Mary Jo. Reassuring Scriptures in the face of the degenerating impact of ALS were John, Chapter 1 where it says, “Not one thing had its being but through Him,” reminding Mary Jo that “we are a conscious choice of God so circumstances don’t matter,” her husband said.

Another was 1 Peter, Chapter 4 where it says, “anyone who in this life has bodily suffering has broken with sin because for the rest of his life on earth he is not ruled by human passions but only by the will of God.”

“She would say, ‘How much more?’ to which I would answer, ‘Good question.’” They looked at 2 Peter, Chapter 3, verse 9, which says, “The Lord is not being slow to carry out his promises” and verse 15: “Think of our Lord’s patience as your opportunity to be saved.”

“She would share, ‘I’m afraid,’” Bob Fitzgerald said. “She was afraid of leaving the children, the younger ones, ever the mother. How will they acquire the social graces society demands.” But they drew strength again from “Not one thing has its being but through Him.”

Mass was celebrated regularly in their den, as the Cathedral folk group found their music a healing, strengthening presence for the Fitzgeralds, and found in their lively family and open faith a welcome.

We Gave Each Other Permission to Cry…To Shout

Stephanie Korcheck, a guitarist in the group, never knew Mary Jo when she could speak, but basked in what she felt in her smiles and eyes. From her first dinner with the family, “I immediately felt accepted…My communication with Mary Jo was through music.” She struggled to compose a song that would express what she saw. “Mary Jo’s Song” came very slowly. “Whatever I wrote down just wasn’t communicating what I felt about them…how they have encouraged me to live my life better.”

They couldn’t talk, but Stephanie would visit and sing. “I looked at her and literally could see Christ in her face. All she had to do was smile…It’s really not explainable. It is, has and will compel me to keep searching for God everywhere.”

“Your smiles reflect the grace of God; His peace shines brightly in your eyes. I know that I’ve been blessed by God; Humbled to be touched by your lives,” her song says.

Elise Foster, also a Louisiana transplant to Atlanta, met Mary Jo in a friend’s kitchen and then saw the whole Fitzgerald clan at the Cathedral’s folk Mass: the children, Kelleen, Maureen, Robert, Kista, Kerry and Meghan. They invited her home to dinner and she became like a member of the family, visiting the home several times a week, taking some of the kids on a Louisiana vacation with her. She met her future husband, Roy Lander, during Mary Jo’s illness and brought him to the Fitzgeralds early in their dating. He sensed an unusually generous acceptance of people in Mary Jo, looking for the good, not the bad. “She could look at you and tell what your best qualities were and latch on to those.”

He also found Mary Jo extraordinarily peaceful. “Even in the midst of pain you could look at her and see that peace and you knew where it came from, you knew where it came from.”

“She lost the physical side of herself, but to replace that she was just that much more spiritual,” he said.

Elise Lander, whose wedding was planned with Mary Jo’s help, experienced a generosity of giving that helped her to become a more giving person. In all her days in and out of the house in all circumstances, “I can maybe count on my hands five times when she didn’t ask how my day was first. She directed the conversation to the other person. That enabled her to become filled with them and their graces.”

She also learned slowly that May Jo “was not untouchable, she was not unreachable. She was a model to live by, not a model to look up to.”

Her struggle was profound and poignant to many because she had so much to let go of that was beautiful. “She and Bob represented the epitome of success in every aspect of their lives because of the energy they had put into their lives and they had a wonderful set of values spiritually and theologically,” Marianne Craft said. “The letting go process was such a difficult process with so many victories.”

With the loss of speech, there was a purity to Mary Jo’s communication, stripped of niceties and conventions, Mrs. Craft said, direct and purposeful. “But it was deeper than that. Mary Jo was involved in centering prayer for every moment once she lost her ability to speak.” From that well, she drew counsel.

Even her struggles to accept her dying and let go were turned to victories, her friend said. “She would battle and battle and struggle and weep and feel such incredible emotional pain letting go of her family, her life. Then His peace would dwell in her, sustain her until the next battle.”

Her last exchanges with friends were still probing, but at peace over her children. Mrs. Craft went away after their last conversation to pray for her friend’s ability to let go, with the thought that they would study Scripture together and pray in the weeks ahead on that topic. But that Saturday morning early, Mary Jo died.

Father Skip Hennessey, a frequent visitor, said his last conversation with her were about heaven and what it would be like, where it would be in respect to her family. The only person he could liken her to was Archbishop Fulton Sheen, whom he had also been privileged to know. “Mary Jo could be in a room with 50 people, mute, in a wheelchair, but you noticed her. She had a force about her…a gentle force. You couldn’t be with her very long without realizing you were following her leadership.”

He said the two had spiritual personalities, given over to God. “Oddly, he was a man of eloquence and Mary Jo lived in a world of silence.”

The day after her death, Denise Johnston walked out on a golf course, alone with her thoughts, under a leaden white sky. When she looked up against the sky, all she could see was Mary Jo’s face.

In a later interview, she reflected on the paradox of the Fitzgeralds, whose life spoke a caution to all: “This is all a gift. Don’t take any of this for granted. Work to put it into perspective. Don’t forget who your God is.”

The other dimension would be the barriers of judgment that were torn down by their openness and love. “There’s a part of society that looks on people of means with an envy that turns to hostility,” Mrs. Johnston said. “If they were privy to these people’s lives, there’s a lot of suffering going on. And there can be a lot of spirituality there that they don’t assume. It may be harder, but it’s there.”

In addition to the prayer groups that formed at the Fitzgeralds, and that are continuing to meet each Tuesday and Friday mornings at their home, other spiritual fruit from this has been evident. Bob Fitzgerald was told the story of a man caught embezzling who confided to a friend that he planned to commit suicide to spare his family the embarrassment of his trial and conviction. The friend who knew of Mary Jo said, “Sit down. Who do you think you are? Let me tell you about somebody I know.” The man is now serving his prison term.

A friend away from the church for 30 years has been reconciled because of the impact of Mary Jo, Bob said. Another in marriage difficulty has been able to persevere because of her example. Another who had an extremely traumatic life told Mary Jo “through giving yours to Christ I’ve gotten mine back.”

Bob Fitzgerald is emphatic that the spiritual significance of Mary Jo’s life is not to be limited to her, but to the potential value every life has if given over to God’s will.

“We’re talking about somebody who didn’t utter a word the last two years. She spoke through other people with her A-B-C board,” he said. But “Christ spoke through Mary Jo’s human life and He touched other people through her…Mary Jo lived as a human being and allowed Christ to touch other people through her.”

One message is that “It’s okay not even want to be a part of it,” he said. “Mary Jo didn’t want to suffer. We didn’t want to have Mary Jo’s death. We didn’t want the hardship of taking care of someone totally incapacitated, just like Christ didn’t want the Passion. But there was a benefit in doing it.”

At the funeral Mass Nov. 15, the Cathedral folk group sang 12 songs, ending with a hand-clapping rendition of “How Can I Keep From Singing?”

“No storm can shake my inmost calm While to that rock I’m clinging Since love is Lord of heaven and earth. How can I keep from singing?”

It was Mary Jo’s choice, as were all the other songs, so if listeners were shaken by the strong assertion of faith in the midst of apparent tragedy they had to look at their own questions and wonder.

Then Bob Fitzgerald came forward and read the congregation a description of his experience the morning after his wife’s death.

“Today I am not sad. There is a peace that fills my existence… It is a time for receiving and giving thanks for the victory that has been achieved. I cannot give you my experience nor share it adequately in words except to tell you I feel Mary Jo and Christ, our Lord, united in a state of perfect knowledge, acceptance and understanding, and being in that state, there are showers of thanksgiving and love for you and for us all. There is a message too, one we all know given years ago by Christ - one that is central to Mary Jo’s victory - ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’”