Before I met my friend Marybeth, before I even knew her name, I knew that she was a person of extraordinary love.
I first saw Marybeth and her daughter Emily nearly two decades ago at daily Mass. Emily, who has autism, was then about ten years old, and she was a constant flurry of motion during Mass. What drew me to Marybeth from the very beginning was the way she loved this precious child.
When Emily stood up and then landed without warning in Marybeth’s lap, Marybeth unflinchingly wrapped her arms around her daughter and kissed the top of her head. When Emily spoke out loud about wanting snacks or something bothering her, Marybeth snuggled her close and quietly whispered calming words. When Emily wandered too far, Marybeth smiled and picked her up and bounced her until Emily giggled with delight.
It was a dance of love, and in all the subsequent times I witnessed it—during so many Masses, over so many years—not once did I see even a glimmer of frustration flicker across Marybeth’s face. There was only abundant love. Marybeth came to Mass to pray, and every single time she was interrupted, she responded immediately with a gesture of love that turned each interruption into one of the most moving prayers I have ever seen. She was the living expression of 1 Corinthians 13: “Love is patient and kind…”
Watching her, I wanted to do what she did: to respond to every interruption, every possible frustration that came my way, with an immediate gesture of love.
As the years went by and Marybeth kept bringing this dear child to daily Mass, Emily’s exuberance turned toward the words of the liturgy—words she would repeat with enthusiasm and wonder.
“Co-heirs!” she would echo in delight after the priest said the word in the Eucharistic Prayer. “We’re going to be co-heirs!”
“Yes!” her mother would whisper back, nodding and smiling brightly and squeezing Emily’s hands in hers.
Sitting behind them, I understood in a new way that Mass is where Heaven touches earth. I felt like I was seeing it from Heaven’s side.
When my children and Emily became friends, I got the chance to experience another dimension of Marybeth’s love. Not only was she an incredibly loving and intuitive mother, but she was an incredibly loving and intuitive friend.
One day after Mass, Marybeth saw me in the parking lot and asked how I was doing. I was going through a hard time, and her empathy was a balm for my tears. A few hours later, I heard an unexpected knock at my front door. I opened it, and there stood Marybeth and Emily on the porch with a bouquet of flowers for me. Marybeth’s heart had been filled with compassion for my suffering, and she responded just as she always did with Emily in Mass, with an immediate gesture of love.
Raising Emily, Marybeth became very active in the special needs community. One year, my children and I attended a pool party to celebrate the birthdays of Emily and several of her friends with special needs. I marveled at the overwhelming joy, gratitude, sincerity, and love among these young people with disabilities. It felt like a birthday party in Heaven. After the party, as we walked to our car, Marybeth came up beside me, pushing someone else’s child in a wheelchair.
“This is what Heaven will be like, isn’t it?” she said.
“That’s exactly what I was just thinking,” I replied.
“All the things that we get caught up in don’t matter here,” she said. “It’s just being who you are, the person God made you to be. And the things that normally matter, that define our success in the world, don’t matter here.”
This was the lens through which Marybeth viewed the world: she looked straight past worldly success and into the heart of what really matters.
She had the charism of contagious joy, but at the same time, Marybeth was not afraid to share her struggles. She did not sugarcoat the complexities of being a caregiver for a child with autism. Yet even when she spoke of suffering, her words were comforting, because they revealed her closeness to God.
Her suffering—or rather, the love with which she offered her suffering—was steadily paving her path to Heaven. Marybeth was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. She bravely endured surgery and radiation, and we rejoiced when she went into remission; but seven years later, the cancer returned with a very rare metastasis to the lining of her abdomen. This time, it was stage four and incurable.
She fought it hard, from every possible angle. After multiple surgeries and seemingly endless rounds of treatment, she got the chance in 2023 to go on a pilgrimage to Fatima and Lourdes.
A few days before her flight was scheduled to leave, I saw her at Mass. After receiving Communion, I was back in my pew, praying, and I looked up and saw Marybeth in the Communion line. As I looked at her, I was overcome by a powerful sense of how much God loved her and how precious she was to Him. It felt as if Jesus, in the Eucharist I had just received, was looking at Marybeth and showing me how incredibly beloved she was to His Sacred Heart.
Afterward, I sent a message to Marybeth telling her about this experience, and she wrote back and told me (with her characteristic effusion of gratitude) that she was printing the message to bring with her on her trip.
“I have struggled with seeing Jesus’ love for me,” she wrote, “and I know it is only His Sacred Heart that can truly bring me peace. You have been a true messenger of God’s grace to me.”
I thanked God for allowing me to console her with His love, as she had done so many countless times for me, and to help fulfill a need I never would have guessed she had.
A year later, after still more treatments and painful side effects, in October of 2024, Marybeth sent an update with great news: her latest test had shown that her cancer had stopped progressing. That very afternoon, I was sitting on a bench at the local community center, thinking of Marybeth, when I looked across the room and there she was.
“Oh, Maura!” she said, her eyes shining with joy at the serendipity of running into each other in this place neither of us had known the other ever went. “Let’s say a Hail Mary in thanksgiving to God for us meeting here!”
She took both my hands in hers and led us in a Hail Mary. After we had talked for a long time, she took my hands again and led us in a Memorare before we parted ways.
This gesture of taking both hands in hers and offering a short prayer was a trademark, something Marybeth did often with the people she met. If we were talking on the phone and she couldn’t take my hands, she would always lead us in a Hail Mary or a Memorare before we hung up.
Our hopes were high that day, but the reprieve was temporary. The cancer soon began advancing again. It metastasized to her bones, then to her liver. In November of 2025, Marybeth survived a heart attack. Then she developed excruciating osteonecrosis of the jaw. Through it all, she steadfastly united her sufferings with Jesus, offering them as prayers for those in need. Again she was the living example of 1 Corinthians 13; this time, it was “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
One evening this past March, I was on my way to see her and felt inspired to pick up flowers, just as she had done for me that long-ago afternoon.
Carrying the bouquet, I walked up to the front porch and knocked. Her husband, John, opened the door and invited me into the living room. Marybeth lay on the couch, wrapped in a blanket. The cancer had taken her hair, and she couldn’t sit up when I came in the room, but her joy was still effusive.
“Maura!” she said, her voice bursting with happiness—just the way she always greeted me. It must have taken a herculean effort to make me feel so welcome when she was in agony. Then she saw what I was carrying.
“Flowers!!!” she exclaimed in wide-eyed wonder, like a child at Christmas. “You brought flowers!!!”
You would have thought I’d brought her the moon.
“They are so beautiful!” she gushed.
“I was remembering that day, years ago, when you and Emily showed up on my front porch with a bouquet of flowers after you saw me crying in the church parking lot,” I told her. “It meant so much to me, and it inspired me to do the same for you.” Her act of love had planted this seed. I thanked God that my simple little gesture had brought my beautiful friend such abundant joy.
I knelt at her side, and she hugged me a few times, her eyes glistening. I felt at once how happy she was to see me—she had a singular gift for knowing how to make a person feel loved—and how deeply she was suffering.
She held my gaze, and eternity was in her eyes. The only other time I have seen such a look was in my mother’s eyes, the last time I saw her before she died.
“I don’t think it will be very long,” Marybeth said.
It was so hard to know what to say. I didn’t want to believe this could be my last visit with her.
Kneeling beside her was like kneeling beside Christ.
“Everything is being stripped away,” she said. “But that’s okay, because it makes me more like Jesus.”
We prayed together, and talked—a conversation that felt like it was floating in between worlds. I told her how her love had inspired me ever since the first time I saw her with Emily at Mass. I told her I had always wanted to love like she did.
When I said goodbye, I steeled myself by believing I might see her again. But it was not to be on this side of Heaven.
Two weeks later, she was in hospice.
The news came on a quiet April morning. After a courageous battle with metastatic breast cancer, Marybeth had taken her final breath and gone to be with Jesus, whose love she had spent her life lavishing upon everyone in her path.
“I’m praying for her soul because we’re supposed to, but she has to be in Heaven already,” was the sentiment echoed by one friend after another as we talked and shared memories at her viewing, expressing a universal awe of her astonishing capacity to love.
After I prayed at Marybeth’s casket, I heard a voice calling to me from across the room.
“Hi, Mrs. McKeegan!” Emily waved, making me feel as welcome and loved as her mother always did.
I walked over to Emily, and she immediately took both my hands in hers, just like her mom always did. In her hands, I felt her mother’s prayers.
After talking with Emily, I turned to introduce myself to her two friends standing beside her. Immediately one of them opened her arms wide to me for a hug. There were no strangers here. Everyone was unconditionally loved.
This, I thought to myself—this was Marybeth’s world. This was her Heaven, where nothing disguises the truth about love and where the childlike heart is the safe harbor of eternal shores. And I wanted to live in that world forever.
The next day, I drove to the church where I had first sat near Marybeth and Emily at Mass all those years ago. And once again, the veil between Heaven and Earth was lifted as all the saints and angels joined us there, this time for Marybeth’s funeral Mass.
Emily, accompanied by Marybeth’s sister, Marla Jeane, read the petitions, lifting my soul to God as they reflected what was dearest to Marybeth’s heart.
“For all people with disabilities,” was one petition, “that they may feel a true sense of belonging, safety, and love in our society. For the parents, families, and caregivers of people with special needs, that they may find strength in the Lord for the challenges they face. And in thanksgiving for those who work professionally in the disability community, and care for God’s precious children and adults with dignity and love, we pray to the Lord.”
In her beautiful words of remembrance given at the funeral, Marybeth’s daughter Alex, Emily’s sister, shared a story about a time when she and her mom were at a coffee shop together.
“I turned around for one second,” Alex recalled. “I went up to get our coffee. And when I came back, my mom was sitting with a group of teenagers. They were dealing with some typical teenage drama, and my mom was sitting there, holding their hands, giving them advice and love. She had no hesitation. She saw some people who needed support, and she was there.”
No hesitation. When Marybeth saw that those teenagers needed love, she loved. When she saw they needed hands, she offered hers. She saw their need and responded with an immediate gesture of love. The way she loved Emily at Mass was the very way she loved everyone around her: without flinching, without hesitation, without bounds, without end.
Marybeth not only told me what she thought Heaven was like; through her witness, she showed Heaven to me. Her love was Heaven’s love.
If I close my eyes and hold out my hands, I can almost feel her taking them in hers and praying a Hail Mary with me in joyful thanksgiving that we met here on earth—and then a Memorare as we part ways for now, but not forever. These prayers, which Marybeth offered so many times with hands that held Heaven’s love, fill me with hope that we will meet again one day, in the place where “[God] will wipe away every tear from [our] eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more” (Rev. 21:4).
In the place where we’ll be co-heirs.
In the place where all the things we get caught up in here on earth, the things that define our success in the world, don’t matter anymore.
In the place where we can just be who we are, the people God made us to be, for all eternity.
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon her. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
