MaryMargaret Kelly

MaryMargaret Kelly was born at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, DC, on December 1, 1960, and shared a birthday with both her parents. On the day of her birth, the Secret Service filled the maternity wing due to the only other baby with the last name also beginning with “K” by the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior – aka John-John. As a teenager, MaryMargaret occasionally mused aloud about whether she might have been switched at birth.

MaryMargaret, affectionally called “Mimi” by her family, was the fifth child of seven children born to Joseph Kelly and Catherine Neubeck Kelly. She was preceded in death by her brother, Michael Kelly, her parents, and her father-in-law, Clifton Thompson Sr., brother-in-law, Clifton “Tommy” Thompson, Jr., and her sister-in-law, Sandy Matson. MaryMargaret is survived by her beloved husband, Mike Thompson, her cherished son, Austin Waller Griffin, and his dear wife, Chelsea Griffin, and siblings, Patricia Kelly, Karen Kelly-Shea, (Denny), Jeanne Marie Nealon, (Bob), Brian Kelly, (Stefania), and Monica Murphy, (John), and her mother-in-law, Dorothy Thompson and sisters-in-law, Kathy Hurst and Debbie Torres. She is survived by thirteen nieces and nephews, Thomas Kelly, Kelly Rose and Emmet Shea, Ryan, Emma, Kelly Marie, and Gavin Nealon, Alesandra, Dylan, and Liam Kelly, EllaMarie and Sean Murphy, and six great-nieces and nephews, Jackson, Eleanor, Marshall, Spencer, Devin, and Shannon, and her adored dogs, Jellybean and Jack, who went everywhere with MaryMargaret and Mike. She is also survived by numerous grieving cousins and friends who will forever feel the giant-sized hole in the universe Mary Margaret has left behind.

MaryMargaret grew up in Washington DC, but spent her early childhood in Japan, where her father worked for the U.S. Government, and where her younger brother, Brian, was born. Upon their return home, she attended elementary school at Our Lady of Victory School in Washington DC, and from fifth grade to eighth grade, she delivered the Washington Evening Star newspaper every day after school.

For high school, MaryMargaret secretly applied to the Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda, Maryland. When her parents learned of her application, they informed her that they could not afford the tuition, which was when she told them she had already taken the entrance exam by way of two city buses and had been awarded a full scholarship for all four years. At six feet tall, when she made the Varsity Basketball Team at Stone Ridge, her mother balked at signing the permission slip and said, “But what if you get hurt?” to which MaryMargaret took her gently by the shoulders and said with a smile, “But what if I don’t?”

The permission slip got signed.

MaryMargaret spent part of every spring break at Stone Ridge hiking and camping along parts of the Appalachian Trail. She was also active in the Triple Trio Music Club and the Social Action Committee, which introduced her to her lifelong passion for social justice, the environment, and championing marginalized people through every facet of life. Upon graduation with honors from Stone Ridge while working with her sisters at the famous Booeymonger Deli in DC, MaryMargaret attended the University of New Mexico and became an exchange student with the University of the Virgin Islands, where she studied Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography.

She decided to stay in the Virgin Islands instead of returning to the University of New Mexico and worked on the island, pursuing her studies, and even took the opportunity to go skydiving one day and landed on the X the day of her jump from the plane.

She married James “Jamie” Griffin in 1985 and gave birth to her beloved son, Austin (1986), and shared custody of Austin with Jamie after their divorce. Austin told the story recently about how, when he refused to listen to his mother in public, especially when out with friends, MaryMargaret, instead of yelling or threatening or cajoling, simply began to dance in the aisles of grocery stores or shopping malls. That would get his attention immediately, and he’d race to her side - “Okay, Mom, I’m listening. What do you need? Please stop dancing.” His favorite times with her were all the many Sunday afternoons growing up while she cooked chicken, played smooth jazz, and danced in the kitchen.

MaryMargaret spent decades working in human resources at various companies across the country from Virginia to Washington DC to Maryland to North Carolina to New Mexico to Illinois to Florida, teaching public speaking, presentation skills, extensive coaching, relationship management, team building, leadership development, compliance, liability management, compensation and benefits administration, recruiting and staffing, risk assessment, and numerous other skills that she brought to the table in her years in business. In every environment, MaryMargaret strove to create a development of HR practices among all employees that, in her own words, “provided an employee-oriented, high-performance culture that emphasized empowerment, quality, productivity and standards, goal attainment, and the recruitment and ongoing development of a superior workforce.”

Her cousin, Greg Neubeck, described Mary Margaret’s blunt feedback to his own nervous public speaking presentation. Without missing a beat, she informed him that he was a “hostile presenter, who used his hands like weapons.” He admitted he saw the audience as his opponent, but through her guidance and coaching, he got better. During other public speaking on-camera sessions, MaryMargaret’s son, Austin, was her on-site cameraman for a side gig as a teenager and said his mother could bring the corporate management bigwigs to their knees with her direct, no-nonsense counsel on their own public speaking presentations.

In 2012, after studying Legal Research at Georgetown University and Organizational Psychology at George Mason University, two important events occurred in MaryMargaret’s life. She met Mike Thompson, the love of her life, and she returned to school to finish her BA and make plans for her lifelong dream of Law School.

MaryMargaret and Mike met by chance at the tiny Veterans Airport of Southern Illinois in Marion on Christmas Day when all the flights were snowed in that morning. MaryMargaret was trying to fly out to Palm Springs, and Mike was retrieving luggage that didn’t arrive the night before. They were the only two people in the waiting room at the airport, and they began to talk, and they never stopped talking, and were married on June 1, 2016.

Mike, an Army veteran, was getting his Bachelor of Arts in Music with a focus on the trumpet, but was also thinking of quitting because of his full-time job in conservation law enforcement, and MaryMargaret said, “Why in the world would you do that? You’re so close. You can’t quit. You love what you’re doing.”

Mike resumed his studies and received his BA in Music, and began to play in his band, “Downstate Music Company” in 2013, something he continues to this day all over Southern Illinois. MaryMargaret went on to graduate first with an associate’s degree from John A. Logan College with a 4.0 on the President’s List. She then transferred to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she graduated Cum Laude on the Dean’s List with a Bachelor of Arts in Workforce Communication, Diversity Communication, Workforce Education, and Development Diversity. She was also the Co-Chair of the “It’s On Us” Policy Development and a member of the Golden Key International Society.

After helping to care for her parents, who died in 2022 and 2023 after sixty-plus years of marriage, MaryMargaret applied to Tulane Law School, where she was accepted, and after two years of study, received her Master of Jurisprudence and NOLA Certificate for her “extraordinary dedicated service as a Senior Fellow in the No One Left Alone Program.” Adored and respected by her professors and classmates, when the faculty and administration found out about MaryMargaret’s battle with pancreatic cancer, Tulane Law School overnighted her diploma and certificate to her on the day she received the Last Rites from her beloved friend, Father Brown, surrounded by family on October 6, 2025.

She held both her diploma and certificate in her arms and asked for her Tulane parasol and whispered, “Wow. Wow. Wow.” During the last weeks of her life, in addition to loving and gentle hospice nurses, Mike never left her side, calling her “my bonny bride” and taking care of her night and day, as he’d done through the months of treatment and chemotherapy.

MaryMargaret was also surrounded by family and friends holding her close, reading her poems, singing to her, playing her favorite music, and especially her favorite song, “Pure Imagination,” and squeezing her hand. She requested butterfly poems and that we take the time to get up early to see the sunrises and to watch the white pelicans fly at dusk over her beloved Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge in Marion, where she even did some moonlight kayaking during her years in Southern Illinois. Her brother, Brian, wrote her the most beautiful poems that Austin read to her by her bedside. She slipped away on Saturday, October 18th, very early in the morning before sunrise.

Funeral arrangements have been entrusted to Blue Funeral Home under the direction of Binkley-Ross. There will be a Funeral Mass at 11:00 AM on Monday, December 1, 2025, on MaryMargaret’s birthday, at Holy Spirit Catholic Church at 300 Pine Street in Carterville, IL, celebrated by Father Brown. Right after the Mass, the Celebration of Life will be held from 1-4 PM at Blue Sky Vineyard at 3150 South Rocky Comfort Rd, Makanda, Illinois, where MaryMargaret and Mike were married by Father Brown.

Memorial donations in MaryMargaret’s honor may be made to the Friends of Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge at the following address: 6987 Headquarters Rd, Marion, IL 62959.

If you plan to attend the Celebration of Life, please leave a note in the condolences section of our website so we may plan accordingly.

If you cannot attend the Celebration of Life, but would like to, here is the link to attend. https://evt.live/celebration-of-life-mary-kelly