Mary Jane Kagarise

Mary Jane (Christensen) Kagarise, age 76, a long-time resident of Chapel Hill, passed away August 20, 2025. She was born in Marion, Ohio on February 8, 1949, the daughter of John E. and Mary Irene (MacLaughlin) Christensen. Mary Jane graduated from Evanston Township High School (1967), Duke University (1971), and postgraduate (MSPH) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1980).

Mary Jane married fellow Duke student Thomas Kagarise at Duke Chapel in 1970. She loved her family more than anything. Mary Jane credited her two children, Stephen and Jenny, as her greatest loves and achievements. Her forty-year career in health care focused on university academics, hospital administration and nursing.

Survivors include her sister, Ann Maureen Christensen in Alpharetta, Georgia; her son, Stephen Thomas Kagarise, an Army veteran teaching at Chosun University in South Korea; her daughter and son-in-law, Jennifer Kagarise Wilson and Carey Michael Wilson; their children, Whitney Denise Wilson and Justin Michael Wilson; her son-in-law Brandon Glosson, her daughter-in-law Kaylyn Collier and her great granddaughter Millie Glosson.

Mary Jane treasured time with family and friends. Throughout her life she had a deep fondness for animals, gleefully and unapologetically adopting and spoiling dogs and cats; and she sponsored wildlife adoptions (elephants, monarch butterflies, giraffes). Mary Jane trained medical service dogs; participated in church activities; and sponsored a needy child in Ecuador. Among her national honors were The James B Duke Society, Duke University; Delta Omega, national Honorary Public Health Society, Theta Chapter; and Sacred Circle, Century Society, St. Labre Indian Mission and School. Mary Jane was an ASPCA Guardian and a Humane Society Hero. She supported The Mara Elephant Project under the auspices of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The Mara Project cares for baby elephants who have been orphaned, and nurses sick and injured elephants back to health, including medical-surgical intensive care. Mara elephants are integrated into an accepting herd and released.

One of the many highlights of her career at UNC School of Medicine was working with Colin G. Thomas, Jr., MD to co-author the book Legends and Legacies – A Look Inside Four Decades of Surgery at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill 1952 – 1993.

Mary Jane retired from UNC in 2012. She loved retirement. She took the opportunity to further study the Catholic faith and to renew her musical interests, especially playing the flute and learning the piccolo. Having grown up surrounded by her mother’s life-long passion for classical piano, Mary Jane had begun piano lessons in kindergarten, then learned flute in elementary school and self-taught piccolo during retirement. Her musical center of the home was the old upright piano her mother had grown up playing in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

A Funeral Mass for Mary Jane will be held at St. Thomas More Catholic Church on Thursday, September 4, 2025, at 2:00PM. The Committal Rite and Inurnment will immediately follow the Mass. Though she loved flowers, in lieu of them, the family suggests Mary Jane would prefer to be honored by a deed of kindness extended to a needy person or animal, such as the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), or the Mara Elephant Project.