Her impact was clear in the end
By Mark Woods
Story updated at 7:30 AM on Wednesday, Mar. 18, 2009


Provided by the Bishop family
Starr Bishop (left), her parents, Bill and Melody, and brother, Bill, pose for a family photo last Easter, two days after she was diagnosed with ALS. Starr, 21, died Saturday.


Starr Bishop got the news less than a year ago, on Good Friday.

She had ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

Even at its best, if there is such a thing with ALS, it's a horrible disease, one with no known cure, no stories of people who underwent treatment and stopped the ravaging of their bodies. And Starr and her family found out she had one of the most progressive types of ALS, one that gave her a life expectancy of one to two more years.

On that day, Melody Starr Anne Bishop was 20 years old.

She lived another 358 days, the disease methodically tearing apart her body. Her speech went first. Then her neck and arms and eventually the muscles that allowed her to breathe.

She died Saturday afternoon.

But her family says her death isn't the story. It's what happened in the 21 years of her life - particularly those 358 days.

"You think you know your child," said her mother, Melody Bishop.

Starr's parents are Bill and Melody Bishop, two local architects who are quite active in the community, particularly in areas of neighborhood planning. Bill is the city councilman for District 2. Melody designed the Northbank Riverwalk. And while they thought they knew their children (Starr and her 20-year-old brother, Bill), this past year was full of revelations.

They knew that Starr loved the outdoors. She had played soccer and skied, went sky diving and scuba diving. She made it to State Science Fair while at Paxon School for Advanced Studies with her studies on the river. And when she was 18, without any prodding from her parents, she went to a public meeting and spoke against closing off Hogan Street to building a parking garage. Our river, she argued, should be made more accessible, not less.

Her parents knew all this. Knew that she went to the University of Central Florida, dreaming of becoming a lawyer, a prosecutor, a politician. Knew that she ended up at the College of Architecture at the University of Florida, dreaming of following in the footprints her parents have left all over Jacksonville.

They knew she was active at Christ the King Catholic Church, even after she went away to college.

But they didn't know just how much she had affected others along the way. And how much she continued to do it until the end.

Even though she no longer could speak, she still was in school last fall. Through a disability program at UF, she had hired two graduate students to help her continue to work on a project. The focus of the project was a fascinating paradoxical concept. Create buildings that make people, especially kids, want to leave them. Entice those who are inside to get outside. And bring the outside to the inside.

Health and architecture. For future generations. As she was dying, this was her goal.

Melody Bishop found out about this when she went to visit her daughter in Gainesville and discovered a studio, the graduate students, drawings and a professor who started telling her all about the project.

And this was followed by more personal and profound revelations once Starr ended up back in Jacksonville, bed-ridden, but still plugging away at her school work online until a couple of weeks ago.

"It took her being hospitalized for me, as her mom, to begin to hear the rest of the story," Melody Bishop says.

When she went into respiratory failure and ended up in hospitals, first Memorial then Mayo, the news spread. People started showing up and inevitably telling Starr's family stories about her.

They heard from one parent about the time when Starr, then in high school, had heard that a friend who was at UF had been heading down a dangerous path. She hopped in a car after a half day of school, drove to Gainesville and confronted him. She made a difference for that family, the boy's mother told Starr's mother.

You think you know your child - and you assume the parts you don't know are the parts they want hidden, the embarrassing moments, the examples of immaturity.

As it turns out, even when you think you have a good kid, sometimes you don't know how good.

Each day in the hospital there were stories like this from a steady stream of visitors. Classmates, friends from church, parents of her friends, a high school teacher.

And each night, there was the 10 O'Clock Club.

A small sign said that only two visitors were allowed. But in the evening at least a dozen people crammed into Starr's room.

They told stories about her, held her hand and sang to her, mostly Christian rock songs from the Teen Life program at Christ the King.

"Some of the nurses even would come in and be tearfully singing along," Melody Bishop said. "You could hear the music kind of floating out to the hallways."

You think you know your child. And then, as she's dying, you learn so much about her life.

You would think that others were carrying her during the last 358 days. And I'm sure that did happen. But if you hear about the stories, or the messages waiting for her on her BlackBerry, you realize that even at the end it often was the other way around.

She was carrying them.

Arrangements

A vigil (viewing as well as stories or comments) for Starr Bishop will be held 6 p.m. Thursday. The funeral Mass will be 4 p.m. Friday. Both the Mass and vigil are at Assumption Catholic Church.

Because of Starr's love of the outdoors, the St. Johns River and the Riverwalk, the family is asking that contributions be made to the Starr Bishop Memorial Fund for tree plantings along the Riverwalk. Make checks payable to Greenscape with notation for the "Starr Bishop Memorial Fund." Send to: Greenscape, 4401 Emerson St., Suite 3, Jacksonville, FL 32207.



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