Jean FitzGerald Jackson Seglie
Jean FitzGerald Jackson Seglie, 83, a longtime resident of suburban Washington DC and Seeley Lake MT, died July 24, 2022, at Harbor Hospital in Baltimore, following a long illness.
Mrs. Seglie graduated from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland in 1956 and Mount Holyoke College in 1961, after taking a year off in 1959 to marry the late US District Court judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, with whom she had two daughters. That marriage ended in divorce after 19 years.
Her second husband, Ernest Seglie, a theoretical nuclear physicist and the first Science Adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Operational Test & Evaluation, died of cancer in 2016. They were married for 29 years, living in Annandale, Virginia, and then in Kensington, Maryland.
An avid reader, writer, and poet, Mrs. Seglie completed a master’s degree in American Literature at the American University in Washington, DC, once her children entered preschool. She returned to the workforce in 1975, as an editor at the nonprofit National Council on Aging and senior technical editor at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), where she met Dr. Seglie and from which she retired in anticipation of becoming a grandmother in 1997.
In later life, Dr. and Mrs. Seglie traveled frequently, including to their second home in Seeley Lake, Montana, where they zealously pursued fly-fishing, writing, cooking, and photography. In her 60s, Mrs. Seglie completed a volume of poetry, dedicated to Dr. Seglie, that remains unpublished. “I don’t want to bring you poetry that flies on precious wings,” she wrote. “I want to send a poem / that kicks and bites and scratches when it comes into the world, / demands its place, / /accepts respect, and is tamed at last by tenderness”.
A devoted, eloquent, and quick-witted wife, mother, grandmother, aunt, daughter, sister, and friend, Mrs. Seglie is survived by her daughters, Leila Kochis of Kensington and Sarah Jackson-Han of Bethesda; granddaughters Gillian Jackson Han, Lauren Alexandra Kochis, and Genevieve Jackson Han; brother Joseph Knowles FitzGerald of Moraga, California; and sister Susan FitzGerald Othmer of Sherman Oaks, California. A fourth sibling, Helen FitzGerald Cserr of North Dighton, Massachusetts, is deceased.
Born October 24, 1938, to the late Joseph Harold FitzGerald and Ruth Milliken FitzGerald, Mrs. Seglie lived as a child in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Alaska, and Maryland. Her father, the first Rhodes Scholar from the University of Montana, completed a law degree at Oxford University, where he met Mrs. Seglie’s mother. He then served for decades at what was then the US Civil Aeronautics Board.
A Celebration of Life is planned in October at the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Maryland, on Saturday, Oct. 22, 2022. Mrs. Seglie’s family welcomes remembrances sent to [email protected] and donations in her memory to Mount Holyoke College and in support of Alzheimer’s research and treatment.
Published by Missoulian on Aug. 9, 2022.
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