The Litzler Family

Bill and Joyce Litzler gave to a lot of places. Cleveland Clinic wasn’t one of them. Hospitals made money, they figured. Why would they need help?

A doctor changed their minds. Bill and Joyce liked Joseph Knapp, MD, so much that they made a gift in his honor. Dr. Knapp was delighted; no one had done that for him before.

In 2016, Bill joined the Cleveland Clinic Avon Hospital board. He remains astonished by what he sees on a regular basis: an institution that measures everything it does, then sets out to do it even better.

For Bill and Joyce, generosity comes naturally. They grew up watching their own parents give of themselves — in parishes, in scout troops, in nursing homes.

“We saw it firsthand,” Joyce says. “Both of us.”

Their own children learned similar lessons. Matt, Ann and Julia were young when Bill and Joyce gave them baby food jars to decorate. The kids would drop their chore money in the jars. At Christmastime, the family pooled the funds to buy jump ropes and balls and whatever else Sister Barbara needed for her students at Urban Community School. The Litzlers delivered everything to her themselves.

A few decades later, Matt came to Cleveland Clinic on a bicycle.

A lifelong cyclist, he joined VeloSano in 2014. Before long, he was on the steering committee.

Then, in July 2020, everything changed. Matt was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He remembers sitting outside afterward, not knowing where to turn next as he waited for his wife, Stacey, to bring the car around.

Days later he was at Cleveland Clinic’s Mellen Center for Multiple Sclerosis with his care team, still contending with double vision, tingling and slurred speech. He heard himself ask if there was a committee he could join. Some way to help others.

“It was just instinct,” he says. “I had to do something.”

Matt has been doing something ever since. He serves on Cleveland Clinic’s Neurological Institute Advisory Committee. He has hosted multiple neuro-focused Gatherings for Good and recruited dozens of people for the Cleveland Clinic Brain Study, including his son Brett. Matt and Stacey have generously supported MS research, including gifts in honor of neurologist Jeffrey Cohen, MD, and Jennifer Sedlak, CNP. And when someone is newly diagnosed, a friend of a friend might get them on the phone with Matt, who has spent hours listening to strangers, sharing his own MS journey and reassuring them.

A few years ago, Bill and Joyce made a decision: They would stop making small gifts far and wide and focus on a few causes worth sustaining that wouldn’t fall by the wayside. The Cleveland Clinic Brain Study — a first-of-kind longitudinal study whose goal is to identify new biomarkers and targets for preventing or curing neurodegenerative and other neurological disorders — made the cut.

Bill has a phrase for all of it. “If you do well,” he says, “you do good.”

Matt Litzler shared his story in the debut episode of “The Gratitude Sessions.” Watch it here: cle.clinic/matt-and-meghan