Nana died in 1974 at seventy-four. She’d be a hundred and twenty-six today — a year older than half the age of a country that just turned two hundred and fifty.
Her name was Ellen Cannon Furlong. We called her Nana.
She was born in Dublin. She married a man named Alexander Joseph Furlong and had a daughter, Betty. Alexander went ahead to Boston to find work. A year later he sent for them, and Nana crossed the Atlantic alone with Betty on her hip. They made their way to Cambridge, and she had two more children there — my mother Joannie, and my uncle Joe.
Then, the day after Christmas 1943, Alexander died. My mother was twelve. Nana raised the three of them alone.
When I think of her birthday, though, none of that is what comes to mind first.
I think of strawberry shortcake and fireworks. Fun and family. Five-dollar bills pressed into my eight-year-old hand — enough candy to last a month.
I think of her singing, in that Irish lilt of hers:
There was a little man and he had a little gun, and over the mountains he did run, with a belly full of fat and a big tall hat, and a pancake tied to his bum bum bum —
And she’d pat us on the bottom to finish the line.
I think of the nights she let us stay up late when my parents were out, and the night they came home early and she hid all of us in the toy closet, giggling, until the coast was clear.
I think of her Kent cigarettes, and the silent treatment she could give when we hurt her feelings.
And I think of her code. If we ever mocked someone spastic, she’d stop us cold warning “God will strike you that way.” She would not tolerate any of us referring to her own mother as she. And above all — loyalty. You stood by your family. You stood by your blood. That was not a rule in her house. It was the whole of the law.
I have an Irish cousin, Peggy Kelly, who is a hundred and four now. She came out to visit me here in Vermont less than ten years ago. She brought half a Nova Scotia salmon with her, out of pure generosity, and she had the same twinkle in her eye I remember in Nana.
If Nana could ask one question today, on her hundred and twenty-sixth, I think it would be simple.
Did everybody make it to the party?
But my family is fractured. Scattered, and in some corners, canceled outright. There was no party.
My mother’s dying wish was that we all stay together. She promised me, near the end, that everything would be all right. She died anyway. And sadly, so has her dream.
The American dream, George Carlin used to say — “you have to be asleep to believe it.”
Nana’s dream was smaller. Show up. Keep your word. Stand by your blood.
She kept every one of them.
The country turns two hundred and fifty today. It promised to take care of its own. It hasn’t kept that one either.
Nana’s the one I trust.
“Thumb Out” Book One of my memoir trilogy “The Spaces Between” is available now