Last week, we said a final good-bye to Mildred McLaughlin. At her parish church a small group of relatives, and a smaller group of friends, gathered for her simple funeral Mass. No one dropped tears because we felt happy for Mildred’s entering upon a new world after 94 years in this one.

I write about a unique woman and her family who lived in the city where I live. However, there are undoubtedly similar long-lived women and men in every other city and town. They are the people who get to be known as “old timers” and become part of local legend for their style of living, not to say their peculiarities.

Mildred’s home for all but the last two years was on Jackson Street in North Cambridge, several blocks away from the church. There she had lived with her four older sisters in a plain, three-floor wooden house built by her father in 1890 for $1500. In this house the sisters had grown up, learned their place in the family, and took care of the animals they kept in their back yard. These included a cow named Bessie, chickens which provided eggs abundantly, and a dog.

When the McLaughlins were growing up, their section of Cambridge was filled with people of French ethnicity who went to a French-language parish church nearby, but the sisters belonged to the Irish enclave. Both of their parents, William and Mary, were born in Ireland and all of the sisters but Mary eventually visited that country.

Politically, this was Tip O’Neill territory and they were his enthusiastic supporters all the way. In the words of their niece Joanne, “they thought he was the best thing going.”

Mildred’s four older sisters – – Mary, Helen, Cecilia, and Veronica – – went to public high school, then called Cambridge Latin, no short trip from their home. The girls walked the route, a couple of miles each way, without thinking it extraordinary. Mildred, however, was sent to a Catholic school nearby because, in the words of her niece, “they thought she needed it.”

They owned a car but only Cecelia knew how to drive it. Helen had learned but, on one automotive outing, ran into a pear tree and never drove again.

Ultimately, all the sisters, except for one, found employment outside the home. Mildred worked for an insurance company in Boston, making it a practice to eat her lunch at a restaurant each day.  

The oldest sister, Mary, stayed home to take care of the house. Helen, Cecilia, Veronica, and Mildred paid her to do the household work, Monday through Friday, surely a rare arrangement then and now. With even rarer foresight, they also paid Social Security taxes on her employment so that she would have income when she came to retire.

The two brothers in the family, William and John, died in middle age but four of the sisters lived well into their 90s and the other died a few months short of her 90th birthday. As if with a sense of fitness, they died in the order of their birth, beginning with the oldest.

Through the years they enjoyed one another’s company, though Mildred, as the youngest was somewhat spoiled and sometimes out of sorts with the four others. Family members, especially their niece and nephew, loomed large and they relished celebrating holidays with them. Church also was close to the center of their lives offering them a faith that sustained them in hard times.

Despite their other healthful habits, the sisters were not exactly models of nutritional correctness. At the family dinner table, each of the sisters had her own salt shaker. And they would finish each meal by eating something sweet. Mildred also smoked for decades but without any apparent ill effects. She never needed any medications until her last two years.

When she had to move into a nursing home, Mildred found some consolation in knowing that a young family would now live in her house. John, his wife Trudy, and their six-grader son Isaac came to reside on Jackson Street. Only the second family to inhabit the house, they took initiative to meet Mildred and talked with her about the history of the place they had bought from her.

Now that Mildred, the “last leaf,” has fallen, that family tree stands shorn of foliage. She leaves behind a saga of 20th century living in a style vanishing quickly. With rising real estate prices, her neighborhood now boasts families attuned to the high-powered professional world. No longer does one commonly see households with seven children, and adults who walk everyplace they go.

One legacy left behind by Mildred and her sisters is a set of habits that make for good health and longevity. Exercise, low stress, strong community, spiritual life – – these and other elements certainly conduced to long and happy lives for them. Their peculiarities, too, fascinating and endearing, added zest to their lives and perhaps extended them also.

Richard Griffin