Nana: A Family's Lucky Charm

By Jessica Kennedy

“Lucky” was a big word that Jean Johnson practiced saying without teeth.

The speech therapists helped her relearn how to flex her neck muscles, glide her tongue to the roof of her mouth and cluck it back to rest with a staccato breath of air, producing “L” and “K” sounds.

She tried talking to her grandkids Jenna Messier and Peter Messier every day. Sometimes she even stayed overnight at their house on a dead end street in the town of Auburn.

Bearing swollen red gums, Jean bugged her eyes, flexed her neck, and made a silly face at them.

“Lucky, lucky, lucky!” she’d say slowly, exaggerating the speech mechanics the therapists taught her. The silver bracelet Jenna bought her jingled around her wrists as she jiggled her hands. The word “Lucky” was engraved on the dangling horseshoe charm.

Her family burst into laughter and playfully imitated her.

“Lucky, lucky, lucky!” Jenna repeated, laughing. Her neck was strained and her eyes were bugged like her grandmother’s had been. Her mother, Jean’s youngest daughter, Chris Messier laughed until she couldn’t breathe.

“Yeah,” Jean would say with a sarcastic chuckle. “What the hell am I lucky for?”

Jenna glanced at the bracelet. “We are lucky that you’re still here, Nana,” she thought.



If it weren’t for the pain in her ear and jaw and the small sore on her tongue that grew into oral cancer, then Jean would not have lost half her face in the operating rooms at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

The day before she went in for oral surgery, Jean was wrapped in all of her nervous grandchildren’s arms and wished well by her family’s worried faces.

Chris put a hand to her face as she watched her mother pull another grandchild into a gentle squeeze.

“I can’t even believe she has cancer,” Chris thought, her eyes red with fatigue and anxiety. “I can’t even believe it.”


To Chris, it seemed only days ago that her mother and three sisters embarked on their annual “Ladies Only Vacation.” Jean was fit and fiery like always, cracking jokes and laughing loud.

Vacation adventures always started before they got to the best bed and breakfast that Jean could book for them. Stories and giggles spread like wild fire among the women the instant the car driver’s toe touched the accelerator pedal. Jean gave each of her grown daughters fifty dollars to spend on something special to help them remember their trip, and paid for everything else herself. She was ready and willing to try new things, to have fun, laugh, and make memories with her family. Even on their way home, Jean and her daughters would still roll with laughter and retell the escapades from their vacation.

They even found humor on the crooked cobble stone streets in Nantucket.

One warm evening Jean, Chris, and Jean’s second youngest daughter Penny Hetel started walking back from a shabby package store with bulky bundles stuffed with wine bottles, pretzels, and chips. After a walking down the main street a ways, the women came down with a case of “laughing arms,” and had to call a cab to take them back to their hotel. The only problem was that none of them knew how to call for a cab. Regardless, Penny sprang forward in the street fluttering her hand in the night air, hollering in a goofy voice “Cabby! Cabby!” Jean and Chris exploded into fits of laughter, unable to move. Penny continued to march through the street calling “Cabby!” with her long graying braid wagging with her hand until she finally flagged one down.

When the women were delivered to their hotel, they were welcomed back by Jean’s two oldest daughters, popped open bottles of cheap red wine, and chattered away.

Chris had her camera out, ready to document her mother and sisters throughout the night. She went in for surprise shots too, capturing Jean in her floral night gown sitting on the toilet with a tooth brush hanging out of her mouth.

“Smile, Ma!” Chris said, chortling at her silly ambush.

Jean laughed and smiled a white, foamy smile for her daughter as the camera clicked.


Four years later, the woman in that picture was barely recognizable as she lay in her hospital bed in the Intensive Care Unit. After twelve hours of removal and reconstructive surgery, Jean’s distorted face was pink and puffy, resembling a fleshy beach ball. Stitches and staples laced her jaw line and the right side of her face up to the center of her bottom row of teeth. Half of her tongue had been replaced by skin tissue from her left forearm. More tissue, lymph nodes, and the cancerous tumor had been cut out from the right side of her face. Steel plates had been screwed into her face to reinforce her bone structure.

Her family was by her side once visiting was permitted that night.

Jean slept through her anxious family’s visits. She missed the tired, stunned eyes of her grandkids, and dreamed while Chris’s knees buckled from sleep deprivation and shock.

After surgery, Jean’s mouth was too swollen for dentures. While she was able to keep her voice through pen and paper and speech therapy, Jean could only savor her favorite meals through memories. The muscles in her mouth, throat, and neck were too tender and delicate from surgery and radiation for her to swallow solid foods for the rest of her life.

In place of solid food, a clear, plastic feeding tube was hooked into her torso, just above her belly button. A clear disk separated the tube from her torso, to prevent the skin from adhering to it. The end of the tube functioned like a large, flexible straw. A plastic pinch clamp was fastened to the tube to stop air from flowing into Jean’s intestines.

Each day, Jean shook and cracked open a small can labeled “Jevity” and carefully poured a liquid resembling coffee into her tube. When the liquid settled and slowly sank into her body, she added more. Sometimes she mixed in crushed oxycodone and other medications with the liquid.

Sometimes, Jenna and Peter would groan over another meal of chicken when she stayed at Chris’s house for suppertime.

“I’ll trade with you any day,” Jean told them, holding her Jevity can.

She sighed. She was usually the one hosting and feeding everyone else.


Every summer Jean stayed up long into the night hours waiting for her family to arrive at her home on Cape Cod, greeting them with smiles and steaming pots of spaghetti. She always made sure everyone was comfortable and happy, and struck up conversations with anyone willing to chat with her, even if she had already talked to them on the phone that same day.

Every single one of her sixteen grandchildren was taken care of first and foremost, even if she was in mid-conversation with a queen.

In the mornings at the Cape, everyone woke up at 7:30 a.m. to the clanging and clattering of pots and pans and was welcomed to one of Jean’s famous homemade breakfasts. On the kitchen table, boxes of cereal were lined up like dominoes, surrounded by bowls of blueberries, strawberries, grapes, bananas and stacks of piping hot pancakes. Visitors always found Jean standing tip-toed on her stubby stepstool so her four foot eleven frame could reach another pan for fresh bacon.

“Did I wake you up?” Jean would ask her young grandkids as they walked downstairs rubbing their eyes.

“Oh no, Nana,” a then twelve-year-old Jenna Messier said with a yawn. “The sun woke us up anyways.”

“I still have to get new shades!” Jean said, furrowing her tan brow.

“Hey Nana,” a then seven-year-old Peter Messier said while forking two pancakes on his plate. “Can we go to West Dennis Beach today?”

“Yeah, sure Pete,” Jean replied, smiling.

“Then can we go to the golf course after that?” he asked, squeezing a stream of syrup on his pancakes.

“Of course,” Jean said with an even bigger smile.

“And then after that, tonight, can we go to Sundae School for ice cream?”

Jean laughed at her eager grandson. Her hazel eyes twinkled.

“Ok,” she replied. She took anyone anywhere they wanted to go in a heartbeat.


But during her fight with cancer, the only places she could go were to the hospital for radiation and to follow-up doctor’s appointments.

At one particular doctor’s appointment regarding a familiar pain in her jaw and ear, she went through another follow-up CAT scan. When it had finished, the doctor flipped through some papers and looked up at Jean and her daughter Chris Messier, who were restlessly awaiting the results. His face was remorseful and grave.

“The cancer is back, and has spread to her lungs,” he told them, folding his hands.
Tears gushed down Chris’s face.

“Chrissy, don’t cry,” Jean said calmly, looking at her daughter. “Everyone has to die.”

Chris cried harder.

Jean’s heartbeats were numbered.


Numbers only applied to Jean when she kept tissues handy. Each day when she got dressed in one of her famous blouses, she tucked two, three, sometimes four crinkled tissues into the wrist of her sleeve. “You never know when you might need one,” she would tell her family. Lots of times Jean handed out tissues to her grandkids like a magician pulling a rope of colored scarves out of his sleeve. Jenna needed one in church. Peter needed three or four because of his terrible allergies.

Sometimes Jean would lose her tissues around the house. Chris found two tissues scrunched in her pillow or in the couch. Jenna found one jammed in between the blue couch cushions. Peter even found one stuck in a window.

But on a cloudy September day, Jean’s massive family crammed inside St. Joseph’s Church, each member with crumbled tissues clenched in their hands.

Jean rested in front of the altar encased in her glossy, mahogany bed. A gold cross was delicately placed on the cover of her closed casket.

Every head was bowed as a close family friend, Larry Olson solemnly stood at the podium on the flower-dressed altar, his hands clamped to the sides.

“Jean was an intelligent, high-spirited woman who was always full of life. Her journey ended peacefully on the morning of September twelfth, at the age of seventy-four,” he read, his voice cracking. “Jean, Nana, loved to entertain company and would always go many extra miles to make sure they enjoyed their stay…You could always tell where she had been by her never-ending trail of tissues…She gave so much love to everyone, but never let herself believe that she was truly loved…And there will always be room for one more at Nana’s place when our journeys too, have ended…”


Two months after her mother’s funeral, Chris came home with armfuls of trinkets leftover from Jean. She set down a rounded tan box printed with burgundy flowers. Jenna, now twenty one years old, entered the room to greet her mother.

They both opened the box. Inside was littered with small art projects and notes given to Jean by Jenna and Peter since they were little. They sifted through the papers. Jenna found handfuls of small post-it notes she secretly left for Jean whenever she left her home on the Cape. They all read, “Thank you. I love you” in looped writing.

Chris reached for a small collection of gold and silver jewelry. Many were Jean’s necklaces; white and yellow gold chains with dangling Nantucket baskets, a thin, white gold chain with a skinny Cape Cod starfish, a silver chain with half of a pink heart “best friends” charm on the end.

Jenna had the other half of the heart in her bedroom.

“Oh, Jenna,” Chris said suddenly. “I have that bracelet you gave Nana.”

She pulled a small silver bracelet free from the tangle of necklace chains and handed it to Jenna. Jenna looked at the bracelet; her face fell.

The horseshoe charm hanging from it said “Lucky.”

“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” Jenna said quietly, holding the bracelet. “What the hell am I lucky for?”