Christine (Crowley) Cunningham

Christine Marguerite Crowley was born September 26, 1946, in Waltham, Massachusetts, the daughter of Marguerite Carley of Newton and Cornelius Crowley of Brookline. Her mother was an ambulance driver throughout WWII and her father a Lieutenant Detective in the Massachusetts State Police. She was the oldest of three sisters. The Crowley girls lost their mother when Christine was eight and were sent to live at Rosary Academy in Watertown. Christine lived there until she graduated and entered Newton College of the Sacred Heart, now part of Boston College, where she was a Russian and Art major. She was forced to drop out in freshman year when she became pregnant with her first child and did not return until after her second baby was born four-and-a-half years later. “I don’t see how one little baby could get in the way,” said the head of the art department, who’d called to see where she’d been, and would she return.
 
In this way both her children attended her life drawing classes, Willy in a baby carriage and Marguerite set up in the back of the drawing studio with an easel and a newsprint pad, learning to write by copying the words that Christine wrote in charcoal at her own easel. Though forced to leave school again, she completed her BA through Boston College the year she turned 50 and went on to get her MA as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, a job she held and loved for the rest of her life. As a single mother of two she worked in her aunt Doris Carley’s real estate office. On her first visit to Nantucket, she saw a house on Cliff Road, worn out and for sale. From a payphone at The Chicken Box, she called Aunt Dottie, who said, “Buy it. I’ll give you a downpayment.” Christine ended up running The Cliff House as a bed-and-breakfast for 30 years, making it up as she went along. The first woman who answered the chambermaid ad that Christine had posted on a bulletin board was asked for advice on what might improve the place. The woman looked around and said, “Maybe take the Holiday Inn towels out of the bathrooms?”
 
When it rained, she would walk through the dining room of cranky guests, handing out hot muffins and garbage bags, saying, with her usual stentorian good cheer, “Just put this over you and go out! A little raincoat is all you need.” Junior Walker and the All-Stars were among the first guests, and Fred Rogers the first customer of Christine’s ill-fated rental car business.
 
She met her first husband in Symphony Hall, at an Arthur Rubinstein concert, and her second on the dance floor at the Chicken Box. Through both those marriages she created homes that more resembled grand hotels then ordinary domestic settings. People were always coming through, for a few days or for years: friends, friends of friends, relatives, boarders. She invented families wherever she was, the motherless mother to everyone.
 
“You’re nothing but a traveling cocktail party,” her second husband remarked, after she’d broken her foot dancing with his construction crew after work. Which was partly true. Her laugh was raucous and her pouring hand was heavy— “I’m not trying to kill you, I’m only trying to cheer you up,” she once told an Italian boarder who refused a seventh glass of Madeira—and she was the center of any room she was in. You even knew if you entered a space she had just left. People’s guards would be down. The bank tellers would all be laughing uncharacteristically. The Italian boarder would have cheered up.

 
Nobody can remember how many psychics she visited who asked her, “Why are you here?” At least five were genuinely puzzled as to why a woman with so clear a gift would come to a stranger for insight. A past-life therapist once said that when it came to Christine, they saw a hole in the ground, with smoke steaming out. This surprised no-one close to her. On some level everyone knew she was part Delphic Oracle, part Cat in the Hat.  
 
She saw you; she heard you, and she decided what was best, for you, and for her. The laws that governed her life were formed through a habit of radical generosity and an iron-clad belief that she knew best. She recognized no rules but her own, and she excelled at bending reality to her own will. She possessed a startling ability to disarm, which made people, often against their better judgment, inclined to obey.
 
Really, she might have been a character from a tall tale, Paul Bunyan or Molly Pitcher or John Henry. How else could there be so many stories?
 
There was the time she left her Cadillac Eldorado running in front of the Hyannis Airport—not parked legally, because Christine’s idea of a suitable parking space was metaphysical—and then went in, had lunch, and flew to Nantucket. The car was still running. When she got back to the mainland on Monday morning she sailed through the airport, searching for her keys. “Looking for these Christine?” a clerk called out from behind a desk. “Thank you, dear. Do you know where I parked my car?” Of course, someone else parked it. “Things just work out.” That was her motto. Proved true, most of the time. There was the time she delivered a giant bouquet of flowers to the woman at the gas company, who was in tears and pregnant and recently abandoned by her boyfriend. “Here you go, sweetheart,” said Christine. “Now, it’s all over but the memories.”  One Christmas she sent an eighty-dollar bottle of scotch to the new branch manager at her local bank with a card that read, “Well, dear, if I’m going to drive you to drink, you may as well do it in style.” One New Year’s Eve she greeted visitors pantless, and explained that she always wore black underpants: “That way, if people show up, I can just say I’m in my bathing suit.” In December she would drive around in a convertible blasting salsa music, looking for all the best lights. She loved applauding on the lawns at Christmas time.
 
With her dear friend of many decades, Joe Gleeson, she swam in Walden Pond, Crystal Lake, Buzzards Bay, Blue Harbor, Jamaica, the Bahamas, quarries on Vinalhaven and, of course, all over Nantucket. She loved to dive into the surf on the south side of the island then pop up with bathing suit in hand, waving it once before flinging it to the beach. She loved to swim. She had been a swimming teacher when she was young, and in the water was a seal, able to swim forever or close to it, across Walden Pond and back again and then across and back again, always employing a perfect, elegant breaststroke.  
 
If she in general held the crown for least judgmental person you ever met, this may not have applied to people who waited on her in restaurants. Anyone who dined with or waited upon Christine had the experience of being held hostage by the Queen of Hearts, demanding more butter, sending side dishes back, ordering after closing time, special ordering…everything. Still, in the immediate aftermath of her death when friends and family dropped into her local, Paddy’s, the parade of weeping waitresses was astonishing.
 
She could surprise you suddenly with things she knew shorthand, how to iron like a professional, fifteen lines of Pushkin in Russian recited from memory.
 
The last real fun she had was with that original Cliff House chambermaid, Elizabeth Lowengard. In January of 2026 they met again, after decades, to go on a Christian McBride Jazz Cruise.
 
She wanted her daughter, who learned to read in a drawing class, to be a designer of wine bottles, though instead Marguerite became a visual artist. Willy, her son, runs the Café Havelaar in Amsterdam, and like Christine, he has created a home for strangers and friends and family.
 
She leaves behind daughter Marguerite White, of Rockland ME, and son Willy White, of Amsterdam, NL. Daughter in law, Madeleen DeKock, of Amsterdam and her beloved grandsons, Fionn and Fedde. She is survived by her youngest sister, Susan Alexander, and predeceased by sister Linda Crowley and half-brother Peter Funderburk. She was aunt to Katheleen Lopez, Nuala Heesplink, Susan Ruth, Denise Funderburk, Sharon and Christopher Alexander. In addition, she mothered Nancy, Kerry, and Kevin Cunningham, of Lewiston ME.

Visting Hours in the Lehman Reen & McNamara Funeral Home 63 Chestnut Hill Ave Brighton on Friday, April 3rd from 4:00pm - 7:00pm. Relatives and friends are kindly invited to attend. For directions and guest book please visit www.lehmanreen.com

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