Maureen Armstrong

who was at her happiest when she had a pint of Guinness in one hand and was gathering friends and family to the table with the other, died recently, after losing a three-and-half-year battle with colon cancer.

The 75-year-old mother of three and grandmother of six, who loved to bake and boast about her Irish heritage, was born June 11, 1939, in Beacon, N.Y., to Richard and Agnes (Devine) King.

When she was growing up in the bustling factory town of Beacon, Maureen’s mother loved to dress her and her younger sister Sharon in starched, laced dresses with petticoats and parade them up and down Main Street.

Maureen’s mother, who was one of 14 children, was from one of Beacon’s oldest and largest Irish-Catholic families. Her mother often joked to Maureen that she never should say a harsh word about anyone in Beacon because she might be related to them. As a child, she liked to go bikeriding with her sister Sharon and cousin Gail to visit her mother's hundreds of aunts, uncles and cousins who lived around Beacon. Maureen also went to many

Irish wakes and weddings, which nurtured a garden of stories and memories that, in later years, would keep her family and friends hurting with laughter.

Maureen attended South Avenue Elementary School and one of her favorite pastimes was watching matinees at the old-time movie palaces from Beacon’s heyday. In fact, those movies that captured her imagination as a young girl, she continued to enjoy until her last days, watching the Turner Classic Movies channel for hours at a time.

The grit and resolve she showed in fighting cancer was honed in childhood. Her late sister Sharon marveled that when Maureen got Rheumatic fever in elementary school, she was confined to her bed. She missed half the school year, but that never stopped her from being promoted to the next grade.

At Beacon High School, she was on the cheerleading squad and often would sneak into Mi-Ro’s bar along East Main Street to meet her friends after football and basketball games. She also was voted best-dressed girl in her senior class.

After high school, she got her first job as a secretary at Texaco. A few years later, she went to IBM, where she stayed for 17 years, working her way up from secretary to a buyer in the purchasing department.

In her retirement, Maureen enjoyed a long streak of good health and good times — going to baseball games with her grandchildren, making her cream cheese brownies and rice pudding on holidays, traveling with her late husband John to Ireland and seeing the wide-eyed wonder of her grandkids’ faces after giving them gifts from her human-sized stocking on Christmas Eve.

After being diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, she made it a point to soak in the precious moments of life’s last innings — traveling to Savannah, Ga., to watch the St. Patrick’s Day Parade with her niece Lisa and great niece Emily, visiting the 9/11 Memorial in New York City, spending every last cent she had on clothes and sparkly earrings at Chico’s, and eating pasta with Bolognese sauce at her grandson Eric’s restaurant in Pennsylvania.

When she laid calmly in her hospital bed on the last night that she was alive, she was surrounded by a small circle of family, who retold the stories she had told them so many times. She would let out a supportive moan when there was a burst of laughter, and it was as though she was attending her last Irish wake — the kind from her childhood — where the deceased was in the parlor, the whiskey was in the kitchen and where mourners always, always laughed more than they cried.

Maureen is survived by her daughter Patricia Ciarfella Alexander of Tustin, Calif.; her son Mark Ciarfella and daughter-in-law Nika of Jupiter, Fla.; her son Matt Ciarfella of Wappinger Falls, N.Y.; grandchildren Liam and Rhys Alexander of Tustin, Calif.; Reigan, Colin and Lily Ciarfella of Jupiter, Fla.; Eric Murphy of Northampton, Penn.; and great nephew Nikolas Niksirat of Jupiter, Fla. She is predeceased by her husband John Armstrong and her sister Sharon King.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to Community Connection VITAS (which is the charitable arm of VITAS Innovative Hospice Care), 1901 S. Congress Ave., Boynton Beach, Fla., 33426 (561) 364-1479 www.vitascommunityconnection.org and the Ella Milbank Foshay Cancer Center at the Jupiter Medical Center, 1210 S. Old Dixie Highway, Jupiter, Fla., 33458, www.jmcfoundation.org (561) 263-5728

Visitation is from 1-3 p.m. and a memorial service will start at 3 p.m., Saturday, July 12, at the Aycock-Riverside Funeral and Cremation Center at 1112 Military Trail in Jupiter.