Esther Elizabeth Nolan

Esther Elizabeth Nolan, born April 16, 1933, passed away peacefully in her sleep on April 27, 2020, after a year-long battle with cancer. Her passing came just a week after celebrating her 48th "39th" birthday; she was 87-years-old, and lived a long and memorable life.

Esther was born and raised in Albany, and had always been independent and spirited. She balanced work at a train station luncheonette to support herself and her younger sister while still in school, before she was forced to quit school at 16 in order to care for her sister more full time. Her tenacity showed itself again when she cared for her daughter, Jackie, as a single mother working as a grocery cashier during the day and a "jukebox" at night, spinning records by request for patrons at Melodies, a local bar. With determination and perseverance, she eventually worked her way to a job with the phone company in the billing department.

It was while she was working there that Esther met her husband, John Nolan Sr; they got engaged on Christmas Day and married at Sacred Heart in North Albany when she was 27. She quit work when she was pregnant with her son, John Jr., but eventually went back to work, this time for the state and in a clerical position and then as an accountant, when Jackie and John were older, to help support the family. She lived to see what would have been her and John Senior's 60th wedding anniversary.

When Jackie and John were kids, the family lived on Walter Street in North Albany in a raucous three-family house full of Nolans. Esther and her family lived on the first floor, while John Senior's sisters and brothers lived on the upper floors with their families, his sister Bella and her husband Lefty on the second floor, and his sister Mary and brother Al on the third. Sisters Helen, Aggie, and Dottie often visited for family gatherings.

Esther, John Senior and the kids would, along with extended family and friends, travel to Caroga Lake each year for Memorial Day weekend. There, the kids would play at the old amusement park and on the sports field until it was time for the picnic, eaten snuggled in the open trunk of the car on colder years. At the end of the day, John Senior would line up all the cars and shout "Wagon's HO!" to start the processional home (a line that can still be heard on any Nolan-family car trip today).

Esther was passionate about her family and cared deeply for tradition. When she and John Senior moved to their two-family house on Menand Road, she lived there for over fifty years collecting memorabilia and photos to serve as a timeline of their lives. She was the kind of mother who could pull off anything, and convinced her children that they could do the same. She was always a captive audience for John Junior's shows when he taught himself to do magic, and was the assistant for his first show as a magician at his cousin Patsy's tenth birthday party. In Menands, she attended Mass religiously at St. Joan of Arc and saw her daughter married and one of her granddaughters baptized there. She loved to return each year to the St. Joan's picnic at the park to catch everyone up on her adventures from the past year, including her "second son," John Junior's best friend, Danny Kilmartin.

Esther had a hand in beginning and carrying on many long-standing Nolan-family traditions. On weekends, Esther and John Senior would camp with Jackie, her husband, and their grandkids at Lake George, spending days playing miniature golf and gorging on soft-serve ice cream. Each year she and John Senior spear-headed the charge to Atlantic City on the New Jersey shore for a family vacation, staying first in a little rental on St. James Place and then eventually moving south to Ventnor and later, Ocean City, with her grandchildren—a tradition spanning millennia, as it began in 1963 and is still a perennial trip for the Nolans today.

Although Esther did not swim (despite her children's and grandchildren's insistence that they would happily teach her), she loved the shore: sunning on the beach, standing in the surf with feet sunk into the wet sand, visiting and revisiting her favorite haunts on the boardwalk for caramel corn or fudge and taffy—with a coupon in hand, of course. The shore became a sort of second home, as Esther knew the staff and the people who vacationed for the same week as her as well as she knew her own neighbors. It also became the venue for Nolan-family Scrabble tourneys, intense battles with all parties involved vying for the "crown" to smugly hold until the next bout. Esther was always up for a game, despite always seeming to get a hand of all vowels, and was always happy to team up with her grandchildren to glean victory over her son.

She doted on her grandchildren greatly, never showing up without a new Beanie Baby and a plate of gooey brownies in hand. "Grandma Nolan" stumbled through the names of Pokemon characters (even answering to "Charizard" for years) and played endless games of War with the ex-casino cards of which she had an endless stock. Christmases and birthdays were always huge affairs with Grandma Nolan around, each one punctuated with a lot of love and a card full of scratch-off lottery tickets. We were lucky to have her for as long as we did, and she was certainly a lucky woman; through what seems like sheer will and persistence against all odds, she gifted her granddaughter a jackpot-winning ticket for her 20th birthday.

She defeated the odds again, when, after her cancer diagnosis in 2019 and a difficult back surgery, she tackled all of the challenges that came her way head on. She spent one last year at the beach with her family, traversing the boardwalk in her scooter, visited her granddaughters in Buffalo, and made the snowbird trek to Florida to spend the winter with her daughter, before coming to her final rest.

Esther is preceded in death by her husband John Nolan, mother Prudence Huhn, sister Anne DeMarco and brother-in-law David, brother Robert Van Brabant and sister-in-law Trudy, and her Aunt and Uncle Pat and Cass Mertz, who helped to raise Jackie. She is remembered by her daughter Jackie Legault and son-in-law Helton, son John Nolan and daughter-in-law Terri, and grandchildren Melanie, Nathan, Megan, Elizabeth, and Johnny. She is also remembered by her sister Susan Huhn, Goddaughter Patsy (Caufield) Carl whose visits over the past year especially cheered her Aunt Esther, her close friend and neighbor Holley Conway, and her lifelong friends from the Unclaimed Funds Department, Pat Kelly and Henry Duclos.

Esther was an incredible and irreplaceable wife, mother, grandmother, and friend. We honestly can't imagine life without you here, but we know that, wherever you are, you are watching out for us. Wherever that may be, we hope the sun is shining every day and that the breeze from the ocean is pleasant. We love you and miss you!