Profile: Jeanette Flynn, Shelter Island’s newest Lion

Jeanette Flynn is a sunny, can-do person, who chooses not to stew about the very real challenges she has faced in her life.

She has a new job she loves, a roof over her head and two children doing well in college. Still, she admitted some parts of her life do sit heavy with her, especially first thing in the morning.

“There’s 20 minutes of every day that sucks for me,” she said. “But then I get in the shower and keep going.”

Jeanette has lived on Shelter Island for less than a decade, but in her time here has become so much a part of the community that when she fell seriously ill with a viral disease a few years back, there was no shortage of friends and neighbors to help her through it.

Margaret Doyle and Melanie Matz visited her at an off-Island physical rehabilitation center three days a week. Linda Bonaccorso brought baked ziti. Heidi Fokine picked up Jeanette’s kids, Tara and Johnny, took them to her house, helped them with homework and fed them dinner.

“Mom, we had beets for dinner last night!” they told Jeanette.

Baskets of food appeared at Jeanette’s door. Melanie even organized a zumbathon to raise money to help support the family through a very rough time. “I think I truly fell in love with this community at that point,” said Jeanette.

Today, Jeanette is healthy and much happier, working full time for the town as clerk to 12 committees, including the very active Planning Board, ZBA, and Waterways committees. In addition to sitting in on meetings and taking minutes, she coordinates the calendar and contributes to the smooth running of government by making sure when topics that the various committees discuss overlap, someone connects the dots.

In her “spare time” she logs another 10 hours a week at the Shelter Island Public Library, where she has worked since 2007. She also volunteers, teaching religious education for first communion at Our Lady of the Isle. On June 9 she was installed as a Shelter Island Lion.

Jeanette was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Flushing. Her father worked at New York Telephone for over 30 years and was in the New York National Guard, part of the 69th Infantry Regiment, the “Fighting Sixty-Nine.”

“My Dad’s work ethic shaped who I am,” Jeanette said. “He was and still is the hardest working man I know.”

Her parish and grammar school was St. Andrew Avellino Roman Catholic Church and she attended the all-girls St. Vincent Ferrer High School. But her parents didn’t pressure her to go to college. The oldest of four, her siblings settled nearby; her sister Corinne in Center Moriches, brother Sean and Kathleen in Smithtown.

After high school, Jeanette worked and went to school at night, excelling academically. Meanwhile, her brother who was two years younger, enrolled at SUNY Oswego, which her parents agreed to pay for. At the time, Jeanette said she resented the double standard, but eventually her parents agreed to help her attend Binghamton University, where she had been accepted.

The summer before she was to enroll at Binghamton, she was in New York City with friends and met a man on the Circle Line named John Sturges and fell in love. After one semester at Binghamton, Jeanette left school and moved to Brooklyn to be with John.

Eventually she realized the man she loved had a serious drug problem and in 1994 she found herself pregnant with Tara, unwilling to marry John and estranged from her parents. She was, she said, “the black sheep of the family.”

Jeanette left John in 1998 when their son, Johnny, was six months old and Tara was three to move in with her parents in Suffolk County with whom she had reconciled.

“My kids are very close to my parents, and helped me see their better side, that they aren’t so bad, and helped me forget,” she said. “My children were my life and I had to be for them.”

The kids continued to see their father, but in 2004, when Tara was in fourth grade and Johnny was in second, a day arrived that Jeanette had long feared.

“That was the hardest day of my life, telling my kids that their dad died she said.”

For her part, Jeanette has reached something like forgiveness for John. “Maybe it was acceptance,” she said. “Understanding the disease and knowing that if that wasn’t part of the picture it would have been a different life.”

In 2007 Jeanette moved to the Island and married Andrew Payne. But after seven years together, Jeanette decided that she and her children could no longer live with him, and they subsequently divorced.

Once again, Jeanette faced a crisis, and as they had when she was sick in 2011, the Shelter Island community stepped up to help.

“Sue Binder, no questions asked, let me and my kids move into her cottage,” said Jeanette. “Didn’t want a thing from me. I had a year to figure things out.”

Patty Quigley, Kathy Lynch, Melanie Matz, Margaret Doyle, Susan Binder and Elena DeStefano all showed up to help her move. Kim Reilly brought food, clothes, and gifts. Linda Bonaccorso brought more of her famous baked ziti.

Finding an affordable place to live after the break up of her marriage was a turning point in her life, Jeanette said, and one that she prayed for fervently. Always a hard worker, often with multiple jobs, she said life got a lot better when she was able to sign a lease for a little house for her kids and Petunia, a rescue dog who has been a member of the family since 2005.

“You feel things positively here,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that my kids’ future was good and being here did that.”

Tara has just finished her third year at Marymount Manhattan College, and Johnny just finished his first year at St. Francis College in Brooklyn.

She hasn’t seen significant changes in Shelter Island in the years she’s been here. ”We still don’t have a stoplight here,” she said. “I think we’re doing pretty well. No bridge and no stoplight.”

But Jeanette sees working families struggling due to the rising cost of housing, and the sparse availability of affordable homes and rentals.

“It’s supply and demand, but I’m hopeful that we can figure it out,” she said. “My goal is to buy my own home. Right now I have a lease and I’m a lucky person.”

Every day, the 20 minutes Jeanette allows herself to think about dark episodes in her life gives way to the appreciation and gratitude she carries with her for the rest of the day.

“I’ve had many crises and I dealt with them with my faith,” she said, “Always knowing there is light at the end of the tunnel.”