A Furlong Family Fascicle
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| This website is dedicated to families everywhere, and to all those who may find inspiration through our successes, education through our mistakes, and solace through our trials. |
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The pictures on this opening page are from June of 2000 at a bittersweet moment for our family:
Claudia, our oldest daughter and her husband, Rony, had moved to
Dallas from São Paulo;
Raquel and Thomas were newlyweds; and Chistopher had just won a full scholarship to do his Ph.D. at Harvard. But Neila was in chemotherapy
again and though we were hopeful of the results it was devasting her health. It seemed an appropriate moment for new family portraits and indeed they were the last ones she would take with us as a family. They were shot at Canyon Creek Drive in Richardson, Texas with the beautiful natural falls you see in the background.
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"It's a Wonderful Life" |
Your are visitor number since March 10, 2000 |
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Neila was to survive another 17 months after this picture, succuming finaly on Novmber 9th, 2001 to the desease that had racked her body. Her struggle was heroic in that she never gave up and fought long past the regulation time for lung cancer victims, but in the end she had to lose. Neila and I had been married 35½ years, but growing old together as our parents had done would be denied us, and I now must cope with being a father and grandfather alone.
In our section of these pages you will find both a medical history of Neila´s illness and how it affected us as a family. I have also included a memorial section dedicated to the vibrant person she was and the way she would want to be remembered. As for me, no longer young but not yet old, I must put together a new life and I will try to show some of that in these pages too. They will, I hope, reflect and be informed by the wonder and richness of the life Neila and I shared and a continued and unabated commitment to family.
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Claudia is our first-born: to her fell the task of breaking Neila and I in as parents during our wanderings as corporate nomads. But residual ill effects would be hard to find. By her middle shool years we had settled in São Paulo, Brazil and she began attenting Pan American Christian Academy or «PACA», graduating in 1987. Deciding for college in the US, she chose Asbury College in Wilmore, KY were she played flute in the band, worked for the Salvation Army during Christmas vacations, and in 1992 graduated magna cum laude with a BA in History and Education. Returning to PACA, she taught history there and later at Chapel, another American school in São Paulo. In 1995 she married Rony Kühnast, a dedicated Christian man: they had known each other since we moved to São Paulo. In 1998 with Neila´s illness, the Kühnasts came to Dallas, a city which in February of 2001 had the
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Always the social worker, by Raquel´s junior high years she was a renoun babysitter in the American community of São Paulo where she grew up, and by high school she was doing volunteer work among Brazil's street children. We moved to Richardson, Texas in 1992 where she completed high school.
Raquel is the family "lighting rod" because everything seems to happen to her: she suffers from asthma and at least once in heavily polluted São Paulo we thought we would lose her; and, she has struggled with dyslexia. But she has never let these stand in her way, though they probably kept from her the magna cum laude honors her siblings achieved. She went on to major in psychology at the The University of North Texas in Denton where she graduated in May of 1998. After working a year Raquel started work on a Masters' Degree in Counseling with a speciality in Play Therapy, completing her degree in December of 2001. She works as a counselor and therapist at the Family Place. Raquel has had an active artistic life and as been an enthusiastic ballet dancer and student since she was small. During college she was a member of the Denton Civic Ballet Company where, in addition to dancing, she has served as Assistant Artistic Director, and Coreographer. During college she met and fell in love with a graphic art student, Thomas Goranson, and there began a long romance. They were married in August of 2000 at the Dallas Arboretum. |
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Chris was born in Paducah, KY near Mayfield, were we lived at the time. By the time he started school the family found itself in São Paulo, Brazil where he attended «PACA» the same dual-curricula (US and Brazil), evangelical missionary school Claudia and Raquel went to . Between his ninth and tenth grades the family moved back to the US and settled in Richardson, Texas where he finished his secondary training at Richardson High School. Although today we think of Christopher as the brains of the family, it was not always that way. In high school he had a number of problems, both academic and personal and was barred from the Academic Decathalon regionals his senior year because he was failing a course. By his senior year though, and during his first two years of college, he had come to grips with life and was able to focus his considerable intellect on his goals, becoming the family intellectual pride. He went on to graduate with high honors in philosophy
from the The University of Texas at Austin in May 1999. |
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"Samantha" our Chinese pug |
