Photo: courtesy Recio famly
Elisa Montoro Canoso, who had just turned 100, shocked everyone when she asked for the microphone and ad-libbed a toast at her September 25th birthday party at a Miami Country Club.
“I was very happy having everyone in the same room, all my family,” she says of the 60 family members who’d travelled to be there for the occasion.
It was a celebration that was decades in the making and one that almost couldn’t happen.
“Everybody was just so happy to be celebrating this milestone,” Irene Recio, 53, says of her grandmother’s 100th birthday party, at which everyone in attendance was required to be vaccinated. “So many of us have lost so much: job opportunities, travel, even family members, and so to finally have this opportunity to celebrate with somebody who lived through world wars, through the exile, a previous pandemic and now she lived through this one, and to be able to celebrate a life that has been through so much, it gives you the courage to keep going.”
Recio, an immigration judge in Miami, helped organize the party that brought four generations together from across the country. It was the first time her entire family was under one roof since the start of the pandemic, when the close-knit Cuban clan all gathered for Recio’s father’s funeral. Her sister, Ana Recio Reyes, a management consultant, remembers the doctors telling the family the 76-year-old likely died of Covid-19 but because it was so early on, there was no way to test for it.
courtesy Recio famly
“My dad passed away from Covid in February right as Covid was starting, so essentially we saw each other at the funeral and then we weren’t able to see each other again,” Reyes recalls. “It was really difficult for all of us to go through that, and so being able to get together for my grandmothers 100th was really special. It almost felt like a celebration at the end of it all.”
Reyes lives in D.C. and typically travels to Miami frequently to see her mother and grandmother but Covid-19 kept them apart. Instead, her kids called and Facetimed with their great-grandmother every day.
“They call me every day from Washington before they go to sleep and that makes me very happy,” Canoso tells PEOPLE.
Canoso was born in Cuba in 1921 but lived in Paris with her family until the start of World War II. They went back to Havana until they fled to Miami during the Golden Exile in 1959. She married a University of Miami professor and they were together 53 years before he died in 1993. The couple had three children, seven grandchildren and 12 great- grandchildren – and almost all of them were there for her centennial celebration.
Reyes tells PEOPLE, “To see somebody who is just so grateful to be alive at 100 and to have the people who love her celebrate her really put things in perspective. So many of us get drowned in the day to day minutia of having to wear a mask or work from home and we all complain so much, and to be at this party all together was really special.”
Canoso says she is beyond grateful the vaccines made her big party possible: “I was vaccinated. My whole family is vaccinated. I don’t understand how some people don’t do it because it will never go away if people don’t cooperate. I’ve led a very peaceful life and I’m so grateful. I enjoy life, I have the love of my family and I really enjoy having the family all together.”
source: people.com
