Recalling May in December

It was 30 years ago today we lost my paternal grandmother, my dad’s mom, Mary Ellen Harvey Ennis. Most folks called her “May,” but I called her “Momma,” apparently because I babbled that to her as an infant.

When she died, she was 81, but for almost all of her final years, she didn’t know me or anyone, and I’m not even sure if she knew herself.

She’d spent her last decade in nursing homes, suffering from dementia that robbed her of everything but her smile.

We were always very close. But time was not kind. She came here from Ireland as an exile, fell in love with a promising young man who rose to a great fortune and blew it all on gambling and booze, leaving her out of love and married in name only. So, May returned to doing the only job she knew how to do to support herself and her family: cleaning houses of the well to-do.

How she got here is a story unto itself! When she was 13, her father and brothers decided she was of no real use on their farm in Drumshanbo, County Leitrim. So they packed up a trunk and shipped her to America on a steamship. Her father gave her the family china, with instructions to sell it should she fall on hard times.

She never did — the complete set graces my dining room china closet today.

Young May found work as a cleaning woman, and one day she met an older man named Tom Ennis, also an Irish immigrant, from County Mayo. They married and started a family. Their beloved first son, Tommy Joe, died as an infant. My father…