"There's one more thing," the minister told me, "The dog she was holding, the one she thought was a child. The dog was a present I'd given her for her birthday when I was maybe 12 years old. Turns out that was the child she'd been telling me about. She was clutching a small ceramic dog wrapped in a blanket. He did, and he called me back and told me that May had been found wandering on the street, disoriented. I got in touch with a local minister and asked him to check on her. Then a couple of weeks went by and I couldn't reach her on the phone. She had nieces and nephews, and I figured as one of their grandkids, but I didn't ask more. May started mentioning occasionally that she was taking care of a baby. If I was happy, May was happy, and I wanted to make her happy more than anything else in the world. I'd ask May how she was, but she usually dismissed my questions, preferring instead to hear about what I was doing, what my friends, many of whom she knew, were up to. When she was around 80, her hearing got a lot worse than it already had been, and phone calls became difficult. But by the time I could do it, May had begun to decline. Over the years, I saved up to surprise her with a house of her own. When I started to earn some money, we took trips together to Los Angeles, Edinburgh, Rome. Eventually, she retired and moved back to Scotland. May and I remained extremely close for the next 32 years of her life.
She was a mom to me, and there was nothing she or I could do. I came home and May was packing her things, trying not to cry in front of me. My mom was hurt by the closeness of my relationship with May, and one day she fired her without any warning. As a kid, every night before I fell asleep, I would pray that one day I would make enough money to take care of May and get her a house and take her on trips to places that she always wanted to visit. May took care of me when I was little, but she's also the one who taught me to take care of myself, to not sit around, to make decisions, and to make things happen.
She lived with us and after my dad died, she was the person I could depend on more than anyone. She didn't suffer fools gladly, but she was funny and loving and our bond was extraordinary. Even though she died after a ten year struggle with dementia in 2014. She was a mom to me, as important to me as my mom and my dad. Mae was my nanny from the time I was born till I was about 15. She hated being photographed, so there aren't a ton of pictures of her.
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