Nancy Jeanne May was born August 27, 1937 in Coeur d’Alene, ID, and died August 7, 2023, in Olympia, WA, surrounded by her three living children.

As a child, she said she sometimes dreamed of running away to live with the gypsies who would pass through the forest at the end of the road near one of her childhood homes. She said they seemed so colorful, vibrant, and to have a culture full of life.

Although she did not run away to join them, she did live a full and explorative life that took many significant turns and contained different chapters and stories, that could easily have filled many books.

During her life, she lived in Coeur d’Alene, ID; Sitka, AK; Renton, WA; Bozeman, MT; Spokane, WA; St. Maries, ID, in a teepee and trailer on a mountaintop; Marana, AZ, in a 12 foot long trailer; Silver City, NM; Las Cruces, NM; Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico; and Olympia, WA. She traveled to Mexico, Hawai’i, France, through parts of Eastern Europe, and on road trips across many parts of the United States.

She was many things to many people over her lifetime. Nancy was mother to 4 children, Mark, Greg, Sherri, and Julie, and a grandmother to siblings Rose & Carson. She took a great interest in genealogy, and traced certain lines of her family’s history as far back as the 1200s, visiting libraries, graveyards, and numerous historical sites across the U.S. and abroad, including an extensive trip to Eastern Europe where she connected with distant relatives and was honored in a small church with a town gathering and large bunch of red roses to celebrate her journey to see them.

She was a very active member in AA and OA, and sponsored many people during their own journeys with sobriety, making close and long-time friends among this community, and in some cases staying connected up to some of their passings as they walked before her into death.

She was a caregiver and nurse, and cared for both her mother Ruby prior to her passing, as well as her second husband Jim, as he battled Parkinson's for many years prior to his death, which gave her a perspective and sense of what it takes to support people through chronic illness and into death, in ways that no other experience on earth can teach you.

At the time of her passing, she was active with the Association of Contemplative Women, a group called the Bloomers, as well as the Unitarian Universalist of Olympia. She attended Crone’s Councils, and sought out spaces that honored the dignity and wisdom and power of women in the later stages of their lives.

She went to protests, she wrote down her dreams, and she was always concerned with folks who were suffering more than she was, struggling with being unhoused, hunger, poverty, abuse, marginalization, oppression, even as her ability to go out and take action outside of her home decreased during the pandemic, due to living with significant lung and heart issues at this point in her life.

She was a spiritual seeker for her entire life, and her relationship with the divine took many forms during that time, and led her to many different communities, both to share a spiritual practice, and at times to seek a community to live with, in shared reverence for the spiritual path. In a way, this was one of the threads that wove the tapestry of her life, through every single chapter, and was perhaps the longest relationship of her life outside of her children, this relationship with divine source. She continued this work right up until the end of her life, and sat in ceremony only days before her death.

She had a great love for nature and wild places, the bears, the hummingbirds, the frogs, the forests, and the ocean, flowers, and spent time in these places whenever her body would allow.

She was fierce in many ways, right up until the end, and also very tender-hearted for what the world is going through in these times, even as she knew she would not live to see where it took the rest of us.

She will be missed greatly and is loved deeply by both family and community, whom she seemed to find anywhere she landed. Her spirit and legacy will live on through our actions and our hearts. 

If you feel moved to gift in her honor, please consider a donation to the Olympia Unitarian Universalist Congregation, who does work in the community through their "Justice - Faith in Action" limb of their church, as well as others.

Please indicate that it is for homeless outreach, that way the donation will be used specifically for that.

Click the link below for different ways to donate:

https://www.ouuc.org/giving/w…

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