Lillian remembered
On Monday (May 11), in response to a query from a friend, I pored through the Albuquerque Journal’s obituary listings for August 2011. I didn’t find what my friend was looking for. I did find an obituary notice for Lillian Cantrell, age 100, who died on Aug. 10 of that year. Oh my goodness. This had to be the Lillian Cantrell who worked for my family as a housekeeper — the term at the time was “cleaning lady” from roughly 1957-69. What a very hard life she had. Lillian lived in a poor section of Albuquerque’s South Valley. She made her living cleaning, doing laundry, etc., for ours and other households. Her husband had deserted her and left her with three children, two of whom had a disability (I don’t remember exactly what the disability was). Her other son died young, I believe in a car crash. Yet, Lillian was unfailingly cheerful. She loved our first Welsh Terrier, Terry, and got along better than some of us did with our second, Binky, who ha...