Obituary for Eleanor Max

A young Eleanor taken by Michael in Ireland maybe in 1968

Blurry but a good one

On January, 25th 2021, Eleanor Elizabeth Max (née Kelly), 82, loving mother of Rachel and widow of Michael Max, passed away peacefully at George Washington University Hospital after a short illness.

Eleanor was born on September 9th, 1938, in Mullingar, Ireland, and was the sixth of seven siblings born to mother Bridget Kelly (née Gillivan) and Patrick Kelly.

Eleanor received her Bachelor's of Commerce in 1959 and a Higher Diploma of Education in 1960 from the National University of Ireland, Galway. After college, she moved to Dublin and taught primary school in Crumlin, Dublin, an underprivileged part of the city at that time.

She met her husband Michael D. Max in Donoghue's, a well-known center for Irish music and song in Dublin, in the Spring of 1966. They married on July 11th, 1969, but celebrated their anniversary on July 12th for 50 years, having forgotten the correct date in the happy intervening decades.

They welcomed a daughter, Rachel, in 1975, and moved to Washington D.C. in 1985. There, Eleanor started work as executive assistant in the dental school while pursuing a Master's in Literature from Georgetown University.

A native speaker and advocate of the Irish language, she taught Gaelic continuing education classes at both Georgetown University and Catholic University, as well as in her home in Glover Park for many years.

Eleanor was a bit of a Francophile, and made several trips to France throughout her life. Her dream of living in France almost became a reality in 1991, when she, Michael, and Rachel moved to Italy and lived in beautiful La Spezia, near the Cinque Terre, for six years.

It was in Italy that Eleanor honed her cooking skills, gathering the freshest ingredients from the main market in town. She would bring these delicious morsels back up to their apartment above the town via the number 13—a tiny bus with a loud horn that handled the treacherous hairpin turns with ease. Eleanor would often joke about her sore “La Spezia Arm” from carrying these bags of ingredients but felt the resulting meals were worth the effort.

Eleanor and Michael moved back to Washington D.C. in 1996, but it wasn’t until early 2020 that Eleanor finally became a United States Citizen. She proudly cast her first vote for President in November 2020, and lived to see her candidate inaugurated as the 46th president.

Eleanor will be sorely missed and fondly remembered for her sense of humor, her skills in the kitchen, and her discerning and uncompromising nature by her daughter Rachel; her sisters Anne, Imelda, Rose, and Patricia; her nieces and nephews John, Deirdre, Anne, Emer, Conor, Ronan, Enda, Dara, Billy, and Emily; her in-laws Debby and Joel; and by her many friends, some of whom she had since childhood.

Eleanor was preceded in death by her husband Michael Max and by her siblings William Kelly and May Donohue.

If Michael were still alive he would remind us of the first law of thermodynamics - that no energy in the universe is created or destroyed. All Eleanor’s (and Michael’s) energy, as physicist Aaron Freeman said in a speech on NPR in 2005, “every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her remains with us in this world. All the photons that ever bounced off her face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by her smile, by the touch of her hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by her. All the photons that bounced from her were gathered in the particle detectors that are our eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.”

In lieu of flowers, donations in Eleanor's name can be sent to PBS stations WETA or MPT, to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, or to Planned Parenthood.

A virtual memorial service will take place in the Spring and there will be a small ceremony in Ireland once it’s possible. If you would like to be included in the online memorial, please send an email to eleanormemorial@icloud.com