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Your Catholic Neighbor: Ruth McMahon
Joyce Coronel/CATHOLIC SUN
Ruth McMahon holds a hat she knitted for cancer patients. She passed away shortly after being interviewed.
Local woman overcomes hardships, lives life of service to parish and God
Editor’s note: Just weeks after this interview, Ruth McMahon died peacefully at home, surrounded by her children.
By Joyce Coronel, The Catholic Sun
February 21, 2008
Ruth McMahon was only 8 years old when doctors told her family she would probably succumb to a deadly bout with asthma and pneumonia.
“My aunt had my funeral clothes all picked out. I was anointed and given my First Holy Communion,” McMahon said with a twinkle in her eye.
She survived the illness but eventually left New York for Arizona’s more hospitable climate in 1943. Trained as a dental assistant, she worked for a dentist in Tucson, and later married and moved to Scottsdale. Living just a stone’s throw away from Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, she was busy raising six young children when her husband suffered a heart attack and died in 1964, leaving her to raise them on her own.
McMahon credits her faith and the love and support from her parish friends as helping her make it through some tough times.
“I went to work when my youngest child, Molly, was 8. I was lucky because my daughter was in high school and able to help,” she said.
McMahon walked five miles to and from work every day because the family didn’t have a car.
The whole family walked to Mass together and the kids helped bring in money with paper routes and babysitting. In a tribute her daughter wrote about her, she said the family “ate a lot of spaghetti and very little ice cream, but they always ate together.”
McMahon sewed all the clothes for her children, not just to save money but also to show them how much she loved them and how they fulfilled her life. “She taught each of them that family was everything and how good it was that they had each other,” her daughter said.
A monthly rosary group McMahon joined in 1965 still meets regularly and the spunky 87-year-old never stops finding ways to serve God. For the last 10 years she and a team of five women from OLPH have planned and organized the luncheons that follow funeral Masses at the parish.
“I couldn’t do it without them,” McMahon said of the team, shy about taking too much credit. Still, in 2007 the Phoenix Diocesan Council of Catholic Women recognized her with its Woman of the Year Award.
In addition to her other church activities, McMahon has been active in the ministry of care for 10 years and serves as an extraordinary minister of the Eucharist at Mass.
Tucked into the basket on the front of her walker is a ball of pink yarn, evidence of another of McMahon’s ministries. A beloved granddaughter, Alicia, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004 and McMahon took to caring for the young woman, allowing her and her brother to move in and transporting Alicia to radiation and chemotherapy treatments.
McMahon began knitting a hat for her granddaughter and as she got to know some of the other women who lost their hair due to cancer treatments, she began to knit hats for them, too. Although Alicia died three years ago, McMahon still makes the hats to honor her memory.
“She was absolutely gorgeous. God had a place for her,” McMahon said.
Hundreds of the handmade hats have found their way to patients in California, New York, Connecticut and New Hampshire.
“People call me up and say, ‘Gee, Ruthie, do you have a hat for me?’” McMahon said with a grin. “I just keep busy. I haven’t got time to sit.”
What’s your favorite quote?
“I felt sorry for a man who had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.”
What do you like most about being Catholic?
I think it’s the love and the friendship I have. When my husband died and I had six kids ages 5 to 13, I had no money. Everybody came through to help. Our rosary group meets and prays for the sick — there’s no gossip. We need each other and we’re there for each other.
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