Maureen Elizabeth (DeYoung) Meek

August 6, 1951 – January 7, 2026

In the final months of her life, Maureen often told stories from her early years. An eagle almost plucked her out of a baby carriage, or so they said. A forest fire burned close to the bungalow her parents built down the hill and across the road from the old farmhouse where Maureen first lived. When people went visiting, an uncle or a neighbour would play a tune on a fiddle or an accordion or a guitar. Adults played cards and shouted; children slept in stacks; and Maureen’s grandmother kept the kids in check by wielding a flyswatter as a weapon.

Maureen worked hard as a young girl, hauling firewood to the family home under the watchful eye of her father, Joseph DeYoung, a carpenter. As a teenager, Maureen would join the summer haying crews in the rolling fields of Antigonish County. She was raised in the tiny village of Pomquet, where French was spoken everywhere except the one-room schoolhouse, with its English-only curriculum. Like her father, her mother Margaret (nee Benoit) was Acadian to the core.

Maureen also played hard – both as a kid and for the rest of her life. On hot August days, she would steal away with her cousin, Marie DeYoung, to fish or swim or ride bicycles on the bumpy gravel roads. The girls, destined to be fast friends for decades, relished the thrill as they jumped from the railway bridge into brackish waters where river and seawater mingled and swirled.

The eldest child in the DeYoung family, Maureen later admitted she ruled supreme until her sister Linda came along, and next thing you know her brother Albert showed up too. She eventually forgave her siblings for being born and the trio developed close and enduring ties.

Maureen turned 17 the summer after she finished high school and enrolled in the last three-year course for Registered Nurses at St. Martha’s Hospital in Antigonish (class of 1971). There she earned top marks for everything but obedience. Studying under the Sisters of St. Martha, she acquired top-drawer nursing skills, learned to distrust authority, and started to question the faith in which she had been raised.

Eventually, she strayed so far from the Church of Rome that she took up with Jim Meek, who was Protestant not Catholic, English not French, and Upper Canadian not Nova Scotian. (Eventually, Jim was welcomed into the DeYoung family, mostly because he played crib.) The couple were married in Toronto on February 13, 1975. They enjoyed the best day of their lives on June 18, 1976, when their twins (Heather Marie and Colin Joseph) were born at Toronto General Hospital, where Maureen then worked as an RN.

Maureen would later say that she and Jim shared 50-plus years together – “most of them good.” (She was a truth-teller – you couldn’t stop her.) Soon after the kids were born, Maureen suggested they move to Halifax just for the heck of it. She dragged a few credits along with her from the University of Toronto and added a few more from Mount Saint Vincent University. In the early 1990s, she finally earned her social work degree from Dalhousie University. Thus, a lifetime goal was achieved.

Maureen’s career as a caregiver was guided by a simple principle – she worked for her patients or her clients, not her bosses. If there was a front-line in health care, she wanted to be on it. She enjoyed her job at a detox centre, enlisted in a pioneering Mobile Crisis Intervention Unit (joining police officers at domestic disputes), and worked with sexual assault victims at the facility now known as the Avalon Centre. She also put in shifts at the old Civic Hospital on Queen Street and at a university clinic.

Her last job was with Home Care Nova Scotia (now known as Community Care). She enjoyed visiting people in their homes and coaching them to obtain help inside a system which seemed designed to deny it. In that job, as in all before it, she made friendships that lasted. In the final years of her life, as she slowly succumbed to the cancer that would kill her, her Community Care colleagues formed a group they called ‘Mo’s posse’. This caring cadre did for Maureen what she had done for others for decades – find the help she needed and damn the torpedoes in doing so.

She retired in 2013, after she was diagnosed with cancer. By then, she had brilliant granddaughters to visit, two in Seattle, Elinor Clara Meek and Lucy Elizabeth Meek, daughters to Colin and his wife Erika Pierson. And two more in Montreal, Esther Rose Meek and Vera Rose Meek, offspring of Heather and Robert Rose. In her final 14 months on earth, battling the odds stacked against her, Maureen voyaged to Dublin, Boston, and Montreal to spend time with those grand girls. She was not much given to religion, but her ties to her granddaughters were spiritual, sacred, and just plain fun.

When she was still young enough to pull it off, Maureen enjoyed step-dancing on coffee tables. She later turned to making things – mittens for friends, and sweaters for Jim that never quite fit. (His body was misshapen, she said, there was nothing you could do about it.) She hooked joyous rugs on the Deanne Fitzpatrick model – featuring clotheslines, strong women, and active skies. (When friends would tell her she was talented, she replied she had always been a hooker at heart.) She loved a campfire at a backcountry site at Kejimkujik Park and only gave up the long paddle across the Big Lake after a final pilgrimage to Moose Island in 2024.

Back home in Halifax, Jim would often wake in the morning to a clatter from the kitchen that sounded like a small protest march. Downstairs, he would find Maureen had made black bean soup for 20, prepared the marinade for a leg of lamb, and had a loaf of sourdough bread baking in the oven. Before her last Christmas, wielding knives like a Ninja, Maureen baked a final batch of rabbit pies – wild meat or nothing, and don’t even suggest buying pie crusts at Sobeys.

Maureen was pre-deceased by her mom and dad, and by her cousin Marie. She is survived by Jim, Heather and Colin, her four granddaughters, her sister Linda (Benoit) and her husband Jimmy, her brother Albert, and most of Antigonish County if you put the genealogy together.

She would want to thank scores of people, her family, her friends, her posse, and some extraordinary caregivers, including her oncologist Alwin Jeyakumar, who “kept me alive for 12 years,” and two other specialists – cardiologist Kim Anderson and hematologist Mary Margaret Keating – who both booked final appointments with Maureen to say goodbye.

Her loved ones would also like to thank the team at Hospice Halifax, who provided compassionate, patient, and altogether amazing care to Maureen in her final two weeks of life. (If you’re thinking of making a charitable donation, the hospice would be a good choice.) She died free of pain, but not in complete silence. Indeed, those who knew her best and loved her most would say Maureen was rarely quiet in her storied, accomplished, and beautiful life.

An event to tell stories about Maureen and mourn her loss will be held Feb. 15, 2025 at 1.30 pm in the Lilian Piercey Concert Hall at the Maritime Conservatory.

To leave words of comfort for the family please visit: www.tjtracey.com.