Christine Egan, 9/11 casualty, remembered in Nunavut

Dr. Christine Egan, 55, a nurse who spent many years in Nunavut, died Sept. 11, 2001, while visiting her brother Michael, 51, who was working in an office high up in the South Tower of the World Trade Centre. In the late 60s and early 1970s, she worked in Pond Inlet, where this photo was taken. (PHOTO COURTESY OF E.JUDD)

Dr. Christine Egan, 55, a nurse who spent many years in Nunavut, died Sept. 11, 2001, while visiting her brother Michael, 51, who was working in an office high up in the South Tower of the World Trade Centre when it was hit by an jet aircraft and later collapsed into a huge cloud of dust and debris.

Today, the memory of Egan, better known as “Dr. Christine” and a woman who loved life, lives on among her many friends and aspiring Inuit nurses she continues to help in Nunavut through a scholarship established in her name.

In 2004, Egan’s family, friends, and estate established an endowment fund at the University of Manitoba to provide scholarship support to promising Nunavut nursing students.

This year that fund will hand out $8,000 dollars.

Working in Nunavut was Egan’s passion, says her partner Dr. Ellen Judd, a professor at the University of Manitoba.

“It wasn’t just about a job. She really valued her Inuit friends and really valued the culture,” Judd said.

Egan came to Nunavut two years after she graduated in 1967 from the Hull School of Nursing in the U.K.

She worked as a nurse in Iqaluit, Cape Dorset and Pond Inlet.

After that, she spent many years nursing in the Kivalliq region, mainly in Coral Harbour and Rankin Inlet, but also in Sanikiluaq and Chesterfield Inlet.

Along the way, she made many life-long friends, like Putugu Adamie of Coral Harbour, now an intepreter at the Cape Dorset health centre, who still calls Egan “her best friend.”

The two met in 1981 when Egan worked in Coral Harbour.

“She was a very good person. She was like everyone. She got along with everyone,” Adamie said. “And I met a lot of her friends and they became my friends.”

Adamie couldn’t believe it when she learned Egan had been inside the World Trade Centre when it fell.

She and her husband thought they were watching a movie when they watched the disaster unfold on television, but it turned out to be all too real.

Today Adamie says she still feel uneasy when she watches anything about 9/11 on television.

“I never feel comfortable because my friend was there and she was more like a family to us. It still hurts me. It’s been 10 years, but it hurts when I watch.”

Her comfort? Her youngest daughter, Christine, now seven, was named after Christine Egan.

Maybe someday the little Christine will become grow up to be a nurse, said Adamie who still keeps in touch with Judd.

As Judd tells it, Egan made high demands of herself as a nurse.

After many years as a nurse, Egan decided to go back to school to qualify as a nurse practitioner.

She also studied anthropology and health sciences, and finally earned a Ph.D. in community health sciences at the University of Manitoba in 1999.

After that Egan worked as program director of research and education for the Kivalliq Regional Health Board in Rankin Inlet.

Even when she was based in Winnipeg, Egan always returned north — to work in the summer, to visit friends and to take an intensive Inuktitut course one summer.

“Egan loved the North. Everywhere she went she made friends, she cared so much people no matter where she went. It wasn’t just about a job,” said Judd, who also visited Rankin Inlet and Coral Harbour with Egan.

It was just by chance that Egan was at the World Trade Centre that Sept, 11.

She’d gone down to New York City to take care of the youngest — and handicapped — son of her brother, Michael, an executive with the insurance company Aon Corp., who was preparing to head off to Bermuda with his wife, Anna, for a 20th wedding anniversary trip.

Egan had planned to meet a school friend of hers at the World Trade Centre, but the friend was to arrive late so she went up to the Aon offices, located on the upper floors of the South Tower, where the hijacked United Airlines flight 185 hit a little after 9:00 a.m. on the 81st floor.

In 2005, when she was studying nursing at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, Pallulaaq Ford of Rankin Inlet, now a registered nurse and manager of clinical nursing education in the Kivalliq for the Government of Nunavut, received one of the scholarships given out in Egan’s memory.

Ford learned about the scholarship from her instructor, who had worked with “Dr. Christine.”

“When our instructor spoke about her, all her memories were happy, so it was a tragic story, what she told us, the way that she died,” Ford said.

“New York seems like such a far place from Rankin, from Nunavut, but when our instructor told us how she had actually worked with her, it was unreal.”

Four Inuit nurses now work in Rankin Inlet, and many of the 20 or so Inuit nurses who have graduated from Nunavut’s nursing program have received help from Egan.

Ford is sure Egan would be happy about that.

So is Judd.

“It’s a good thing. I know she’d be really pleased. There are lots pf people worked to make scholarship happen which makes things easier,” she said. “It makes us all feel better.”

That scholarship fund, the Dr. Christine Egan Memorial Scholarship, is still accepting applications until Sept. 30.

More information is available here on how to apply.

Recent recipients of the scholarship include Nancy Gordon, Sarah MacRury, Suzy Schwartz, Amanda Hatch, Parniga Thibaudeau and Harriet White.