Born in Minneapolis, Minn., Nancy Drummond died in Montreal at age 63 of metastatic bone cancer.Courtesy of family
Nancy Mary Drummond
Mother. Nurse. Sister. Wife.
Born Jan. 28, 1962, in Minneapolis, Minn.; died June 12, 2025, in Montreal, of metastatic bone cancer; aged 63.
Not everyone transmutes the anguish of cancer and loss into deeper compassion. Nancy Drummond opened that deep well of quiet understanding at the bedsides of the women and families that she helped.
Nancy knew intimately Montreal’s polyglot of rituals surrounding death and dying. She didn’t acquire that intimacy from her anthropology degree from McGill, but from her work as a gynecological oncology nurse at the Jewish General Hospital. She attended to mothers, daughters and sisters at the moment they crossed over between the familiar and the terrifying unfamiliar. She helped them navigate their way back to a new wholeness and witnessed mourning in all of its forms. Many obituaries later thanked her for her extraordinary care.
Nancy was born a twin. Her pediatrician father often said that the character of human beings could be discerned in the cradle. Right from the outset she was gentle and quietly attentive, the fourth child of a noisy brood of five (sister to Robbie, Susan, twin David and Jeffrey). She was born in Minneapolis where her father, Keith Drummond, was completing a residency in pediatric nephrology. The family moved back to Montreal when she was four.
Nancy drew the world in, with all of its smooth delights and painful edges. She took pleasure in the slowly opening trap door of a snail, pulled out of the water at the lake, and was pained by the bullying of her twin on the schoolyard.
How does an individual face the disruption of cancer? Here, Nancy was fluent. Two months before her wedding, she was diagnosed with Stage 4 lymphoma. She had a mass the size of a grapefruit next to her heart.
Nancy met Matt Dupuis while studying at McGill. They moved in together in 1988 and married in 1991.
A year after her diagnosis and wedding, and after many rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, she was told she would not have children. But she gave birth to Gabrielle in 1998 and then to Luke.
When Luke was a year old and Gabrielle was 3, Nancy suffered serious burns and lost her left eye in an accident at the family cottage. She had no time for self-pity with two young children to raise. She returned to her work as an oncology nurse as soon as her injuries had healed.
Nancy rode her bike to work (which she affectionally called Maurice), cycling over Mount Royal even in bad weather. She arrived an hour early every day to review every file. The head physician on her team, Walter Gotlieb, told her he would do anything for her, short of illegal, she was that vital to the department.
Over Nancy’s next 25 years, the shadow of death was always close. This quickened Nancy’s intense love for her family. She threw herself into the pleasures of cooking. She planned feasts with military precision, prepping weeks in advance. One kind of bread roll would not suffice. Sundays were devoted to preparing meals for the entire week. No one was entirely sure what the kitchen counters looked like underneath the heaps of bowls, spoons, sheet pans, casseroles and abundant delights. When she started making sourdough bread, her family would find remnants of the starter all over the house – the price to pay for fresh sourdough.
Nancy always shared the sweet details of her children’s lives with her siblings – Gaby’s exquisite sense of order and beauty and how a young Luke wailed, “My pal! My pal!” when the wind took off with one of his small toys.
When the cancer returned, Nancy told her family what she was experiencing and where she was headed. Her children emerged well into young adulthood and she was more worried for Matt living on his own than herself.
Matt, Gaby and Luke were with Nancy, at home, when she died.
Susan G. Drummond is Nancy Drummond’s sister.
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