Pamela Anne Fortune

Pamela Anne Fortune (nee O’Brien). Pamela was born in Halifax on December 16, 1949, to Denis Joseph O’Brien, a postmaster, and Luna Frances O’Brien (nee MacDonald), who worked in advertising. Her parents taught her a firm sense of justice: Pam was left-handed, and when the nuns sent her home from school one day for writing with the wrong hand, Luna marched her right back and sternly corrected the nuns.

Pam grew up in the North End with four younger siblings: David, Kenneth, Karen, and Peter. The family vacationed in Luna’s childhood home in Sherbrooke Village, where Pam spent time with her mother’s family. Pam would later bring her own family here every summer for fishing, miniature golf, and soft ice cream. And she always fondly remembered two voyages from her early twenties: a family road trip across the continent to California, and a trip to Mexico aboard a personal aircraft.

Pam attended St Patrick’s High School and went on to complete a BA in sociology at Dalhousie University and a bachelor of commerce at Saint Mary’s. In 1974, she had finished and was planning to move to New Zealand. Then she met John Edward Fortune (Jack) of Saint John at the restaurant where she worked. Within days she had abandoned her one-way ticket, within a month they were engaged, and they got married on April 19, 1975, and honeymooned in Bermuda.

Pam was universally regarded as Jack’s better half. This wasn’t an empty compliment: when he broke his back and was put in a brace for six weeks, she had to take the phone to convince his family he wasn’t lying.

Their first son, John Edward (Jack) was born in 1979; their second son, Kris Alan in 1980; their third, Brian Alexander (Sandy) in 1983; and their fourth, Scott Andrew in 1985. After that they gave up trying to have a daughter. Pam was a mother who read to her children every night, contributed to top-notch school projects, sewed Halloween costumes by hand—including, one year, matching ninja turtle outfits—and at every birthday and holiday baked chocolate cakes that quickly became legendary at Elmsdale District School. All her children went on to college, so she must have done something right.

After having moved to Fredericton and back to Halifax, in 1983 Pam and Jack started work on their own house in Belnan. Pam designed it. Her organizational powers were the stuff of legend. In addition to running her own accounting firm, she did taxes for family members and even friends, often silently completing a whole stack of documents and presenting it needing only a signature. She had family trees, account numbers, and birthdays at her mental fingertips and could produce off the top of her head the medical histories of distant relatives and the legal standing of old family properties.

Pam loved the quiet life of the country, where she also busied herself with reading, gardening, and meditation, and she took daily walks with neighbors whatever the weather. Pam also sponsored many underprivileged children over the years and kept a large folder of letters and photos from them. Much of her accounting work was done for assisted living homes, and she was a lifelong blood donor. She always gave selflessly, and she kept the lives of everyone around her operating like clockwork even while running her own business.

The family trips were mostly camping, as far away as New Brunswick and PEI at first, but later into Ontario and New England, and in 1993 a road trip to Florida and Disneyworld. Once the kids were grown, she and Jack ventured farther and farther afield, and over the course of her life Pam traveled to Mexico, Bermuda, St. Martin, Panama, Spain, South Korea, China, Thailand, New Zealand, Australia, and more countries we couldn’t remember.

She especially loved two of these trips. In 2005, she and Jack took a camping trailer tour around North America: across Canada to Vancouver, north by cruise ship to Alaska and back, south to California, and then on a long diagonal back through Yosemite and past Mount Rushmore. And in 2011, they took a cruise around Southeast Asia and Australia, stopping in Korea to visit Sandy and his future wife. In 2015, they took a second trip to Bermuda, forty years after the first.

In 2015, Pam was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. She worked through it, determined to beat it, meticulously organizing her life around every roadblock so she could keep traveling and doing everything else she loved. In 2014 her first grandchild, Lukas Min, was born. In 2016, Lukas’s sister Haydee Song was born. Pam never got the chance to meet her granddaughter in person, but she spoke to her many times on video chat, and the last words she said were “I see her” as she watched Haydee play. She passed away on the morning of January 12, 2018, at the age of 68.

Pam was loved deeply and will be missed by her husband Jack; their sons Jack, Kris, Sandy with his wife Seung-Min Song, and Scott; two grandchildren, Lukas and Haydee; her mother Luna; siblings David, Kenneth, Karen (Stone), and Peter; and many cousins, nieces, and nephews.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday, January 21, at Cruikshank’s Funeral Home, 2666 Windsor Street, Halifax, with a reception to follow. In lieu of flowers, a donation to Parkinson Canada or the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of Canada would be most welcome.