Humble life-saver, adventurouss seeker, ‘she was my pal'

Winnipeg Free Press

a day ago

After a plane with six American fishermen on board crashed at a landing strip near Gods Lake Narrows in June 1972, Janet MacKenzie, one of two nurses working at the nursing station, rushed over without a second thought. She cared for the wounded until a medevac plane arrived.
Before Janet died on May 7 at age 78, that was all her husband, Robert, and her children knew about that story. She didn't say too much about it, and when she did, it was to the point and with little embellishment.
It was only after she died that her family learned, while looking through her belongings, that she had received letters from Americans, who had reached out through the Winnipeg Tribune newspaper, asking for help to find the nurse who had saved the lives of their loved ones.
A copy of a letter sent to the Winnipeg Tribune in 1972 asking for help finding the identity of a nurse who helped save lives during
a plane crash near Gods Lake Narrows. The
nurse turned out to be Janet.
'Can you help us find out her name? It is quite likely she saved the life of one or more of the passengers and we would like to thank her,' reads a letter to the Winnipeg Tribunewritten from Illinois by Carla Pluff, the wife of one of the injured men.
A medical services director quickly identified Janet as the nurse in question.
About a week later, letters came rolling in and she quietly stored them away.
'I have given your address to the others as they will want to thank you personally, but, meanwhile, please know we will be ever grateful to you,' reads a letter from Pluff sent in November 1972.
In another letter, a family member of an injured man says: 'Without your care, Leo wouldn't be alive.'
Robert and daughter Lesley MacKenzie go through the letters, carefully folded and sorted, but never talked about. It was a surprise on one hand, but on the other — it was, in a way, like her to jump head-on into anything while avoiding any fanfare.
'I'm going to be honest with you, she was just a different species altogether,' Robert, 82, says with a laugh from his home in south Winnipeg.
'Somebody called her very unique,' Lesley, 45, adds.
Janet was born in January 1947 in Morden, and lived in Minnedosa, Flin Flon and Brandon before graduating from high school. She graduated from the nursing school at Misericordia General Hospital in 1968, under the eye of the nuns who taught there.
The school was strict — the nuns forbade her from going on a date with a doctor while studying, for example — and Janet had described her upbringing as strict, too. But she had an adventurous streak.
After a short time working in Fisher River, she decided she wanted to see Canada's North, and boarded a plane to Aklavik in the Northwest Territories in 1969.
It was there she met Robert, a native of Scotland who was working as a store manager for the Hudson Bay Co.
They clicked almost immediately, Robert says, and quickly moved in together, which was uncommon at the time. They married in 1970, at the Brandon home of Janet's parents.
'We communicated, that was it, I think. Every day,' Robert says. 'She was my pal.'
Rather than rush to have children, the couple focused on their careers.
Nursing was Janet's life, and she picked up jobs at nursing stations in remote northern communities such as Split Lake and Cross Lake as Robert travelled for the Hudson Bay Co.
Janet MacKenzie with a baby she delivered while as a nurse in the Northwest Territories.
The couple lived in fly-in communities that had no doctor. Two nurses would staff the local nursing station that was open nearly 24-7 with few resources. It demanded creative approaches to treating patients.
Patients weren't always accessible by road, and Janet often met patients by hopping on a snowmachine or taking a dogsled.
'I remember at times, at two o'clock in the morning, people were banging on our door and saying, 'Can you come to see my husband or my wife?' or they'd come in bloodied at the door and they needed assistance,' Robert says. 'Janet would disappear for three or four hours.'
While she wasn't from Northwest Territories, she never acted like an outsider and found herself immersed in the cultures of the people she nursed. Lesley fondly remembers attending powwows as a child and her mother would use the word 'astam,' Cree for 'come here,' to call her over.
Lesley remembers her mother, more than anything, accepting people as they were, be they her patients or her family.
'My mom was the least judgmental person ever, she (would say), 'You don't know what people have been through, everybody is equal, everybody's the same,' Lesley says. 'It was just kind of the way she was.'
Janet and Robert moved to Winnipeg, where she worked in various positions at the Health Sciences Centre while raising their children, Christopher, Lesley and Heather, before retiring in 2010. She's remembered by them, and her two grandchildren, Adryan and Annika.
She died surrounded by love, after a lifetime of ensuring others felt loved and cared for.
Janet MacKenzie often had to take a Ski-Doo or dogsled to provide care as a nurse in northern Canada.
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'Any broken friend, or broken person, or broken animal, strays, she had an open-door policy in this house,' Lesley says.
They don't know if Janet ever connected with the people in those letters after the plane crash, but they paint a clear picture of her devotion to the act of caring and the ripples of impact it created.
'Mrs. (MacKenzie), this coming Thursday will be Thanksgiving Day in the U.S,' Pluff's letter to Janet reads.
'You can be very sure that six families will thank God you were there when needed!'
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Malak AbasReporter
Malak Abas is a city reporter at the Free Press. Born and raised in Winnipeg's North End, she led the campus paper at the University of Manitoba before joining the Free Press in 2020. Read more about Malak.
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