Shocking darkness, enduring light Christine Egan’s warmth and spirit made a deep impression on everyone she met in northern health career; 25 years after her death — the lone Manitoba 9/11 victim — her legacy lives on helping Inuit students become nurses By: Melissa Martin Posted: 5:24 PM CDT Thursday, Sep. 10, 2026

On the night before the morning that everyone remembers, Ellen Judd spoke to her partner, Christine Egan, several times on the phone. Egan was in New York, where she’d gone to look after her nephews so her beloved brother, Michael, and his wife, Anna, could treat themselves to an anniversary vacation.

Usually, Judd would have been there, too. The couple had been together for more than 15 years, and loved sharing all the good parts of life. But at the time, she was an anthropology professor at the University of Manitoba, and the school year was just starting; she had classes the next day. Staying connected by phone would have to suffice.

In their calls that night, Judd remembers, Egan was happy. Christmas was the main topic. They were planning to spend the holiday with Judd’s family in Ontario, and talked about when to book flights. Egan was looking forward to that visit; Judd’s family “loved her to bits,” the now-retired professor says, and the affection was mutual.

The next day, Egan said, she planned to go into Manhattan with Michael. He was an executive at Aon, a global risk, retirement and health services corporation, and had an office on the 105th floor of the World Trade Centre’s South Tower.

An old university classmate of hers also lived in New York, and they’d arranged to meet at the WTC for lunch. So it would be a fun Tuesday in the heart of the city.

With that, the couple said goodnight. It was Sept. 10, 2001, and in a matter of hours, Egan would be gone.

She was the lone Manitoban killed in the 9/11 attacks, and, depending on one’s definition, the only so-called tourist who died in the WTC buildings. Everyone else who perished on the ground either lived in New York, or had a work reason of their own to be in or close to the towers.

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Friday, as the world marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, there will be many words devoted to recalling the day’s destruction. We live in a world transformed by that horror, a legacy that still casts a shadowy chill over our lives. There were the massive increases in surveillance, encroachments on civil rights, the fear and anger and wars that came after.

But Christine Egan left a legacy, too: first and foremost here in Manitoba, where she lived the last decade of her life, and in the North, where she poured her heart into improving health care for Inuit people. In a way it’s an act of defiance — and of hope — to remember her life just as vividly as the terror that stole it.

“There is a lot about the commemoration that’s really challenging, because it’s not entirely about the people who died,” says Judd, speaking over the phone late last month from her home in Vancouver, where she recently retired.

“It does a different kind of work in the public. So I think it’s really important for the people to be honoured, and cared about.”

But how to describe the vibrancy of a person? How to capture even a little bit of who Egan was?

Perhaps, one ought start at the beginning of a life bracketed by catastrophe. She was born in 1946 amidst the rubble of Hull, a port city on the coast of England that had suffered the brunt of Nazi Germany’s bombing campaign against Britain.

When she was just 18, she enrolled in nursing school, driven by a desire to help others.

In 1968, inspired by some of her colleagues, Egan brought her skills to Canada. She went first to London, Ont., where she worked at a local hospital. Soon she was offered an opportunity to go north, to what is now Iqaluit.

At first, Judd says, that seemed to Egan like a “wonderful adventure” — and it would change her life forever.

From the start, Egan was captivated by working in the North. The nursing work was challenging, which made it all the more fulfilling. The people she met were warm.

She immersed herself in Inuit culture, delighting to learn to carry babies in traditional amauti parkas that have a pouch sewn in the back, below the hood. She even began to learn Inuktitut to better care for her patients.

Above all, she made deep and lasting friendships in the North. For Egan, that part came naturally. She was outgoing and curious, with a boundless energy to “make life better for the people around her,” Judd says. When Dr. Anne Durcan first met Egan at a party in 1998, she was immediately struck by the nurse’s “big hugs, huge smile and incredible warmth.”

“Anybody who met her, that’s how they would describe her,” says Durcan, now the director of Inuit health for the U of M’s Ongomiizwin Health Services.

“You felt like you were her close friend, even if you just saw her occasionally. Her eyes were always smiling…. She just had this energy and passion, and she was always interested in who you were.”

“She just had this energy and passion, and she was always interested in who you were.”

Egan channelled that energy into a remarkable career. She obtained several degrees in Canada, published key papers examining Inuit women’s health and worked at hospitals and community nursing stations across Nunavut and northern Manitoba, including Garden Hill, St. Theresa Point, York Factory and Shamattawa First Nations.

When Judd accepted a job at the U of M in 1989, Egan moved to Winnipeg with her. It was a good place to continue her work in the North. She started her PhD in community health at the U of M, and lectured medical and pharmacy students on the intersections of Indigenous culture, traditional medicine and health care.

In 2001, two years after earning her doctorate, she took a lead role in Health Canada’s anti-tuberculosis efforts in the North. She was passionate about that topic, and often shared her knowledge with Durcan and other physicians. But her time in that role was cut far too short.

On Sept. 11, 2001, at 8:46 a.m. EST, American Airlines Flight 11 slammed into the WTC’s North Tower. At that moment, Egan was visiting her brother’s office atop the other building. He was among more than 1,100 Aon employees in the South Tower. Most made it out alive; but 176 of them perished.

Why wasn’t Egan among those who survived? Evidence suggests she came close to escaping.

In the 16 minutes and 20 seconds between the impacts, people in the South Tower received conflicting instructions on what to do.

Many began to evacuate; but in a decision now stained by the terrible grief of hindsight, security officials came on the building’s public address system advising workers there was “no need to evacuate” and to return to their offices.

At the time, it made sense. The South Tower was intact, but debris and human bodies were crashing onto the pavement outside. Authorities feared putting thousands more people onto the streets; nobody then could have imagined a second plane. So many workers continued to exit, but some hesitated, and others returned to their desks.

Despite this confusion, many Aon execs — including a 32-year-old executive named Eric Eisenberg — made a firm decision to send their employees out. Eisenberg and others who’d taken the lead to clear their offices perished, but their efforts were not in vain: the company had one of the highest survival rates of any at or above the tower’s impact zone.

After the South Tower was struck, Michael Egan — stuck in his office on the 105th floor, amidst unbearable smoke — stayed on the phone with his wife until the building collapsed. Christine wasn’t there, he said. He’d sent her down some time before. He was a designated evacuation leader for his floor; he would have urged his sister to leave with his colleagues.

When some of Egan’s remains were recovered, the medical examiner gave Judd some information. It was difficult to be precise, in the vast mound of twisted wreckage that emergency crews dubbed The Pile, but it appeared she was found in the lobby area of the South Tower.

Did she almost make it out? There’s no way to be certain, but those who knew her can imagine. After the South Tower was struck, first responders set up an emergency triage station in the lobby. She was a nurse, and some people were emerging from the stairwells with injuries; perhaps she offered to stay and help.

Maybe she was also determined to wait for her brother; the two had always been inseparable.

“My guess is she was desperately trying to reach Mike,” Judd says. “I can’t imagine her wanting to leave without him.”

Today, on the memorial that borders the footprint of the towers, their names are inscribed next to each other.

To those who knew her, the hours and days after were a blur. That night, as word spread through the U of M’s medical school that Egan was missing in New York, Durcan found herself in shock: “It was just hope, right?” she says. “You hope that she was off setting up a little (nursing) tent, putting dressings on people. But it wasn’t that.”

Three days later, with U.S. airspace still closed to commercial traffic, Judd flew to Ottawa, where she met her brother, and the two drove to New York to search for Egan.

They reported her missing. They connected with her brother’s family, and with the friend she planned to meet at the WTC, who’d been running late and missed the attacks.

Everyone at the U of M was “kind and helpful,” Judd recalls. So were Canadian officials, who had to break the heavy news that they were not aware of any Canadians among survivors in hospital.

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In the years that followed, Judd poured her heart into honouring Egan’s life, by keeping her voice of compassion alive.

She joined with September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, advocating for a non-violent pursuit of justice. On the 10th anniversary, she returned to New York for the first time, to read out names at the annual memorial service.

She even went twice to Guantanamo Bay, in 2017 and 2018, to observe pre-trial proceedings against four accused al-Qaida plotters. (The trial is currently set to begin in June 2028.) That act of witness was a chance, even through her own grief, to speak against the death penalty and keep the focus, instead, on ways to protect life in the future.

“A lot of what the families have wanted to do is to make something better,” Judd says.

Just months after Egan died, Judd and others who knew her had already began organizing a material way to keep her legacy going. Every year since 2002, the Dr. Christine Egan Memorial Scholarship has distributed thousands of dollars to Nunavut Inuit nursing students who plan to pursue their careers in the North.

“We remember her, and all that she did, and all that she loved.”

Even now, a quarter-century later, everyone on the scholarship selection committee knew Egan.

“When we get together it’s a special day,” Durcan says. “We remember her, and all that she did, and all that she loved and how happy she’d be for the Inuit nursing students. She’d be so thrilled. Ellen always wanted the light that Christine would have wanted, and the hope. There’s always that sadness. But it’s amazing, and it keeps her spirit very alive.”

So far, the scholarship has helped more than 30 nurses pursue their education. Durcan works closely with two of them now in health leadership roles in Nunavut. Over their careers, each recipient may help thousands of patients; in time, the number of lives healed by Egan’s memory could exceed those taken on the day she died.

“I hope to carry a piece of her legacy forward,” Jane Mansbridge, a 2025 scholarship recipient, wrote in a recent email.

At 30, Mansbridge is too young to have a memory of 9/11. She grew up in the tiny hamlet of Arviat, on the northwestern shore of Hudson Bay. In her youth, she noticed that there were few Inuit nurses; a fluent Inuktitut speaker, she began to dream of pursuing the career, so she could care for her people in a way that made them feel understood.

She and Egan came from different sides of the world, and very different times. Yet in Mansbridge’s story, there is a poignant thread of connection, something that would surely have made Egan smile. As a student at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit, Mansbridge had financial support, but it didn’t cover travel home for her young family.

“I hope to carry a piece of her legacy forward.”

The night before she died, Egan was excited to plan her trip to spend Christmas with Judd’s family. She never got to cherish that time.

Twenty-four years later, one of the young nurses following in her footsteps did, because of the gift that her love for the North left behind.

“The scholarship helped me and my family travel home for Christmas,” Mansbridge wrote. “It made it possible for us.”

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Friday, hundreds of millions of people around the world will pause to remember 9/11 — what it destroyed, what it changed, how it changed us. Almost everyone above a certain age can recall where they were when it happened. For many, the date alone still sends a shiver down the spine.

Yet for Judd, there are many dates that are more important to remember than the one on which Egan died.

For instance, it would have been Egan’s birthday on June 20. She would have been 80 years old and, according to the average Canadian life expectancy for women, she would likely still be alive, enjoying retirement with Judd in Vancouver’s balmy air.

Someday, they will be buried together in Judd’s hometown of Kingston, Ont. Just like Egan always wanted.

That’s love. It is quieter and less visible than destruction. Yet so long as people are willing to tend it, it can endure long after destruction’s rubble is cleared away, and even long after living memory fades.

Twenty-five years ago, Manitoba lost one of its citizens in the deadliest terror attack of all time; but the light she lit here remains.

“This is what life is, and we get just one shot at it,” Judd says. “We need to preserve life, and value it and certainly she did.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca