Obituary of Helen Marjorie Chernoff, B.Ed, M.Ed.

In Memory of

Helen (Meek) Chernoff, B.Ed, M.Ed.

(1944 –2026)

Helen Marjorie Chernoff (née Meek) was born July 25, 1944, in Toronto, Ontario, the second child of Donald Urquhart Meek and Evelene “Ev” Harriet Meek (née Cherry). Helen’s first home was a small duplex unit on Atlas Avenue in Toronto, shared with Ev’s older sister Irene Borsos, Irene’s husband Alex, and their growing family. 

Ev and Irene, children of the Depression, were close and frugal, and for Helen, her mother’s family was to become a touchstone. The Cherry children – 11 lived into adulthood – formed a close-knit unit. Of necessity, the older Cherry children (including Ev) cared and provided for the younger ones. The siblings developed close, caring relationships that endured for their lifetimes. Their example imbued in Helen the guiding principles by which she lived - family was more important than anything, and when people needed help, you gave it to them. Helen’s relationships with the Cherry clan, including more than 30 first cousins, provided joy, comfort and belonging throughout her life. The annual Cherry Family Reunions were a can’t-miss event for Helen.

The Meek family moved to London, Ontario in 1950, when Helen was 6; her older sister Ruth was 7; and her younger sister Barb was 4. The youngest sibling, Jim, would be born days after the move to London. Both parents worked, and the children were expected to help around the house. When Jim was 4, Helen taught him to skate. She took him to a rink, strapped her old white figure skates on his feet, gave him a push, and told him, “You’ll figure it out”.

In her teenage summers, Helen cherished the time she spent at the cottage of her lifelong friend, Barb Seaton, in Grand Bend on Lake Huron. Helen was then interested in fashion and wore stylish clothes (later in life, nothing could interest her less). In 1963, Ev quit her job as a waitress and enrolled in studies to become a Registered Nursing Assistant. She was part way through the program when her husband, Don, died at age 52. Helen was deeply attached to her father; losing him at such a young age was one of the enduring sadnesses of her life.

Fiercely independent, Helen was never fond of being told what to do. Her mother, no pushover herself, would occasionally enlist Barb to help reason with Helen, confessing to Barb that “Helen doesn’t listen”. Her defiance hardly endeared Helen to her teachers either. She was bright, curious and questioning, but her school career was still a bit of an adventure. After escaping high school, she enrolled and graduated from Ontario Teachers College in the middle of the swinging ‘60s.

In 1966, while teaching adult education at the Jones Avenue School in Toronto, Helen met William “Bill” Chernoff, the handsome, hulking farm boy who taught in the classroom across the hall. Bill was born into the Doukhobor community that had settled near the town of Veregin, Saskatchewan, and Bill had moved to Toronto in 1965 to complete a Master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Toronto. After watching Helen tear around the school at a frenzied pace, Bill’s first reaction to her was a combination of fear and fascination. Here was one formidable woman. Helen and Bill did land in the same social circle and over time a romance blossomed from the bud of their friendship.

Bill moved to Winnipeg in 1967 - in the middle of the Summer of Love - to take up a teaching post at the University of Winnipeg. Helen told Bill that she would be driving through Winnipeg later that summer with her sister Barb en route to Vancouver, and ultimately San Francisco. Bill was invited to tag along. They agreed to meet at a designated hotel in Winnipeg on a predetermined date. Bill showed up that day only to discover that Helen wasn’t there, then drove to all the hotels in town desperately trying to find her. All the while, Helen and Barb were looking for Bill on their own tour of Winnipeg hotels. As a last-ditch effort, Bill decided to stop by the Winnipeg police station to ask if, by chance, some woman from Toronto had been looking for him. Ends up she had. The rest is history. They were married in a civil ceremony in London on July 2, 1968. Helen and Bill moved to Vancouver later that summer. Helen enrolled in courses at Simon Fraser University and learned to scuba dive. Bill taught at Capilano College and enrolled in a few classes at UBC.

In 1969, Bill wrote the University of New Brunswick’s Department of Mathematics to inquire about working there. Neither he nor Helen had ever been to New Brunswick, though Bill had heard the fishing was good. Bill received a job offer combined with the opportunity to do a PhD at UNB. The couple agreed to give New Brunswick a try, probably for a year or two before moving on. It’s been home to the family ever since.

Not long after Bill and Helen arrived in Fredericton, they went out to a bar. Women were not allowed in public houses in Fredericton in those days, so Helen was asked to leave. Outraged, even though she didn’t drink (and never has), Helen told the bartender she wasn’t going anywhere. Wisely, he backed off. Next day, Helen wrote a letter of protest to Fredericton City Council. Helen was well ahead of her time in her rejection and active opposition to misogyny, racism, homophobia, and other prejudices. She abhorred the judgement and maltreatment of the underprivileged. She was fearless and stood up for her beliefs.

After their arrival in Fredericton, Helen taught adult education in Minto. Not long thereafter, Bill became the Don of Bridges House, one of the Men’s Residences on the UNB Campus. Campus life exposed Helen and Bill to an eclectic range of wildly intelligent, colourful, eccentric and engaging characters who continued to add immense richness to the family’s lives long after they had all moved off campus.

Helen stopped teaching when their first child, Ian, was born in 1970. Greg followed closely in 1971, then Eric in 1975, Alex in 1978 and Donna in 1982. Helen’s sister Barb was close to Helen’s side during Helen and Bill’s early years, spending stints of time together with them in Winnipeg, Vancouver, and especially in Fredericton. Barb was an important presence in the early lives of both Ian and Greg, as Bill was both teaching and trying to complete a PhD, and neither Helen nor Bill had other immediate family nearby.

In 1976, Helen and Bill bought their house at 5 Manor Court. Bill renovated it over the course of 2 years, occasionally with the help of unsuspecting relatives who came for a visit, only to find themselves fitted with a carpenter’s apron and equipped with a crowbar. Helen’s brother Jim fell through the rotten roof while he and Bill were tearing it apart, leading to a cut chin and a trip to the ER. Helen was proud to tell anyone that her “Sweet Billy” had renovated their house entirely on his own. He was “Sweet Billy” at the best of times, but heard a stern rendition of his surname, “Chernoff”, at other times.

The family moved into 5 Manor Court in 1978 and have remained there ever since. Their home was welcoming, rambunctious and full. A revolving door of people filed through the doors - neighbours, relatives, Helen and Bill’s friends and the friends of their kids. The Chernoff children knew their siblings’ friends, and most of their friends’ siblings as well. The webs of connectedness that spun from this could nourish several lifetimes. Years after some of Helen’s children had left home, either she or Bill would sometimes wander down to the basement in the morning to find one of their kids’ friends asleep on the couch, having trod the well-worn path to their home after the bars closed the night before, and knowing where the spare key was hidden.

Helen’s unrestrained parenting style led to the occasional spirited pursuit of her children around the neighbourhood. These were witnessed by many with a mixture of awe, fear, and amusement. This, her seemingly boundless energy, and her unapologetic activism earned her the fitting nickname of Hurricane Helen.

Family outings included trips to the Chernoff family woodlot at Crabbe Mountain for the cutting and preparation of wood to heat the house for the winter, and to make maple syrup in the spring. Trips to the u-pick strawberry patch in the summer, where in addition to picking berries for home, the kids were also encouraged to eat their fill. And in the fall, trips to the banks of the Nashwaak River to pick high-bush cranberries. Although mandatory for the Chernoff kids, these outings were rarely resisted and have provided their children with some of the most treasured memories of their lives.

Family summers were happily dominated by the epic annual pilgrimage in the family van from Fredericton first to London to visit Ev, as well as Helen’s extensive family in Southwestern Ontario, then on to Bill’s family farm in Saskatchewan, with invasions of gracious relatives’ and friends’ homes along the way. Helen and Bill would take turns driving the van – which in itself was a spectacle to behold, stuffed to the gills with surplus strapped on top - while the kids did their best not to kill each other in the back. These vacations fostered many of the most enduring memories, relationships, and attachments of the family’s lives.

Helen’s sister Ruth died prematurely of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 1995. As devastating as this loss was, Helen’s main concern shifted to Ruth’s kids; Jennifer, Dan, and Andrew.  Helen’s fierce and loving connections to Ruth’s children and grandchildren created enduring bonds. The relatives living closest to Helen and Bill for years have been Ruth’s son, Dan, and his family, who live in Saint John. Dan was always first on the scene when Helen and Bill needed help, even if in the middle of the night.

While raising 5 children, Helen managed to complete a Bachelor’s degree in Education at UNB and get elected as a School Board Trustee. Helen stood up for what she believed in on the School Board and refused to back down, leading to many epic battles with outmatched bureaucrats. Once Donna started school, Helen obtained a Master’s in Education from UNB. Upon its completion, Helen was hired to teach adult education and high school equivalency at the Island View Correctional Centre, an adult minimum-security prison located in Kingsclear on the outskirts of Fredericton.

Helen leapt into teaching her students with dedication and zeal. She was a staunch advocate, and taught herself new disciplines to teach her students in turn. She was characteristically clear-eyed in her recognition of the disadvantaged and traumatic life circumstances that were a near universal undercurrent in her students’ lives. Some of her students deliberately committed timely petty crimes, hoping this would land them in the warmth and relative safety of a minimum-security prison for the winter. Prison could be a warmer and safer option than their home environments. Helen worked in the jail until her retirement, which coincided with the decommissioning of Island View in 2000.

Upon their retirements, Bill spent a lot of time in Saskatchewan, building and operating a substantial organic farm. For Helen, her chief focus remained her children and their growing families. She anointed herself “The Flying Grammie” and proudly dispatched herself to any of her children’s homes where she could pitch in to provide childcare.

In Fredericton, Helen busied herself with volunteer work, and continued activism in her community. She served as a dedicated volunteer in Fredericton’s Community Volunteer Income Tax Program, filing income tax returns in a free tax clinic for people with modest incomes. She participated in local protests and championed many causes - environmentalism, Indigenous rights, the rights of the disadvantaged, and opposition to all forms of prejudice. In all of this work, the child was the parent of the woman. Even as a young teenager, Helen took pains to rescue people from tough situations, never more dramatically than when she brought home a schoolmate to live with the Meek family for an extended period of time. 

Helen remained a devoted member of the congregation of the Unitarian Fellowship of Fredericton. At the Unitarians, surrounded by like-minded people, Helen found a deep sense of community and belonging, and formed deep and enduring friendships. She was stimulated and spurred to action by the shared activism she encountered there, and the Unitarian potluck suppers remained one of her favourite things in life.

Helen and Bill each thrived on their shared love of family, resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, work ethic, and lack of concern with convention. In many instances, the more seemingly crazy the idea, the more it got purchase, and an improbable number of the couple’s zany schemes largely worked out. Being raised by such loving and somewhat mad visionary parents instilled in their children - and by extension, their grandchildren - a sense that anything was possible, both for themselves and for the broader world.

Hurricane Helen burned bright and was hard to miss. She refused to back down and ruffled more than a few feathers. Although she came to the rescue of many, being genuinely unassuming, she failed to think there was anything extraordinary in any of it. She loved fiercely, her family above all.

Helen faced several medical challenges over the last decade of her life. Although they took a toll, she continued to endure them, making her seem somewhat indestructible. She continued to live the life she wanted right until her last day, which she spent going to the grocery store with Bill, sending a few emails to her kids, and organizing a few things at home. Helen died suddenly and peacefully in the early morning hours of March 25, 2026. She was 81.

She is survived by her sister, Barbara, (Dartmouth NS); brother, Jim (Halifax); son, Ian, his wife Sarah Luke, and their children, Alexandra, Sam and Benjamin (Toronto); son, Greg and his wife Mollie Ferris (Bentley, Alberta); son, Eric, his wife  Jennifer Shaw, and their 3 sons, Jamie, Henry and Luke (Ottawa); son, Alex, his wife Farrar Brodhead, and their children, Ella and Peter (Ottawa); daughter, Donna, her husband Brad Haga, and their children, Will and Ty (Cranbrook, BC). In addition to her parents, she was predeceased by her sister Ruth.

Helen was immensely proud of her children, their spouses, her grandchildren, their many accomplishments, and the shared love they have for one another. Nothing gave Helen more joy than having her children and their families gather together. She was grateful for the outstanding and compassionate medical care that she received over the course of her lifetime, particularly from her family physicians - most recently the exemplary and dedicated Dr. Kimoko MacLeod, and before that Dr. Kara Allen, Dr. Doug Varty and Dr. Ian MacDonald.

The Chernoff family is deeply grateful for the outpouring of support, kindness and shared memories from the vast and vital community our mom Helen helped build over the last 60 years.
 

A celebration of Helen’s life will be held at noon on May 2, 2026, at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre in Fredericton, with a reception to follow.

The event will be live-streamed; the link will be added to this obituary by May 1.

Helen didn’t like being made a fuss of. However, for those who would like to make a donation in her memory, please consider doing so to any of the following, or a charity of your choice:

The New Brunswick Conservation Council: https://www.conservationcouncil.ca/donate-ccnb/

Indspire: https://indspire.ca/ways-to-give/donate/

The Fredericton Public Library: https://www.fredfdn.ca/library-fund