MAUREEN FORRESTER KOMLOS
July 19, 1934–October 4, 2024
Maureen was born in Toronto to John Rae Forrester, a Sergeant Major in the Canadian Army, and Marie O’Connor, a nurse. A child of the Great Depression and of the Second World War (during which her father was stationed overseas), she concluded early on that life was a rather serious affair.
In 1948, the army transferred her father and the family, which now included three daughters, to Montreal. Maureen finished high school and completed one year of college there before returning to Toronto to study at St. Michael’s Hospital School of Nursing, Marie’s alma mater. She graduated in 1956, thirty years after her mother.
She would move back to Montreal to do staff duty at St. Mary’s Hospital and earn a Bachelor of Nursing from McGill University. In 1959, her sister Sandra, also a graduate of St. Mary’s, died of cancer before her twenty-third birthday.
Between 1961 and 1968, Maureen taught at St. Mary’s, then went on to finish her Bachelor of Arts at Sir George Williams, now Concordia University. In 1966, she married Steven Komlos, a communications engineer who had immigrated to Canada ten years earlier during the Hungarian Revolution. When FLQ bombs began blowing up in mailboxes in 1969, the couple decided it was time to leave Quebec and settle in Toronto.
Maureen returned to St. Michael’s as coordinator of the second year of the Diploma Nursing Program before being promoted to associate director of the school. In September of 1973, Ontario’s hospital-based nursing schools were moved into collegiate settings, and St. Michael’s joined George Brown College. The following July, Maureen read the names of the final graduates of St. Michael’s in the traditional ceremony at Convocation Hall.
After thirteen years in administration, including two as chairman of the Diploma Nursing Program, she returned to teaching and focused on both classroom and clinical work (except for a year as acting chair during a departmental crisis). When she retired in the summer of 1995, she did so with a sense of accomplishment, thinking of the hundreds of students she had helped mentor.
During her retirement, Maureen spent fourteen years as a volunteer docent at the Art Gallery of Ontario, giving tours to elementary school students. She also joined the Toronto Heliconian Club, an organization founded in 1909 to support and promote women in the arts, and served as its president from 2003 to 2005.
In their leisure time, Maureen and Steve enjoyed attending the symphony and the opera, and taking in plays at the Shaw and Stratford festivals. They also travelled extensively in Europe and did one major tour of South America.
In the fall of 2017, Maureen was pleased to return to St. Mary’s for a ceremony honouring the school of nursing and its graduates.
She will be missed by her sister, Alana Forrester; her brother-in-law, Charles Verge; her nieces Alexandra, Stéphanie and Charlotte Verge, their partners and their children; and her longtime friends.
A Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at St. Basil’s Church in Toronto on Thursday, November 7, at 2 p.m. Maureen will rest at Mount Hope Cemetery with her husband Steve, and her maternal grandparents and great-grandparents.