Nancy Greenleaf

Here's the house that Nancy Proctor Greenleaf lived in as a ten-year-old in Peterborough, New Hampshire: her father had been given two small, derelict cabins by a nearby artist colony. (Rumor had it, a young Bette Davis once stayed there.) These cabins were pasted together to make a two-room house, and on the back of that house a lean-to was added, as sleeping quarters for the kids. Bunk beds. A top bunk, because she was small and nimble. And beside the bunk, a two-by-four - part of the building's framing - was where she would carefully place her most prized possession every night: her glasses. Hopelessly myopic without them, possessed of her specs, she always looked hard at the world around her and took in everything she could.

If it were up to her, she would have called this world Enigma. She reveled in its mysteries and loved to rattle the assumptions she found along the way, both within herself, and in the people and institutions around her. So if at twenty-something, she studied psychiatry to understand what makes us tick, at sixty-something she turned to Buddhism, both because ticking doesn't explain it all, and because she loved its practice of pondering contradictions. And at eighty-something, she would gleefully tell her fellow residents at The Highlands to buckle up and contemplate "the inseparability of confusion and wisdom."

Nancy's first career was in nursing, because she needed a steady gig and didn't have money for school. Mary Hitchcock Hospital in Dartmouth, New Hampshire, had a three-year training program that provided education, room and board, and $500 in exchange for her labor during her years as a student nurse, plus one year post graduation. Much later in her life, she would write Becoming a Nurse in Mid-Twentieth Century America (2017), a combination memoir and history of such hospital-based nursing programs.

In subsequent years, as she worked in various hospitals in the Boston area (plus stints in Rochester and San Francisco), she pursued further education, earning a bachelor's degree in 1964, and a master's in 1967 (Boston University). Along the way, she started to think critically about her field - about the wage gap, the respect gap, and the increasing failures of a health care system that seemed better at caring for its institutions than for its patients.

In 1974, she was fired from her job at Newton-Wellesley Hospital because of her union organizing efforts. Blacklisted and unable to find work, she went back to Boston University for a third time, receiving a Doctorate in Nursing Science in 1982. Among the acknowledgments in her dissertation: "I want to thank my husband Allen for his steadfast encouragement and my children Emily and David, who managed to grow a total of nine inches between them during the two years this work was in progress." She and her family moved that same year to Maine so she could take a teaching position at the University of Southern Maine's School of Nursing. She was appointed Acting Dean in 1984, and then Dean in 1985.

She retired from her nursing career in 1991 and promptly switched course. Calling her small flock of Angora goats the "peer review committee," she learned how to spin and weave. She studied color theory, natural dyeing techniques, and pattern making, and joined the Weaver's Guild. She traveled extensively in southeast Asia to further study textile arts, and put her teaching skills to use in weaving schools both at home in Pownal and in India.

If the warp of her life was the stuff of résumés and obituaries, the weft was the rich world of family and friendship. She met her husband Allen Greenleaf through the Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They married in 1966 and moved to Lexington, where they were active at First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church (and part of a group of parishioners that were always ready to skip church and go for a hike at a minute's notice). At First Parish, Nancy was part of a working group that drafted the Women and Religion Resolution that would be adopted by the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly in 1977. She and Allen were also involved in developing the church's forward-thinking sex-education curriculum, as Nancy was always one to believe that what you don't know, or refuse to acknowledge, will hurt you (and others as well).

A friend that is honest with herself is a good friend, and she had many - through her work, her education, her activism, her creative endeavors. She went on multiple health delegations to Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 80s and 90s. She co-founded Nurses for Progressive Social Change in the 80s, and Bradbury Mountain Arts in the 90s. Meanwhile, she and Allen raised their family and grew together for 37 years, managing to stay good friends when they eventually divorced.

The daughter of Wesley Redfield Proctor and Eloise Betz Proctor, Nancy was born December 6, 1936 in Auburn, New York, the fourth of six children. Her childhood memories were mostly of New Hampshire, where they moved in 1941 to take over the family farm in Jaffrey after her grandfather broke his neck falling off the hay wagon. Her first memoir, Becoming a New Englander (2013) describes her childhood adventures and coming of age in a family that was slowly fracturing under her father's alcoholism.

Nancy died in Topsham, Maine on October 21, 2025. On her last day, she was still singing a song she learned as a student nurse in the 50s ("Every day is Labor Day at Boston Lying-In"). She was predeceased by her sisters Beverly Boyer and Ann Rice, and by her brothers Peter Proctor and Wesley Proctor Junior. She is survived by her sister Betsy Nidecker of Danville, Indiana, her daughter Emily Greenleaf, of Brunswick, Maine, and her son David Greenleaf, of Montreal, Quebec.

A celebration of her life will be held for friends and family at the Pownal Town Hall, December 7th, 2025 from 1-3pm.

In lieu of flowers, please donate to your local food bank.