A life of quiet generosity
Patricia Margaret O'Brien — known as Pat to her friends, Mrs. O'Brien to three generations of Kingston schoolchildren, and Nana to twelve grandchildren — passed away peacefully on the morning of March 8, 2024, surrounded by her family.
Born in Halifax in 1942 to Eileen and Thomas Donnelly, Patricia grew up by the harbour with a love of the water that never left her. She moved to Kingston in 1964 to attend Queen's University, where she met Michael O'Brien at a folk-music night at the Grad Club. They married eighteen months later and built a life together on Sydenham Street, raising four children in the house where Patricia would live for the next fifty-eight years.
For nearly four decades, Patricia taught Grade 3 at Frontenac Public School. She had a particular gift for the children others found difficult — the shy ones, the restless ones, the ones who arrived without breakfast. Former students still write to the family to say she was the first adult who made them feel they mattered.
Outside the classroom Patricia gardened, played the piano (poorly, she insisted, and beautifully, everyone else insisted), and made Sunday roast for whoever happened to be in town. She was a quiet, faithful presence at St. Mary's for fifty years, and a Meals-on-Wheels volunteer for thirty.
She is survived by her four children — Sean, Maureen, Brendan and Catherine — twelve grandchildren, and her sister Helen. She is reunited with Michael, who passed in 2019, and her parents.
"She had a way of making an ordinary afternoon feel like something you'd want to remember."
— Catherine O'Brien, daughter