Meg Ninos, obstetrical nurse, buoyant spirit
Pulling up in front of school a few days before she died, Meg Ninos hailed a friend nearby, calling attention to the new car she was driving.
"Maggie had no idea that I picked it up," she said of her 7-year-old daughter, whom she was getting that afternoon. "She is going to be so excited."
Excitement was somewhat of a specialty for Ms. Ninos. An exuberant dancer, she took classes to learn new steps and in her 20s would sometimes jump up on speakers in a club to show the crowd how it was done. A nurse, she helped deliver hundreds of babies over the past two decades, most recently at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
An unwavering friend, she always had enough love to spread around, even when her daughter became the focus of her life, friends and family said. At 47, Ms. Ninos was the kind of single mother others aspire to be when she was murdered at her Medfield home on Feb. 6.
"She was quite a woman, I'll tell you, and a wonderful friend," said Valerie LeBlanc of Watertown, who met Ms. Ninos at a graduation party when they finished their nursing program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. "I couldn't go two weeks without talking to her."
In order to spend more time with her daughter, Ms. Ninos often volunteered to work 12-hour nursing shifts at night or on weekends so she could bring Maggie home from school on weekdays.
"Ever since Maggie was born, that was it," Stephen Ninos of Malden said of his older sister. "Maggie was everything to her."
Family and children were the navigational stars that guided Ms. Ninos through life. The oldest of three, Margaret Eldred Ninos grew up around Syracuse, N.Y., where she won awards riding horses in equestrian competitions, including a fifth-place ribbon during the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
At home and on a farm that her father built into a horse business, Ms. Ninos developed her acuity for friendship.
"She loved, loved making friends and, I thought, had an exceptional ability to maintain friendships over her lifetime," said her brother John of Tampa.
"Everywhere she went, she made friends," said her mother, Margaret Ninos of Syracuse. "And unusual for a lot of people, she kept contact with everybody."
Ms. Ninos was the third of four Margarets, sharing a first name with her grandmother, mother, and daughter.
"To keep everybody separated, we were Peggy, Meg, and Maggie," her mother said of herself, Ms. Ninos, and her 7-year-old granddaughter.
In 1978, Ms. Ninos graduated from Jamesville-deWitt High School in DeWitt, N.Y., and graduated four years later from Mount Holyoke College.
On "Memories of Meg," a website at web.mac.com/avjewe/Meg/Welcome.html, classmates from Mount Holyoke recalled meeting Ms. Ninos in Safford Hall their first year. She had a "perpetual twinkle in her eye," one wrote, and her compassion extended beyond burgeoning friendships to the dormitory's kitchen staff that eked out a less privileged existence.
The daughter of a physician, she was attuned to the benefits of nutrition and exercise even during college. After graduating, she spent a few years as an aerobics instructor at a Richard Simmons fitness studio, then decided to become a nurse.
Additional coursework at UMass-Boston led to a nursing degree, which she used initially to work as a traveling nurse in places such as Los Angeles and Summit, N.J.
At a Bennigan's Grill & Tavern in New Jersey one night, she walked up to a man at the bar and encouraged him to dance. They became lifelong friends, he wrote on the "Memories of Meg" blog, and he didn't find out until a decade later why she picked him out of the crowd: "She said, 'I liked your shoes!' " Had he worn sneakers, he mused, "I never would have known Meg."
By the late 1980s, Ms. Ninos was a labor and delivery nurse. Her father, whose specialty was obstetrics and gynecology, "said he was so proud and excited that she was a delivery nurse," her brother John said. "They had a professional bond."
Several years ago, she married Andrew Boisvert, though the marriage was ending by the time she was pregnant with Maggie and they divorced. For the sake of their daughter, family members said, she kept in touch with her former husband. Authorities say Boisvert killed Ms. Ninos, then committed suicide in North Carolina.
"I admired my sister for the wonderful mother she was to Maggie," John wrote in an e-mail. "Her total love and absolute dedication to raising Maggie and providing a good life for her were felt by all who knew her. She had a core belief that Maggie should have close relationships with the relatives of both sides of her family, and with Maggie's father, Andrew, because she wanted Maggie to have a sense of family and a father figure in her life."
Ms. Ninos, meanwhile, was a mother figure in many lives.
Long before the birth of her daughter, she organized trips and sprawling gatherings with guests milling in and out of rooms. That didn't stop when she became a single mother.
"She always loved being around people, having dinner parties," her brother Stephen said. "If half the people were in the living room watching the game on TV, the others were in the kitchen making food, and the kids were all running around, she was in her element."
Never lost in such crowds, Ms. Ninos "had a huge laugh," Stephen said. "No matter what room you were in, you knew she was laughing."
In the delivery room, however, she could be a calming presence, as LeBlanc learned when she was giving birth to one of her daughters and Ms. Ninos hurried to be with her right after leaving work.
"I was in the middle of a big contraction and wasn't breathing right and it was like she was the cavalry," LeBlanc said. "She rushed in and said, 'You breathe with me.' She showed me how to breathe right. Right then I knew, 'this is a good nurse.' "
A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. on Feb. 29 in United Church of Christ in Medfield. 