Janet Meynell, a family nurse practitioner who served the health care needs of rural residents in the mountains of North Carolina and supported countless people through their recovery from substance abuse, died of cancer on December 28th, 2024, at Mission Memorial Hospital in Asheville, NC. She was 72.
Ms. Meynell was born in Oxford, England in 1952, and grew up in London, where her father, the late Benedict Meynell, worked for the British Civil Service and her mother, the late Hildamarie Hendricks, taught history.
Post-WWII London was marked by austerity and food rationing, but the family had a comfortable life in which Janet and her younger sister, Katharine, attended private school while their parents engaged with a community of intellectuals.
When Ms. Meynell was 10, the family moved to Nairobi, where her father helped administer the process of decolonization during the time that Kenya was establishing its declared independence from Great Britain. There were safaris, where she saw lions and elephants, and snorkeling in the Mombasa coral reef.
In 1964, Janet and her sister returned to London with their father after her parents separated. She excelled in school and as an athlete, and became an accomplished horseback rider. Summer holidays were spent with her grandparents, Dame Alix and Sir Francis Meynell, a poet and publisher, at their country home or at a family friend’s castle in Tuscany.
Though idyllic on the surface, Ms. Meynell’s home life was unsettled, as her mother started a new family with her second husband, and her father remarried a woman who did not get along well with her stepdaughters. Janet had a difficult adolescence, marked by anorexia nervosa, but her resolute character helped her (temporarily at least) work through the challenges.
After graduating high school in 1970, she took a gap-year and traveled overland to India, both by train and by hitchhiking through Afghanistan. Upon returning to England, she attended Kent University, completing a degree in mathematics in 1976. It was at this time that she started to party too hard, but she moved to Edinburgh to live near her mother and became one of the first computer technicians at Heriot-Watt University while teaching mathematics to local secondary school students.
In the 1980’s, things began to unravel for Ms. Meynell, as she struggled with addiction and destructive relationships. She married a musician who was violent and abusive, and her life spiraled out of control. Finally, her father intervened and sent her to Vermont, where her mother had relocated. There, Ms. Meynell found her way to Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous programs and was gradually able to reimagine and rebuild her life.
Ms. Meynell trained as a nurse, completing her studies at Vermont’s Castleton State College in 1995. After practicing nursing for a few years, she enrolled in the nurse practitioner program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ms. Meynell co-authored a paper, “Bioimpedance analysis and HIV-related fatigue”, with Professor Julie Barroso. She completed her MSN degree as a Family Nurse Practitioner in 2002, graduating with honors.
While in Chapel Hill, Ms. Meynell met her future husband, Jay Pittard, who was also involved with the 12-step recovery community and worked in nearby Raleigh. They became acquainted debating the best policies to support people in the local recovery community.
Though their approaches differed, their shared commitment to service sparked a first date which grew into their lifelong relationship. They settled in the vicinity of Burnsville, a small town in the Western North Carolina mountains. There, Ms. Meynell provided primary care to the local community through the Yancey County Health Department and Mr. Pittard worked remotely for a large software company.
For more than twenty years, Janet and Jay made a stable, loving life together in a peaceful home on a wooded hillside above the North Toe River. They continued their shared commitment to serving the recovery community and helped launch the local NA meeting, which is still actively supporting people in Burnsville and the surrounding area. Over the years, Ms. Meynell mentored dozens of young women struggling with substance abuse and related challenges.
As a nurse practitioner for Yancey County, Janet was well-regarded by her colleagues for her professional expertise and collaborative approach. Her kindness and patience earned her the gratitude of patients, who would stop her in the supermarket to thank her for her care. Ms. Meynell also helped some patients with the cost of seeing specialists when they did not have insurance that would cover the expense.
During her last few years, in semi-retirement, Janet traveled to visit friends and helped care for her mother in Vermont, before her mother passed away on February 29th, 2024.
In addition to her husband, Jay Pittard of Green Mountain, NC, and sister, Katharine Meynell of London, Janet is survived by her brother, Philip Rutovitz of The Hague, The Netherlands; sister, Selina Rutovitz of New York City; stepbrother, Neelam Rutovitz of Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and stepsister, Jay Rutovitz of rural England. She was predeceased by her parents, but is survived by her stepfather, Denis Rutovitz of Edinburgh, Scotland. She will also be missed by numerous nieces (Hannah Morgan Austin, Ann Sophie Rutovitz, Sarah Carroll Dunlap and Ashley Carroll Rice), nephews (Josh Carroll and Paul Rutovitz), uncles, aunts and cousins, as well as many longtime friends in North Carolina, Vermont and England.
A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. on Friday, January 17th, 2025, in the chapel of Yancey Funeral Service.
In lieu of flowers, the family suggests contributions in Janet’s name to the PATH program at the Yancey County Health Department, which will assist local patients with the costs of specialist visits, surgeries and other medical treatments not covered by their insurance.
