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By Christine Hamelin
with photography by Ian MacAlpine
Warm, smiling and radiant, Erin Finn is a quintessential people person. Whether she is showing a home, serving a steak, raising funds for a charity or officiating a wedding, she enjoys the moment and embraces life to the fullest.
Erin grew up in Calvin Park in a house where her parents, Irish Catholics from large Kingston families, still live. Her father, Neil, was a police officer and her mother, Maureen, a nurse. “They met at St. Mary’s of the Lake Hospital, where he was an orderly before becoming a police officer,” says Erin. “Six months later, they were engaged. The day Dad found out his offer on our house was accepted, Mom found out she was pregnant with me.”
The family’s lifestyle was “chaotic,” with both parents doing shift work until Maureen got a job in a doctor’s office. Both Neil and Maureen are twins, and “my mom’s twin, Aunt Marg, who is like a second mother,” was often around. One of Erin’s earliest memories is of “playing gin rummy with Mom at 4 a.m. when she got home, and Dad was just leaving for work.” Living this way made her disinclined to want a 9-to-5 job.
Her parents instilled in Erin and her younger sister, Megan, the idea that you should “pay it forward and give back”; so church “wasn’t just about four walls but would help to get you through life.” . . .
