By Lisa Fitterman
Petite, fierce and focussed, Kappy Flanders became a warrior for palliative care because she wanted people to understand that dying was a part of living, as important a passage as being born, and something that could not be brushed aside because the thought of it was distasteful or frightening.
After all, as she once told a McGill University interviewer, “everyone is terminal at some point.”
Ms. Flanders, who described herself as “5 feet, 5 inches, with a push” and had an inordinate love of monograms, was plainspoken and hated euphemisms used in place of death and dying. “Passing,” for example, reminded her of gas, “at rest” was taking a nap, while “departed” meant “sorry, just missed her.” Instead, her style was to confront the issue head on, with no minced words and make the process as comfortable and informative as possible. She believed in giving patients what they wanted, as well as including their families, friends and caregivers in the conversation; they all needed to be aware of what choices were available for care, not just what their doctors unilaterally decreed was best.
She found her calling after the premature, painful death in 1991 of her husband, Eric Flanders, from lung cancer, and the very different death of her mother in Israel less than two years later from the same disease. While her husband’s life was extended for 18 miserable months by seemingly endless surgeries, chemotherapy and radiation, her mother’s death was comfortable and peaceful, palliated by a team that allowed her to die on her own terms.
In that same McGill interview, Ms. Flanders described learning about palliative care for the first time from a physician while sitting in a beautiful garden on Mount Scopus, overlooking the Dead Sea.
“After he explained [it] to me, I said, ‘We could bring you over to Montreal and you could explain palliative care to us and we could start something because it sounds so amazing,” she recalled.
The doctor looked at her in surprise. When Ms. Flanders asked why, he replied: “Well, Montreal is where palliative care started! You have the guru of palliative care there: Balfour Mount.”
When Ms. Flanders returned to Montreal, the first thing she did was call Dr. Mount, who had established the palliative-care unit at Royal Victoria Hospital in 1975 – the first ever in a teaching hospital in North America – and ask what she could do. Her subsequent volunteer and philanthropic efforts led to the creation of the Eric M. Flanders Chair in Palliative Care at McGill University (Dr. Mount was the first professor to hold it) and the McGill Council on Palliative Care, which brought together people from all walks of life to discuss the art of dying well.
She was the Herculean force behind the creation of the Canadian Palliative Care Initiative, effectively a blueprint to develop, enhance and promote a standardized system of palliative care across the country, and she was the co-creator of a series of lectures that forms part of McGill’s outreach in the community, including Mini-Med, Mini-Law and Mini-Biz.
After a diagnosis of cancer, Ms. Flanders died on June 27 just as she wanted: in her own bed at home in downtown Montreal, surrounded by family. There were no surgeries to determine what kind of cancer it was, or attempts to cut it out, or chemotherapy or radiation. She was 81.
“She always said that after a certain age, there would be no more investigations and no resuscitation. That became law as of this past year,” her youngest daughter, Elle Flanders, said. “She lived a good, full life. My sister Judith put it this way: It was a life in two acts.”
Marcia (Kappy) Morrison was born in London, England, on Nov. 12, 1938, the elder of Hyam and Doris Morrison’s two daughters. Her father worked in the ladies’ dresswear business that his own parents had begun; he and her mother, who was from Brooklyn and also from a family in the clothing business, met on a golf course, fell in love and settled down in Kensington.
When Marcia (as she was called) was but a toddler, her parents sent her to New York to stay with maternal relatives in order to stay safe during the Second World War and the German Blitz of London and other British cities and towns. While in New York, she would discover she had a cousin also named Marcia, who declared that the state was too small for the two of them. From then on, she was Kappy, a shortened version of her mother’s maiden name, Kappel, and so she was known for the rest of her life by nearly everyone. (Once, many years later, as she waited for hours in a Montreal Hospital’s emergency room without being called, she approached the nurse at the intake desk to ask what the hold-up was. It turned out she had been called, but as Marcia Morrison, which she hadn’t recognized as her own legal name at all.)
At 16, while still a student at finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland, she met Mr. Flanders at a Friday night Sabbath dinner at her parents’ London home. He was handsome and suave, a Montrealer living in Australia at the time because his father ran a clothing company there, and he had come to London to do business with her own. Then and there, she decided he was the man for her. A few years older, he thought she was too young but she proved persistent, writing him letters from school that soon wore him down.
The couple married when she was 18 and first lived in Australia, where their first child, a daughter, was born. A second child, also a daughter, was born in London and finally, a son and a third daughter in Montreal.
Life was a whirlwind, albeit on a more conventional track when Mr. Flanders was alive. Indeed, Ms. Flanders didn’t really question it at the time; although she would have loved to continue her studies after graduating from finishing school, her own father could not understand why. To him, a woman either became a wife and mother or a secretary, nothing more, and so she became involved in Montreal’s Jewish community, eventually serving as president of the United Israel Appeal of Canada Women’s Division, the chair of the Combined Jewish Appeal Women’s Division and chair of the Israel Cancer Research Fund.
“She was never traditional, not even particularly motherly,” said Elle Flanders. “She had stuff to do, people to see and places to go, community work in the first act of her life. In the second act, her sense of self and her own interests took over.”
Bernard Lapointe, a palliative-care doctor who held the Flanders Chair from 2009 until last spring, said that somehow she managed to be a connector, collaborator and weaver all at once. The best example of what she meant to the movement, he continued, was an event she co-chaired last October called Projection Week, in which more than 100 events brought in people from worlds of social sciences, arts, religion, philosophy, food, education and medicine to discuss life, death and end-of-life issues.
“I’m a doctor but my contribution was a photography exhibit that was organized with the Institut de tourisme et d’hôtellerie du Québec on how to enjoy eating, the pleasures of life,” he said. “How to have the best death is an issue that has become magnified in this time of pandemic. How can we get people to have these conversations beforehand, given the inhumane way they were dying, brought to emergency rooms and so on without making their wishes known, dying powerless and alone?”
Accolades she garnered over the years included the Governor-General’s Meritorious Service Medal in 2003 and an Honorary Doctor of Laws from McGill in 2009. In 2014, she was inducted as a Member of the Order of Canada.
Even when she was dying, Ms. Flanders continued to be an extraordinary organizer, even instructing her daughters to send birthday cards to her friends on specific dates.
“If Kappy had organized Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, all the soldiers would have got back alive, it would have been catered and the napkins would have matched,” Judith Flanders noted.
Besides her husband, Ms. Flanders was predeceased in 2006 by her sister, Andrea Bronfman, a philanthropist and the wife of billionaire Charles Bronfman, who died after being hit by a taxi in New York’s Central Park. She leaves her daughters, Susan, Judith and Elle Flanders; son, Steven Flanders; son-in-law, Michael Dickinson; daughter-in-law, Tamira Sawatzky; and grandchildren Emma and Allie Flanders.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!