One of the Canadian pioneers of palliative care — who recently launched a new training program on dealing with terminal patients who ask for help killing themselves — has himself succumbed to cancer.
Dr. Larry Librach, 67, had worked for more than four decades in a field that until recently has been a poor cousin in the medical world, receiving relatively scant resources despite a growing demand.
He died Thursday, five months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, said the Canadian Partnership Against Cancer in a statement Friday.
“Dr. Librach’s vision, leadership, and passion in advancing the field of palliative care is a true legacy, one that will live on and continue to benefit many Canadians to come,” the Partnership said. “His career, which spanned 43 years, has been influential on a national scale.”
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He was also director of the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics for several years.
In an interview he recorded for the Canadian Partnership in May, Dr. Librach talked about the importance of preparing an “advance directive” that lays out the kind of treatment people desire at the end of life, noting that he himself did not want to be kept alive if he ended up in a permanent vegetative state.
“I think I’m still scared as all heck of dying because you don’t know what’s beyond that,” he said, six weeks after being diagnosed.
“For me to say, ‘Ah, I’m fearless, I can face dying’ — I don’t think anybody can do that,” he said. “I think I’ll have a reasonably good death, and it won’t be defined by my physical suffering. It’s all those psychological, emotional, spiritual things that will make the difference.”
Last month, he told the National Post about a training program he had developed for doctors, nurses and other health-care workers on how to deal with dying patients who ask for help to commit suicide, a relatively frequent occurrence. Assisted suicide, for now, is illegal in Canada, but it is important to identify why patients are making the request and deal with those issues, Dr. Librach said.
He told the Post he did not want an early end himself.
“I’m dying and I will die naturally.”
National Post
tblackwell@nationalpost.com