“She wasn’t a ‘legacy’ kind of person,” said Elle Flanders of her mother, the late educator, advocate, mentor and philanthropist Kappy Flanders, CM, LLD, who founded North America’s first chair in palliative medicine at McGill in 1994. “Looking back wasn’t her thing. She was all about right now, about the work that needed to be done.”
Along with her sister, the writer and historian Judith Flanders, filmmaker and artist Elle Flanders was talking via Zoom in the lead-up to last October’s keenly anticipated The Kappy Lecture: Murder, Mystery and a Little Death, the inaugural instalment of a planned annual series whose proceeds will go to the Council on Palliative Care. (The very council that was founded, and for many years co-chaired, by Kappy Flanders. The word legacy is a bit hard to avoid here.)
“When Kappy died in 2020, there was still some confusion about palliative care,” said Elle, recalling some of the initial thinking around the need for something like the Lectures. “For everything she had done, there were still questions. How does one get it? When does it kick in? Who does one call? Despite being in the lead with a lot of this, she was probably as unsure about those points of follow-through as anybody else.”
The subheading of last year’s Lecture refers to its guest participants, crime novelists Donna Leon and Louise Penny. To match the evening’s underlying purpose with a literary genre not unfamiliar with death and dying, was an inspired idea; to score two of the most acclaimed and popular writers in that genre—writers who can draw a crowd by word of mouth alone—was a coup.
“Kappy was intent on being public facing,” said Elle. “She didn’t want things like, say, the med-school experience to be too much their own language, too separate. The idea of this lecture series is not only to carry that public-facing principle forward, but to make it fun. In this case it’s a way of engaging an audience that, frankly, is coming to hear Donna and Louise and Judith, all of whom are mavens in this whole other realm of literature. Talking about death and dying, too often, means preaching to the choir. Well, this way we can say, ‘Guess what? You’re going to meet your favourite authors, and we’re going to talk about their work together with the idea of death and dying.’”
Judith Flanders, who writes social history books as well as murder mysteries, moderated the inaugural event. Ahead of time, she gave an indication of the spirit that’s driving The Kappy Lectures when she commented on her book, Rites of Passage: Death and Mourning in Victorian England. “The Victorians saw death all the time, and we almost never do,” she said. “Elle and I are extremely unusual in that both our parents died at home, and we were with them as they were dying. As a society, we’ve taken death and sanitized it. We’ve pushed it into either a clinical setting in the hospital, or into the entertainment section. We see people die on television and in the movies and in crime fiction all the time; the Victorians had a much closer and more brutal relationship with death.”
An increasing awareness of palliative care notwithstanding, many Montrealers, and even some McGillians, may not necessarily know of the field’s deep local roots. The very term “palliative care” was coined by Dr. Balfour Mount, who established the palliative care unit at the Royal Victoria Hospital in 1975. It was the first hospital-based unit of its kind in North America and played a crucial role in legitimizing the discipline as a field of study. Dr. Justin Sanders is the third person to have occupied the Kappy and Eric M. Flanders Chair, having been named to the position in 2021. He has said it was “the honour of a lifetime” to hold this role, so it wasn’t surprising to learn that he’d brought a thorough knowledge of McGill’s palliative tradition to the job, and that he concurs with the Flanders sisters on the value of a lecture series that brings the discussion up to the moment and takes it into the future.
“With an event like the Kappy Lectures,” Sanders said, “McGill is reasserting its role as a contributor to the future of palliative care, not just its past. It’s also increasing our exposure to the public and their awareness of our role in the care of people affected by serious illness. I would say that if people who have a serious illness don’t have access to palliative care, the evidence suggests that they really don’t have access to the best care.”
At the launch event in a packed R. Howard Palmer Amphitheatre, Donna Leon spoke by Zoom with Judith Flanders about researching hospice care for her 2020 novel, Trace Elements, comparing her experience in Italy and the United States, where it felt more like a business; she also deconstructed the thought process behind her decisions on whether to kill off a character, drawing laughs from the crowd with her droll delivery. Louise Penny, interviewed onstage by Judith Flanders, talked about her newly published novel, The Grey Wolf, and taking inspiration for another one of her books from a 2014 newspaper article about an episode in Canadian history that has faded all too quickly from public memory: the moment on Parliament Hill in Ottawa when a compassionate passerby whispered “You are loved” into the ear of dying Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, who had just been shot. “That’s the very essence of palliative care, right there,” Penny said.
It’s a measure of their commitment to The Kappy Lectures that Elle and Judith (who are keen to credit their sister Susan with additional behind-the-scenes help) are already talking about the series in the long term: plotting wish lists for future guests, mentioning that French-language events are a possibility, conceptualizing different angles into their multi-faceted theme. The potential is enticing and wide-ranging.
“We’re doing this so that we can enter into a discussion that can continue over the years and open it up to a wide public that is not technically connected to palliative care,” said Judith. “It’s a chance for a two-way conversation with everybody about something that is, after all, a one hundred-percent certainty for everybody.”
“My aspiration is nothing less than having something at McGill that is as significant as the Massey Lectures,” Elle said. “Not because I’m grand and think I need to do something important, but because I think the topic is deserving of it. I think we need more conversations that are not sequestered within their relative fields. I want to bring the public back to the university.”
“And the university back to the public,” said her sister.
Kappy Flanders, you get the feeling, would approve.