Front Burner - Robert Munsch’s decision to die

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

Beloved children’s author Robert Munsch has chosen medically assisted death. Canada is one of the few places in the world where MAID is legal for patients like Munsch, who are not terminally ill. Today, a conversation with journalist Katie Engelhart, on the legacy of one of the great Canadian writers, how dementia has impacted his life and ability to come up with stories. Plus we take a broader look at how MAID works in Canada today, who can access it, and the persistent moral and ethical questions it raises.  For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Too many students are packed into overcrowded classrooms in Ontario schools, and it's hurting their ability to learn. But instead of helping our kids, the Ford government is playing politics, taking over school boards and silencing local voices. It shouldn't be this way. Tell the Ford government to get serious about tackling overcrowded classrooms because smaller classes would make a big difference for our kids.

Go to Building Better Schools.ca. A message from the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm Jamie Possom. Look, Shane, look here, a nice new five-speed bicycle. And Shane went over, looked out, and he kicked the tires. He bounced it up and down. He says, nah, too slow.

That is beloved Canadian children's author, Robert Munch, reading to a group of of kids back in 1991. Fix the pork quark right through her finger. Shane says, blood. You likely know him from the stories that you read as a kid, or like me, the stories that you are also now reading

to your own kids, the paper bag princess, Mortimer, love you forever. A few years ago, Munch revealed that he'd been diagnosed with dementia and Parkinson's. And recently, there was a beautiful piece written about Munch by journalist Katie Englehart in the New York Times. It's about his

legacy, but also about the fact that he's been approved for medically assisted dying or made. We were so moved by the story that we wanted to bring Katie on to talk about it, and medically assisted dying more broadly. Katie, hey, thank you so much for coming on to the show. It's so great to have you. Thank you for having me. So I think you and I are probably pretty close in age, and I know you grew up reading Munch like me and now you're reading those books to your own children, right? That's right. I guess about a year ago, my three-year-old started expressing interest in stories that had a bit more substance to them. Previously, I guess we'd been doing a lot of,

you know, construction vehicle stories. And he seemed to want stories with more beginnings, middles, ends, characters, plot development. And I found that Munch was a really good author to bring into our lives at that point because his books have, you know, plot but not too much plot. They have characters, but but not ones that are too complicated or too difficult to be legible for a child. So, so at that moment where we were really progressing to real stories, Munch was an obvious person to turn to. And Mortimer is such a great one. My boys love Mortimer. They love like pretending to be like Mortimer. They didn't even not like to go to bed.

They make crazy noises. They try to drive us crazy just like Mortimer. Mortimer's father heard that racket. He came up the stairs. Whap, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack, opened up the door. He said, Mortimer, be quiet. Mortimer said yes.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Father shut the door. Went back down the stairs. Whap, laugh, laugh, laugh. They like thinking that we're going to send police officers up to their room. Like, it is such a joy to see them experience these books, probably in very similar ways that we did back then, hey? Yeah, my boys are the same.

It's funny, my one-year-old literally cannot say his own name, but can say Mortimer. So, and it's funny, Mortimer's one of those ones that I have such a clear memory of my father reading me. Mortimer. And I think it's because it's such a, I mean, beautiful, but in a way, simple book. The repetition is, is so consistent. This refrain really sticks in a child's memory. So I don't know, even just the way my father read it to me. It really remains. So I don't know, even just the way my father read it to me, it really remained. with me. One thing that I really loved learning in your piece was how Munch would come to these

ideas. Because you tell me a bit about how he got an idea and also how he workshopped them. Yeah. What was amazing to learn about Munch was just how much time he spent not just coming up with stories for children, but interacting with children. For him, children were always more than just his audience. They were a part of his creative process. He really came up with everything in conversation with or interaction with children. So he started his career as a preschool teacher. And the story he tells is that he used to volunteer to be the teacher who sat in the nap room where children are sleeping on their little cots. And he found that if he told stories, the children would stay on their cots, stay still, and eventually drift off into sleep. And that was

sort of the first place where he was training his storytelling abilities. He discovered that if he was telling good stories, interesting stories, the children would stay there if he told bad stories or moralistic stories or prescriptive stories. The children would get bored and wander away and, you know, not nap and the day would be a disaster. And he really took that philosophy of story writing in concert with children throughout his entire career. My rewrite method is to continue to tell the story. That's how I do most of my rewrites. They're not

written versions. But the stories do check. And I'm not thinking about rewriting when I'm telling stories. I'm just thinking about keeping these kids happy. He spent a lot of time in classrooms at children's festivals, testing out new material, incorporating the interruptions of small children into his

stories, changing his plots based on how he saw his audiences responding. I spoke with his longtime editor at Scholastic, and she had this interesting way of describing it. She said other children's authors, or would-be children's authors, write stories that they think children need, as opposed to Munch just wrote objects for children to devour and enjoy. My kids just really love how the paper bag princess calls that prince a bomb at the end. They just die every time. Elizabeth says, Ronald. Ronald?

old? Your hair is all nice. Your clothes are all pretty. You look like a nice guy, Ronald, but you know what? You are a bum. In your piece, you also tell this story, this really lovely story, about a young girl who would correspond with Munch through letters about her daily. life. I know he spent a lot of time writing and communicating with kids, but can you tell me about this one girl that you focus on? Yeah. Her name is Gan Ning Tang. She's now, I think, approaching 50, but going back to when she was younger, she at eight years old, decided to write her favorite author, Robert Munch, a letter. She wrote a little greeting and sent a picture of herself

in a hot air balloon. And at that time, Munch was receiving, I mean, thousands, some years, he received tens of thousands of fan letters a year, his policy was that he responded to everyone. He gets this letter from Gunning Ting and he writes back to her. And to his surprise, she keeps writing him. Every two weeks, she sends him a letter. When I connected with Gunning later, she told me that she had recently lost a beloved grandmother who'd been her kind of confidant. And she thinks maybe she was writing to Munch because he was another adult who was outside of her immediate nuclear family. And she just wrote him a better daily life, how much her little sister bothered her, how boring she thought her small town was. And a couple of years later, Munch told me he

decided to visit her. He arranged a trip to this tiny town called Hurst, Ontario. He didn't tell Gunning that he was coming. He just showed up one day at her school. Gunning was called to the staff room and found that Robert Munch was there waiting for her. And she just had this amazing story of spending the day with him. You know, this wasn't like a photo op. He wasn't being followed around. This visit was just for the sole purpose of getting to know her. He wandered around the town with Gunning and her sister and her cousins. They went to the graveyard to visit her grandmother's gravestone. And he and Gunning stayed in touch for decades. You also wrote about some of the tragedies and struggles that he's had in his life, which I didn't know about. And how

some of that tragedy actually inspired Love You Forever, which is a book that means a lot to a lot of people. So the way he told the story was Munch and his wife, Ann, they'd both been educators and both really wanted children of their own and gave birth to two stillborn children, a boy and a girl, in quite short order. and Munch was, you know, a wash with grief, as is understandable. He came up with a little refrain. I'll love you forever. I'll like you for always. As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be. And it was just something that he repeated to himself over and over for comfort.

But one day he was on a stage, I think in Guelph, and he made up a story around the refrain and told it. What he told me later was that, you know, it wasn't the final version of the story. It wasn't perfect, but Munch knew that it was meant to be a story. And he just went behind stage and just wept after that release. His own publisher, Annick Press, didn't want the story. They didn't think it really worked as a child's story. It was about a parent growing older and, and, you know, There's an allusion to a parent dying at the end of the book.

So he went to FireFive books. They did a small printing, and it became one of the best-selling children's books in history. I'm so grateful to know the story behind that now. I'll never read it kind of the same way again. Too many students are packed into overcrowded classrooms in Ontario schools, and it's hurting their ability to learn. But instead of helping our kids, the Ford government is playing politics, taking over school boards and silencing local voices. It shouldn't be this way.

Tell the Ford government to get serious about tackling overcrowded classrooms because smaller classes would make a big difference for our kids. Go to Building Better Schools.ca. A message from the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario. Hey, how's it going? Amazing. I just finished paying off all my debt with the help of the Credit Counseling Society. Whoa, seriously? I could really use their help. It was easy. I called and spoke with a credit counselor right away. They asked me about my debt, salary, and regular expenses,

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Robert Munch at his home in Guelph, Ontario over the summer. And I know, well, you spoke to him very candidly about his diagnosis. And just what did he tell you about how he's doing? So it was clear meeting Munch that he's dealing with a lot of deficits. He now has been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and Parkinson's dementia. So a pretty sizable percentage of people with Parkinson's will develop dementia as well. But because he has Parkinson's disease, he's clearly dealing with a lot of physical frailty. He's falling around the house.

He's using a walker or a cane wherever he goes. He's been forced to sort of retreat indoors more or less because of that. And then the dementia symptoms are also progressing. So in his telling, the first symptom was that he found he couldn't fit his car into a parking spot anymore. he stopped driving. Then he found he was falling off of his bike. He stopped using his bike. And now the symptoms of progress. So he has trouble remembering when friends come to visit. He is trouble finding words. The other day he couldn't think of the word dinosaur, which is obviously a word that a child's author will have used quite a lot. What we spent a lot of time talking about

was the effect that the disease has had on his creativity. You know, that that was really why I was interested in speaking to Robert Munch. I wanted to understand better how something like dementia affects a creative mind. And he had a really interesting answer to that question. He explained that he's not able to come up with new ideas for stories anymore. Plots for stories used to appear to him almost fully formed. And it used to happen all the time. so he had this kind of limitless bounty of stories available to him.

That doesn't happen anymore. Occasionally, he'll think of a kind of premise for a story or he'll hear a noise that he thinks would be funny in a story and he will wait for the story to appear to him like it always has, but that doesn't happen anymore. On the other hand, he says his existing stories and he's published more than 80 books remain completely intact within them. it's almost mysterious to him because he's having all this trouble with speech and with

recollection, but his stories are available for him to think about and retell. And that's kind of amazing. He said they're these little nuggets, how preserved in his deteriorating mind. So the rest of it. reason Detra, essentially for your piece, was certainly about his legacy, but also about the fact that he decided shortly after his diagnosis to apply for medically assisted death or maid. And what did he tell you about why he ultimately chose to go that route? I mean, it's interesting because when I set out to write this piece, I had no idea that he had applied for maid, which is the subject that

I've covered very extensively for the last decade or so I had no idea. But what Bob explained to me was that he knew pretty early on after his diagnosis that he wanted to apply for made. At that time, his symptoms seemed to be progressing very quickly. He thinks they've slowed down. But at the time, he was really facing the possibility of being, in his words, a turn up in a year. And he wanted another way. Bob had also watched one of his brothers who was a monk die very slowly of Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS. And as his brother died to people around him really pushed for more and more medical intervention. And Bob says he remembers thinking, just let him die. So he knew he didn't want to go that way. He applied for maid. He was approved. The process he's agreed to with his

physicians is that he will be sort of almost reassessed every six months. He as a follow-up conversation with his assessors. And what they're trying to do is take stock of his cognitive decline and make sure he doesn't progress to the point that he can no longer consent to made. So I think we're working together to find what Bob thinks is an appropriate time. What he said to me was that once he loses more of his communication abilities, when he really has trouble speaking and communicating what he wants,

the time will be right for him. And this idea that he has to be able to consent to it, tell me more about how that fits into how we practice me in this country. So in most of Canada, a person has to be able to, in most cases, actively consent on the day of their death. So they have to have decision-making ability on that day. in the context of dementia, that sometimes means that patients feel pressured to have made sooner than they otherwise would like to because of this fear of losing their chance. The difficult thing, of course, is that no one can tell a person with dementia exactly when they will lose the ability to consent, particularly since, you know, that kind of capacity can fluctuate. There can be good days, bad days. So the fear is that they will progress and lose their chance and then and then potentially

live many, many years in a way that they previously didn't want to. There's an exception and that's the province of Quebec, which recently legalized advanced directives or made. So in that province, someone can write an advance directive stating, you know, when I reach such and such a point, it'll be different depending on the person, but when I can, you know, no longer recognize my family members, when I need daily help toileting, whatever it is. When I reach that point, I would like a doctor to provide me with maid, even if on that day I don't understand what made is or know what's happening. That's a very controversial legal expansion,

and again, it only applies to Quebec. Yeah, and I mean, interestingly, Quebec, it has the highest proportion that made deaths at 7.3% the highest in the world. How do people explain that? You know, I don't know what it is. You know, there are people who make arguments that there's something about the culture of Quebec or French Canada that has explained this expansion, maybe something about the desire for autonomy and self-direction. Others argue that maybe it's more structural. There could be just more physicians providing assisted deaths. I don't think I know what explains it. But it's certainly interesting that assisted dying has been legalized in other jurisdictions for much longer, but it's Quebec that has the highest proportion of made deaths in the world. And what about Canada more generally? It's high. In 2023, which I believe is the last year for which we have complete data, there were around 15,000 made deaths in the country just over, which means that one in 20 Canadians who died, died by maid. And that's

pretty striking, given that Maid was only legalized in Canada in 2016. I also think it represents, you know, a kind of broader sociological shift. If one in 20 deaths or deaths by Maid, that means we probably all know someone who's died by Maid. I do. Yeah. It's no longer this kind of abstract thing. It's just this other way of dying in Canada. How would you explain that? Is it because we do it differently than other places? Is it because our law is around it, are more lax in other places? How do people try and explain that? It's probably a number of reasons, but certainly, you know, if we compare Canada's made legislation to the made legislation in the American states where it's legal, Canada's law is a lot broader. So Canada's law

would allow many more people and many different kinds of patients to qualify. In the American states and in the District of Columbia where it's legal, a person has to be terminal ill and really at the very end of their lives. Their requirement is that a person be within six months of a natural death according to two physicians. And Canadian patients don't actually have to be dying of anything in particular to qualify. So I know that you've mentioned the controversies and the criticisms, but I would like to get into them with a little bit more specificity. Of course, over the years, we have expanded our made laws. And just if you could articulate what the criticisms are around them.

First, there's criticism on kind of religious or theological grounds. In my reporting, I give a lot less space to that. First, because I think it's less influential. on the Canadian political scene, but also because it's sort of predictable. Another main source of criticism comes from certain disability rights groups who argue that Canada's made law in particular, because it's so broad, will either directly through the medical system, through the force of the law, or indirectly in more subtle ways, push people with disabilities towards choosing an early death. So an argument from a group like Inclusion Canada

might go along the lines of, you know, in every Canadian state and province, the disability benefit is below the poverty line. Canada doesn't support people who live with disabilities. They are often denied access to either medical services or caregiving services that they required to live well. Under those circumstances, a person might be declared eligible for Maid because of society's failure to protect them. And I think that's a very compelling argument. And then I think there's criticism that comes from inside the maid provider community, specifically criticism of the expansion of Canada's law in 2021 to include people who are not dying. So under Canada's expanded Bill C7 law, people who have, for instance, spinal cord

injuries, chronic pain, chronic migraines, even disorders that we don't fully understand, like long COVID, can qualify for a medically assisted death. I spoke with a doctor in Toronto, Dr. Madeline Lee, she oversaw the development of the maid curriculum for Toronto's University Health Network. She's also personally overseen hundreds of made assessments. And she's hesitant to involve herself in the cases of patients who are not dying. She told me, she doesn't think that's what medicines should really be doing, helping people to end painful lives. And she said, you know, it's not really assisted dying if the person's not dying. It's something different. There are different forms of criticism.

Certainly, when the Canadian government was deciding whether or not to legalize Maiden, whether or not to expand it, I mean, there were just dozens and dozens of people who were brought in to outline all of these critiques. Of the people who are using Maid, do we have a sense of how many of them are using it because they have terminal illness and how many are using it because they're part of like so-called track two, right? The vast majority of people who choose made in Canada have a death that's reasonably foreseeable. So I'm looking at the numbers here. In 2023, there were 14,721 track 1 deaths and 622 deaths on the so-called track 2, so patients who aren't dying of their condition.

And you mentioned Dr. Madeline Lee, and I just wonder if you could tell you. me a little bit more about the position that this puts doctors in and the complexity of actually assessing the patient in order to prove that in some ways this is a last resort. I mean, it's interesting because Canada's law doesn't require that may be a last resort. It is up to a patient to decide that her condition is causing sufficient suffering to merit death. It is up to the patient to decide what is a reasonable course of treatment. But ultimately, a patient can decline care and then become eligible for made. You know, I think that's something that is hard for some doctors to wrap their minds around. And Dr. Lee's interesting. She had,

she made a distinction between what's allowed under the law. And she thinks a lot, maybe too much is allowed under the law, and what a doctor should permit or what a doctor should become involved in. She argues that too often maid providers are concerned only with what the law allows. If a patient wants to die, qualifies, she should be offered maid. Madeline Lee thinks doctors need to be thinking more about whether they should provide the maid or whether instead they should encourage the patient towards more treatment towards staying alive. You know, that's real dispute within medicine. There are many providers who agree with Lee that the

role of a physician should be to encourage life and that maids should be a last resort. There are others who see this approach as fundamentally being paternalistic. They would argue that it's the patient who knows best whether her life is worth living, not the physician who interacts with her at most for a few hours here and there. You know, I know Robert Munch is just one of many, many patients that you've talked to in all your work on this. And just if there's one thing that comes up over and over again, what do they tell you about what it feels like? Well, something that's interesting is that a significant minority of patients who are approved for made never go through with it. Sometimes that's because they die naturally. Sometimes they lose decision-making

capacity before the day that they had scheduled to die. But sometimes, it's because they just change their minds or they decide day by day that the decline they feared is actually tolerable to them. But still, I've heard from people who argue that the maid approval itself is a sort of medical treatment, like a palliative treatment because it makes them feel better to have. And, you know, Robert Munch isn't planning on dying by maid anytime soon from what I understand, but he's got this approval, and it seemed to me that that approval had some benefits to him that it made him feel better to have. I think that's a good place for us to end. Katie, thank you so much for this. Thank you.

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