Canadian icon Robert Munsch has chosen to die by MAID
Robert Munsch, a beloved and complicated children’s book author, has been granted a medically assisted death under Canada’s MAID laws, though no date has been set.
Munsch, who turned 80 this summer, is the author of more than 70 children’s books, including such classics as The Paper Bag Princess, Love You Forever, Thomas’ Snowsuit and Angela’s Airplane. While StatCan does not have figures on their ubiquity, it’s a fair bet that most Canadian households containing a child over the past 40 years have also been home to at least one of Munsch’s books.
But for all the joy he has delivered to others, Munsch’s own life has had its share of travails. His book Love You Forever was born out of tragedy, when he and his wife, Ann, tried and failed to start a family. A baby boy they named Sam was stillborn. A year later a daughter, Gilly, suffered the same fate. They have since adopted three children.
“Until that time, I had this funny feeling you could just sashay your way around and get what you wanted,” Munsch told The Walrus about those events. “Then I discovered that we couldn’t.”
Munsch has also been public about his issues with addiction to cocaine and alcohol, as well as being diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In 2008, still in his early 60s, he suffered a stroke.
Then in 2021 he revealed that he had been diagnosed with dementia.
“I can’t drive, I can’t ride a bicycle, I can’t write. So it’s been really whittling away on who I thought I was,” he told CBC’s Shelagh Rogers in an interview at the time.
A new profile of Munsch in the New York Times reveals that, shortly after that diagnosis, he applied — and was approved — for Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) from the government of Canada, which legalized the practice in 2016.
He joked to the Times writer that his application consisted of: “Hello, Doc — come kill me!” and added: “How much time do I have? Fifteen seconds!”
It has of course been four years and counting, but Munsch said he was convinced he’d made the right decision after watching one of his brothers (he grew up in a family of nine children) dying from Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).
“They kept him alive through all these interventions,” the author said. “I thought: Let him die.” He added that he will choose to die “when I start having real trouble talking and communicating. Then I’ll know.”
One of the rules of MAID is that consent has to be made at the time of death, and not merely earlier. “The person must be given an opportunity to withdraw consent and must expressly confirm their consent immediately before receiving MAID,” according to regulations posted on a government website.
Thus, said Munsch, “I have to pick the moment when I can still ask for it.”
He expressed a similar fear to CBC in 2021: “I worry about what I’ll be in a year,” he said. “Will I be a turnip in a bed in a year?”
The Times profile notes: “Munsch is now at that unsettling, if sometimes brief, stage in the neurodegenerative process in which he is symptomatic but still self-aware. This allows him to watch himself lose himself.”
Or as Munsch said of his writing and thinking processes: “I can feel it going further and further away.”
He experienced a rare reprieve in 2023, when he was struck with the inspiration to write a story about two little girls who cause havoc in a hospital. “It just sort of happened,” he said of the new story, which he wrote over several days, and which was published last year under the title Bounce.
Another book, The Perfect Paper Airplane, was written by Munsch many years ago, recently revised, and will be published this fall . Like many of his books, it features illustrations by Michael Martchenko, a fellow Canadian, now 83.
Munsch is American by birth, and was born in Pittsburgh, but moved to Canada in 1975. In 1999 he was made a member of the Order of Canada, and in 2009 it was announced that he would receive a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in downtown Toronto. He also once had the dubious honour of being the most stolen author from the Toronto Public Library.
Times author Katie Engelhart (another Canadian) wrote the profile for the paper, and relates how she discussed with her subject the topic of his 1985 book Mortimer, which she both had read to her as a child, and then read to her own children. She asked about the cadence of a refrain in the book, delivered by the title character: “Clang, clang, rattle-bing-bang / Gonna make my noise all day.”
“Would you like to hear me tell ‘Mortimer’?” Munsch asked her, and then he leaned forward and began to tell the story, delivering that line “in a voice so loud and liberated that it quivered in the air,” Engelhart reported, before coming to the story’s quiet conclusion: “And upstairs, Mortimer went to sleep.”
Munsch said to her: “I notice that the stories are mostly free from the problems I have with speech.”
It echoes what he told the CBC four years ago: “My stories, strangely enough, are all there. The stories will be the last thing to go, I think.”
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