FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Amy Tucci | [email protected]
Longtime HFA Board Member Myra MacPherson Dies at 91
WASHINGTON—Myra MacPherson, 91, a devoted and longtime member of the Hospice Foundation of America (HFA) Board of Directors, died in the care of hospice at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital on Monday, February 2. The cause was congestive heart failure.
MacPherson was married for 19 years to the late HFA President and Chairman Jack Gordon, a former Florida state senator, who died in 2005. Her daughter Leah Siegel, a producer for ESPN, died in 2010. She is survived by her son, Michael Siegel, and three grandchildren.
She was a leading force at HFA and regularly participated in its long-running Living with Grief® educational program. In 2019, she was interviewed for the HFA program Aging America: Coping with Loss, Dying, and Grief in Later Life” and spoke candidly of coping with her own significant losses in later life. Describing the platitudes often used to comfort the bereaved, MacPherson said, “I always want to tell people. Don’t say such silly stuff.”
A well-known Washington journalist and writer, MacPherson joined The Washington Post in 1968. She was outspoken about the discrimination she experienced as a young female reporter, often fighting for access that was limited to men. She left the paper in 1991. In a story about her life and death, The Post called her a “trailblazing” journalist who “defied gender stereotypes.”
While working at the paper and after leaving it, she wrote for magazines, including Vanity Fair, and wrote several highly regarded books. MacPherson’s books include The Power Lovers (1975); Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation (1984); She Came to Live Out Loud (1999); All Governments Lie (2006); and The Scarlet Sisters (2014).
She Came to Live Out Loud was a book about a woman diagnosed with breast cancer at 37. MacPherson spent three years with Anna and her family as they confronted Anna’s illness, addressing important issues about death and grief, including physician and patient communication; living with serious illness; children’s grief; anticipatory grief; grieving styles; caregiving; and resilience. In her foreword to that book, she described the need to discuss death and grief.
“When my husband became the president of the Hospice Foundation of America, and I later began my book, I said that we would be the two most unpopular people at any party. Not so. People who had never talked about anything more personal than the [U.S.] president’s budget began revealing their encounters with death—family suicides, losing parents and children to accident and illness, a desire to express their hospice experiences and how to get through mourning. Try bringing up the subject. You may find a level of rewarding communication.”
Myra will be missed by all who had the good fortune to know her.
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