Remembering Prof Cynthia Goh (d. 13 February 2022)

Professor Cynthia Goh (Cynthia Ruth Fong): a woman of strength, a leader with a heart and a legend in palliative care.

She brought solace to the dying, warmth and gentleness to their families.

Gentle grace and a wavering moral presence form the core of her philosophy of care which was loined to her quest to deliver quality care and comfort to a dying patient.

With love, Dr Goh observed. With her heart, she listened.

She fixed her eyes on her patients, knowing that they have so much to teach her; she became the most diligent pupil on living [leaving] well and dying well.

She challenged conventions rooted in the medicalisation of death, brought the gaze of public health and the work of the grim reaper home, to the place where every person will feel comfort instead of fear, ease instead of pain, relief instead of tension.

Critically, Dr Goh’s commitment and dedication gave meaning to dignity.

The term, "dignity”, is pandered around so often that we risk not understanding it at all. Lest it becomes a self-perpetuating fallacy and rhetorical device, Dr Cynthia Goh was determined to challenge and disrupt prevailing attitudes towards dying, death, loss and mortality.

In that, she was a visionary – a living example and a light that cannot be hidden and which continues to shine.

In order for the palliative care movement to have any credibility in the eyes of public policymakers and members of the medical fraternity in Singapore, Dr Goh advocated for palliative medicine to be recognised as a specialty - on an equal footing as clinical medicine and surgical procedures.

She held the view that palliative medicine needed to be mainstreamed into medical practice, if it was to gain support among the medical fraternity, acceptance and application by the average person.

More fundamentally, Dr Goh gave the fraternity, patients and their bereaved families a language to speak about the universality of loss and the commonplace ordinariness of death, dying and loss, in a comfortable and loving context, without fear and prejudice.

She was a pioneer in recognising that the death and loss of every individual, regardless of his/her station in life, should be a community experience - no one should be left to die alone, in pain and in discomfort.