Anne Merriman
1935-2025
December 15, 2025
As the introduction to the Dearly Departed series reads, my father played a huge role in my life. I’ll never forget how he would open the Wall Street Journal while drinking his coffee on Saturday mornings. The strong smells of my father’s coffee mixed with the musty scent of the noisy, inked paper will forever be in my memory. I’d sit next to him and scrounge through the newspaper stack until I found the obituary section. I’d sit and read the stories about some of the most fascinating lives of people all over the world and where their final resting days were held, many in their homes under the palliative care of loved ones and hospice nurses.
Sadly, my family recently laid my newspaper-reading, business-savvy hero to rest. My father suffered a devastating stroke. He spent his final days in hospice where my family members and I were able to say our goodbyes to him while he rested comfortably thanks to the selfless care from some of the most compassionate nurses I’ve ever met. Death is never easy to accept. It gives an unimaginable heartache to those surviving the departed. But when your loved one is at peace, it makes the process slightly more bearable. That, and the memories I held near to my heart as I held his hand in his final days. It is this difficult loss of my father that gives me tremendous gratitude for people like Dr. Anne Merriman, who was known as the Mother of Palliative Care in Africa, and who also received her own hospice care as she passed away in June of this year.
Life, like a book, is made up of chapters. Some are joyous, some are painful, some are unexpected. Merriman devoted her life to honoring the final pages of strangers’ lives, ensuring they were written with peace rather than fear, and comfort rather than pain. In the 1980s, Merriman, who was a British doctor and received her medical degree from University College Dublin, recognized a devastating truth that people in third world countries were dying without comfort, relief, or dignity. She refused to accept that reality and chose to rewrite the ending for these large populations.
Pain relief, something many of us take for granted, was simply not accessible to many countries in Africa that were experiencing vast outbreaks of AIDS and cancer, especially in the 1980s and 90s. According to Merriman’s obituary in the Wall Street Journal, less than one percent of the world’s morphine-like opioids go to the poorest half of the population. Merriman brought end-of-life care to communities where it had never existed. She did this by championing an affordable oral morphine and trained local healthcare workers on administering it through holistic palliative care. Working with pharmacists in Singapore, Merriman created a four-ingredient formula that could be “mixed at the kitchen sink as easily as making coffee,” said Merriman.
Merriman’s work wasn’t just about managing the physical pain. She also trained African nurses on the importance of addressing emotional, social, and spiritual suffering as well. Merriman deeply believed that how someone dies should matter just as much as how they lived. She instilled the message of hospice and palliative care that no one should face death alone, afraid or in agony. One nurse who worked alongside Merriam said that “Anne taught us to be real human beings, especially at the patient’s bedside.”
One of her most lasting contributions was the founding of Hospice Africa Uganda and later the Institute of Hospice and Palliative Care in Africa. These institutions transformed how end-of-life care was delivered across the entire continent of Africa, training more than 10,000 caregivers and caring for more than 40,000 people. Through education, advocacy, and relentless compassion, Merriman helped normalize palliative care as a human right, not a luxury. Her work influenced national health policies and empowered African-led solutions, ensuring her mission would continue through the hands and hearts of others.
There is a rare strength in someone who values not only living, but also the closing of life. Merriman’s large heart made people feel seen and put at ease as their stories came to an end. In so doing, she taught all of us that compassion isn’t just how we care for people who are living. It is how we honor the whole story right down to the final pages of the book or, in the case of my father, the last turn of the newspaper.
Dearly Departed profiles are the musings of SC Innovates’ Director and SmartState Endowed Chair Laura B. Cardinal. Cardinal is an academic researcher and teaches Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation at the University of South Carolina (USC) Darla Moore School of Business Professional MBA program. Her series of courses includes the Strategic Innovation Certificate. Cardinal’s courses offer a unique fusion of innovation, business strategy, science, and technology.