Laurie Schwartz Naparstek, a founder and board member of the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare in Boston, died Dec. 8 in Massachusetts General Hospital, just a month after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She was 52 and lived in Worcester.
Born in Boston, she grew up in Newton, the youngest child and only daughter of a social worker and a physician. She held master’s degrees from Suffolk University and Harvard University and a doctorate in education from Boston University.
For the past decade, Dr. Naparstek worked in human resources at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.
In September, her husband said, she was voted most compassionate by some 150 colleagues. She was known among family and friends for her capacity for caring.
“Laurie’s constant focus was on the well-being of others,’’ said her brother, Dr. Eric Schwartz, a physician in Boston. “She had a fundamental generosity and made every person whose life she touched feel appreciated. Contact with her really elevated people and heartened them.’’
In the weeks before her death, he said, nurses at Mass. General told family members that his sister “ ‘gives more to us than we could ever give to her.’ The nurses would argue over who got to care for her because she had a way of making them feel so good.’’
“Laurie was as polite and welcoming to the doctors and nurses as could be,’’ her husband said. “They would come in and ask how she was doing, and she would turn it around and ask how they were doing or how their kids were.’’
For family members, Dr. Naparstek’s manner with her caregivers recalls the way she helped her brother Ken, a health care attorney who died of cancer in 1994, also at Mass. General.
She “was a regular presence at his bedside,’’ said family friend Andrew Dreyfus, president and chief executive of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. Along with Dr. Naparstek and Ken Schwartz, Dreyfus helped found the Schwartz Center just days before Mr. Schwartz died.
