When his doctor explained in 1995 that surviving leukemia meant he needed to ask a stranger for bone marrow, Chris Pablo was uncomfortable asking for himself alone. So, he asked for everyone else as well.

It became a crusade for Pablo, whose need for a bone marrow transplant never got in the way of organizing community donor drives for others. After he beat the odds and survived, Pablo decided he wasn’t finished helping.
For 13 years, the Käneçohe father answered every request for advice. Every fearful patient — each one a stranger — received his full attention. He gave them hope. Pablo called it “the obligation of survivorship,” the thing you did if you lived.
But survival had its limits. Pablo died today at St. Francis Hospice in Nuçuanu. After living cancer-free for more years than he ever expected, Pablo was struck by two separate cancers in 18 months. He was 59.
His wife, Sandy, tempered her loss with gratitude.
“We just had all those extra years after the transplant,” she said. “We got to raise our sons together. And he has done so much good work in the community and left such an indelible mark. It’s too soon but we had the time we didn’t think we would have.”
Pablo was born in 1950 in Honolulu and grew up in Mänoa. He graduated from Saint Louis School in 1968 and attended Santa Clara University, where he earned a degree in accounting. Pablo went on to receive a law degree from Santa Clara in 1975.
He was a special assistant to U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, director of government affairs for Hawaiçi Medical Services Association and served for 15 years as director of public affairs for Kaiser Permanente. In 2007, he joined the law firm of Goodsill Anderson Quinn & Stifel, concentrating on government relations and health policy law.
Pablo was active in health care legislation throughout his professional life. He worked on a successful amendment to patients rights legislation, worked with the Coalition for Tobacco Free Hawaii to ban indoor smoking, coordinated funding for breast and cervical cancer treatment for uninsured women, and helped the organ donor community develop legislation to promote anatomical gifts.
He was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia in the summer of 1995 and the outlook was bleak. Family members were tested for a potential bone marrow match. His son Nathan, then almost 7, told his father he would save his life. Telling the boy he couldn’t was one of the hardest things Pablo had ever done.
At donor drives, Pablo stressed to people that their marrow might not match his own but could easily match another cancer patient. And he would remind them that on any given day, more than 6,000 patients nationwide are waiting for a bone marrow transplant.