LACONIA --- Joseph H. Sack, M.D., 78, died on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, at his Laconia home surrounded by his family after weeks of visits from devoted friends.
He was born on November 19, 1946, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the firstborn of Dr. Nathan M. Sack and Dr. Esther Goodman Sack. His parents were both children of immigrants and optometrists who met when Esther covered Nathan’s practice while he served in the U.S. Army in World War II.
Joe graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh and attended Dartmouth College, where he raced on the ski team, before entering an accelerated undergraduate and medical school program at the Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, receiving degrees of B.S. and M.D. and an M.Sc. from the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health (now the Bloomberg School of Public Health), all in six years. He always said that the smartest group of people he ever met was his high school calculus class.
Joe met his future wife, Diana Grace, while they were both in school in Baltimore. He served his psychiatric residency at the Henry Phipps Psychiatric Institute at the Johns Hopkins Hospital before spending three years as a U.S. Army psychiatrist at Ft. Richardson, Alaska.
Joe and Diana settled in Laconia where their two sons were born and grew up, both appearing on Granite State Challenge and serving as co-captains of their respective Laconia High School football teams. Joe coached them for years in Little League and Babe Ruth baseball.
Joe was medical director at the Lakes Region Mental Health Center, a staff psychiatrist at the Lakes Region General Hospital (now Concord Hospital-Laconia), and co-director of the hospital’s inpatient psychiatric unit. He was on the visiting faculty of the Department of Psychiatry, Dartmouth Medical School. He served as president of the New Hampshire Psychiatric Society and chaired its ethics committee. He was appointed by Governor John Sununu to his Citizen Advisory Board, New Hampshire Department of Corrections. For most of his professional life, he had a solo private practice. He retired at the end of 2010.
During the COVID pandemic, Joe was diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor, which was removed at Massachusetts General Hospital in an awake craniotomy. Despite having a life expectancy of only thirteen months after surgery, he prevailed for four and a half years through radiation, three rounds of chemotherapy, and years of speech therapy.
Joe’s guiding value throughout his life was to determine what it meant to do a good job and then do it with dedication and intensity. That was his approach to medicine and to the passions of skiing and photography, to which he devoted much of his time in retirement.
He returned to being a student under the mentorship of photographers John Paul Caponigro of Maine and Mike Ariel at the New Hampshire Institute of Art (now the Institute of Art and Design at New England College). He joined colleagues in the Carry It In group of print photographers in Brattleboro, Vermont, and in the New Hampshire Center for Photography. He has shown his prints, mostly black and white, in exhibits in Laconia and elsewhere in New Hampshire and has won publication in national photography magazines.
He skied all over New Hampshire and the world from his teenage years and skied in the telemark style for over fifty years. Diana sometimes found notes he had written to himself on how to make a better ski turn. He last skied this year on February 17th, less than three weeks before entering hospice.
Joe had high expectations for himself, those close to him, and those with whom he worked, and he didn’t mince words. His life’s work was to tell patients that they needed to change, words they didn’t want to hear. He wasn’t easy but he just wanted us all to be better.
Joe was predeceased by his parents and brother-in-law. He is survived by Diana, his wife of 53 years; sons William and wife Elizabeth of Cheyenne, Wyoming; and Guy and wife Jessie of Summit County, Colorado; sisters Trudy and husband Sandy Fisher of Savannah, Georgia; and Sari Terrusa of Palm Beach Gardens, Florida; brother Yacov (Jack) and wife Chava of Jerusalem, Israel; sisters-in-law Ellen Jaronczyk of Williamsburg, Virginia; and Eva Marie Shedd and husband Brett of Silver Spring, Maryland; grandchildren Nathan, David, Jonathan, and Caroline of Cheyenne, Wyoming; and many beloved nieces and nephews and their children.
Like Joe, any celebration of his life will be private.
Wilkinson-Beane-Simoneau-Paquette Funeral Home & Cremation Services/603Cremations.com, 164 Pleasant St., Laconia, NH, 03246, is assisting the family with arrangements. For more information and to view an online memorial, please visit wilkinsonbeane.com.