A journey with no regrets

Kunal shared his experience taking on the caregiver role as his wife dealt with breast cancer and how setting clear boundaries for everyone involved - including himself - ultimately helped him to walk away from the experience with no regrets.

The books that Kunal found helpful for working through his grief after his wife passed away are: 

• The Secret by Rhonda Byrne
• Option B by Sheryl Sandberg
• My Gita by Devdutt Pattanaik 

Please follow the podcast if you are enjoying the show. Would also be awesome if you can leave an honest rating and review so I know if I am serving the interests and needs of you listeners out there.

Have topic suggestions or feedback about the show?  Contact me on Instagram or email me at talkaboutcancerpodcast@gmail.com. 

Thank you for listening!

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My reflections on the conversation:

I really admire the way Kunal was very clear-eyed about his priorities in a really complicated situation that often has no good answers. Take the way he managed communication with every person - from doctors, to friends, and family - he was unapologetic about how and how much he would engage. But those are the types of decisions you have to make when you are taking care of someone with serious health issues. You realize that many of the expectations that you once cared to fulfill no longer matter. And people have to be mature enough to know that it’s time to meet you where you are.

The other thing that Kunal said that really resonated with me was that money has no purpose once your loved one passes away. Before my dad passed away, I was super conservative about saving money for retirement, but after I watched my dad get diagnosed with cancer a year out from retirement and barely enjoyed the retirement life he was looking forward to, I realized that I being prudent about long term finances was important, but not at the expense of making great memories now with the people I love. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that everyone should go out and rack up a bunch of credit card debts to go on luxury vacations, but it’s so important to remind ourselves often that life is tenuous so spending every moment honoring this life you have been given, is so important. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:03

Hey everybody. Welcome to episode 22 of the Talk About Cancer Podcast. This is Serena, your host for the show. If you're enjoying listening to the personal and honest conversations I'm having with my guests, please take a minute to follow the show on your podcast player. It will help other listeners like you find the show. In today's episode, Kunal talked about his experience taking on the caregiver role as his wife dealt with breast cancer, and how setting clear boundaries for everyone involved, including himself, ultimately allowed him to walk away from the experience with no regrets. Let's dive into his story now, and I will check back in with you at the end. Welcome to the Talk About Cancer Podcast. Let's start with a quick intro and have you tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, where you're from, and anything else you'd like to share with our listeners.

SPEAKER_00: 1:10

My name is Sunal Goklani. I'm originally an Indian, but I'm based out of the UK. I'm based in London. I have two wonderful children and a lovely dog. I am in the banking industry, but uh that's a bit of a regret because I really wanted to be a sportsman. Those are some of my favorite, I would say, things uh that has kept me completely sane after my wife passed away, unfortunately, due to breast cancer. And so, yeah, that's me, and looking forward to a discussion.

SPEAKER_01: 1:41

Thank you, Kunal, for that intro. So, can you share how cancer entered your lives?

SPEAKER_00: 1:49

Yeah, Serena, it was one of the what you say that life is a great leveler, and we actually were holidaying in Barbados where we had gone for a Cricket World Cup in April 2007. It was one of her best holidays, the most memorable holiday. We celebrated her birthday there. And on our return after a couple of weeks, she kind of you know checked her breast and she didn't tell me. And then she, with a friend, went for a mammogram to one of the hospitals. I was actually in a meeting in central London. I kind of got a call that you got to hurry up to this hospital. I still remember that day that London had a bomb attack scare. It was completely gridlocked, and I had to walk almost about four or five miles to reach her. And by that time, you know, the biopsy was dumb and we were waiting for results. And but that's one of my regrets in my life that I was not with her when she was diagnosed, although one of her good friends was with her in the hospital. You know, it was a massive shock because she was 38, two months younger than me. So a lot of things that played out during the diagnosis phase as to what's going to happen, because it's a very scary word. And 38 is not the age, generally speaking, to be diagnosed so early in life. And you know, our children were so young. And one of the bigger challenges, Serena, was that I have a son who was born with severe medical difficulties in life. In fact, he had he was under the knife almost seven times before the diagnosis. And to her, besides thinking about her own life, which was at risk, she was more worried about him already than how is he going to survive? And that was the most difficult phase in order to reconcile, to rationalize, to justify how we are going to now live our life, you know, bringing up that child. But then, like any other protocol, we found I was lucky to be in London, you know, with the best medical support system. We kind of identified one of the very reputable oncologists in Marston, Royal Marston Hospital. I would say that I'm lucky that, and you can also call it privileged because we have the insurance. As you can imagine, cancer treatment can be very expensive. The best cancer treatment really can be very expensive. It can make a person go bankrupt or indebted for life. But in that sense, I've been very lucky that I could manage to get one of the best cares in the world.

SPEAKER_01: 4:32

How old was your son at that time when she was first diagnosed?

SPEAKER_00: 4:36

Uh so this was he was six years old.

SPEAKER_01: 4:39

I could see why that was the primary concern for her because I assume she was his main caregiver at that age.

SPEAKER_00: 4:46

And during that time, Serena, you know, you don't realize because you're 38, the level of maturity to deal with such challenging disease is something that we could not comprehend as if something had shaken under our feet, we didn't know what to do. But she was a very mature lady, even at the age of 38, and we had a period of about a month or so where we were completely, I would say, distraught. And actually, even during that time, I was in the middle of a change of my role in the organization that I work for. And I must call out my organization for being a massive support to the situation. And I think that people really are empathetic towards this disease. That's the only positive thing out of it. The battle is something very different that only a person can comprehend who's going through it or the immediate family. But I think this is something that it's a very challenging phase of anybody's life.

SPEAKER_01: 5:45

How did it make you feel that she didn't tell you first, but instead had a girlfriend to go with the appointment with her?

SPEAKER_00: 5:56

Yeah, she's been very protective of me, Serena. And she's she was my childhood sweetheart. I met her in person at the age of 12. That is so sweet. In school, yes. And uh I was a very shy boy. In fact, I'd come from a very small town to New Delhi and joined the school where she was in my class, and she was this bubbly, confident girl, very beautiful. So we were friends, and this was in the 10th standard, then we kind of developed some feelings, and since then we've been friends, we've been lovers, we've been, you know, obviously husband and wife. She's been always protective of me. She frankly was the man in the family, even though I'm the man, right? But she was a strong person. I mean, I used to even tell her that your you should be in the corporate, and I should be the house husband playing golf and taking care of the children, because she was far more, I would say, enterprising compared to I was. I think her protective nature in order to bear the shock, take the shock, internalize, you know, was far mature than I was. And I think that she was not initially, she was not sure, Serena, because you know, it turned out to be a 25 millimeter tumor, grade one. So she didn't want to create a panic, right? Unnecessary. But the panic turned out to be a shocking news on her elevation because when they were when she was asked to take the biopsy test.

SPEAKER_01: 7:33

That makes sense. She's just kind of the all-around caregiver protector of the family.

SPEAKER_00: 7:39

Yeah. And I had to give it back to her in a big way. As you may know, that oncologists that say that if you want to have a choice of what type of a cancer you would want, you should always choose breast cancer because that is the most researched cancer treatment around the world. And you have a success rate of 85% to 86% of treatment. It may have gone up higher today, but nevertheless, at that time, we were looking at an 85%, 86% uh cure. Or I use the word that at the age of 38, you're not mature to handle these kind of diseases, right? And she was given the best care, the typical cancer treatment protocol of chemotherapy, followed by five years of temoxifen. And things were really going well. One area that we could have made a difference was a bit of a change in our lifestyle in terms of nutrition and maybe healthy living and mindfulness, etc., during the five years of the remission period. But then there was another side to the story that okay, we've got this, we've got to beat it. We are in one of the best medical centers in the world. Let's enjoy life as well so that we don't have regrets. So, how do you keep that balance? So we had a good time. We went for holidays, we were partying. Yeah, those were the days after chemotherapy that uh week was pretty awesome. I'll give you one example of hers. You know, she had a chemotherapy, and I was actually invited to attend a Formula One racing. I don't know whether you're aware of Formula One because you have indie car racing in the US. And Lewis Hamilton was one of the people who were invited for that session, and he was supposed to be driving us in one of the cars. And I told her that I don't want to go. She actually forced me to go for that three days after her chemotherapy. Because what she did not want was that we should not stop living our individual lives. Yes, she's going through it, right? But in order for me to take care of her, I also need to take care of myself. Because if I am down and out, the quality of the care that I will provide to her may be compromised. And I think that's the understanding we came to, where I would try and lead a very uh similar, I would say, quality of life, right? But at the back of the mind, yes, let's say that I would play a game of cricket or a golf, but back of the mind, I knew that I had to go back home. Now I would enjoy for maybe two, three hours of the game on a weekend, but it was not, I was conscious about that I really need to get back to her because I don't want to miss out on spending time with her. So it's that conflict that one goes through during the phase of the treatment. But I think the real challenge came after she metastasized. And Serena, this was again why I told you before that that was one of my best holidays. We had gone for another holiday to Tenerife, and this was after five years, and we were supposed to come back to UK for her last appointment and to stop the tamoxifen. In Tenerife, she woke up screaming, help me, and it was a nightmare, and she dreamt that the cancers come back. Now you call it fate, you call it a coincidence, you call it destiny. I don't know, Serena, and this is I don't know. I still I just got goosebumps. I all over me too. I'm still kind of you know, it sends chills to my spines when I think of it. Yeah, and she said, Oh, can I sorry I was dreaming. I said, Jyoti, we are going for a last appointment, and you're okay. Are you feeling okay? She said yes. So I, you know, we felt her breast to see whether she's got any lump because she had already done a mystrectomy, and we went aggressive with the chemotherapy, mystrectomy, and removal of the lymph nodes because we wanted to be very aggressive, and she didn't want to do any reconstruction because there was a lot of debate about reconstruction and the silicon uh inserts, etc. She said, I will live with it, I will live with it. She chose the bras which were padded so that you know she does not lose her esteem in a social gathering. So she did all of that. She would make sure that after the chemotherapy and the hair loss, her kids should not see her bald or with a loss of hair. So she would actually keep her wig next to her while sleeping and wear it first thing in the morning.

SPEAKER_01: 12:25

Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 12:25

She was that sensitive to make the life consistent as if there was no change. Yes, she was going through a treatment, but she didn't want to tell the kids that this is a chemical induction into her body and she'll go through a transformation, right? In terms of losing her eyebrows. She would even use her eyebrow pencils to ensure that she looks as much as the mother she used to look before the chemotherapy. And Serena, believe it or not, we came back from Tenerife, right? And after a week of the holiday, which was one of the very good holidays that we had, and we were with two other families, she started feeling a different kind of pain in her body. She had started exercising, she had started going to a gym, and I said, You know what? You're swimming, you're doing exercises, the pain might be related to some muscular pain. But she knew it. She actually knew it, and she said, No, Kunal, this is not a muscular pain, it's a traveling pain, and I want to get it checked up. Last appointment turned out to be the second phase because the cancer had come back, and as you know, it travels to the bones in breast cancer cells. The primary cancer cells travel to the bones. And the research is still there that they don't know because normally it travels through lymph nodes, it went to the bones. And this was 2013, and they say that after five years of remission, either you live for a long time, or if it metastases, then you're looking at about maximum five to six years, you know. So it's a statistic of 10 years that you kind of fulfilled and proved the statisticians right. But I think the 2013 to 2016, when she passed away, were the toughest in terms of medical care and the whole psychological, the emotional aspect of it. That was more challenging than the first phase, the treatment.

SPEAKER_01: 14:23

If I can just ask, because as you were talking about how she made the effort to basically not let everybody else know what was going on, right? Is it taboo in the Indian culture around cancer and people being ill? Because I'm just sort of trying to understand like why there was this desire to want to keep it under the wraps.

SPEAKER_00: 14:48

I think she did not want the psychological impact on the children one. That that was number one. That was the biggest uh uh thing for her. Our parents live in India, they were on the older side. Not that we didn't tell them, we did tell them, but not to the extent that how impactful it is, because then they worry about their grandchildren, and then there are 10,000 questions and there are opinions, they're worried. So we had to kind of keep the information going out or sharing in a limited fashion because if they call us, if their choice of words that they use is not the best, if I'm emotional and then they call up and find out how are things, you know, the emotional baggage increases. Am I managing my own wife and a treatment and my children, or do I manage the old grandparents? Not that they don't deserve to know, but yeah, we had to, I had to control the information sharing because they can't help you from 8,000 miles away. All they can do is worry. Right. So why make them worry so much if we felt that it is under control? Then we started opening up a bit later, you know, two years before she passed out because the treatment was pretty intense and the side effects was pretty intense, and obviously we knew that this was not heading towards the right direction. But in India, the awareness of cancer is not that great amongst the population about the sensitivity compared to the Western world, and it's becoming better now. They don't appreciate and realize uh the extent of how this cancer damages an individual or a family. Uh so it's not a taboo per se, but then I guess people don't appreciate that if after chemotherapy are you if you're feeling nausea or if you're feeling like throwing up or you have a hair loss, it's a very patriarchal society, right? And uh to keep the family and the men happy is the prime responsibility of a wife, right? And I think the conflict of understanding what the mother or a woman is going through, there's still a long way to go. But it's getting better as we speak every day.

SPEAKER_01: 17:10

Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I and I only ask because it's very similar for my culture, the Chinese culture. I would say it's actually pretty extreme. Like my family, when my grandma got really sick, anytime she had surgery or procedures done, she wouldn't even tell us in advance. She would just call us after it's done. It's like, oh yeah, I had this thing removed. And we're like, what? Why didn't you tell us? And she's like, Oh, don't worry, it's done. I'm good. Doctor says I'm good. So I I totally relay, and I was suspecting that you know there may be some similarities there. But I totally get your point about also just for the children, because it's a lot for them to process as well. But that takes me to my next question, which is then, well, you said in 2013 when it metastasized. I guess at some point you guys had to then actually tell the children how did you guys go about doing that and making that decision of when to actually share with them? They're a little bit older by then, right? Five five years have passed.

SPEAKER_00: 18:11

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 18:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 18:12

So we kept it under wraps where my son was concerned, because he himself was going through a lot of his own therapy, like occupational therapy and speech therapy. He has a bit of a hearing loss. He was in the mainstream school, so you know he had his own list of challenges per se. But my daughter was pretty mature, very intelligent, and she was practical, pragmatic about the whole thing. But we would give the information as much as needed rather than talking about it, because we started talking to her uh in 2015, about a year before things were not really looking very good. And that's when we actually started talking to her because in 2014 is where she went to Edinburgh to join her university. So after a year of the cancer coming back, he had already been to the university, and then we didn't want to distract her from what she had gone to achieve. She did a chemical engineering, so I think it was a lot easier because she was out of the house, so she would not get the exact information and the status of things. But yeah, we kept it away from our son uh on purpose because we didn't want to add the extra burden on him. So and that was a conscious decision.

SPEAKER_01: 19:31

Yeah. Before we started recording, you had mentioned one of the things that you wanted to touch on is how to sort of manage the boundaries, not the immediate family, but like that next layer of circle and support system.

SPEAKER_00: 19:47

Yeah. Sarina, like you know, I don't know about your culture in China, but in India, everybody has an opinion. And everybody knows everything about everything, right? I mean, uh from construction to technology to how to manufacture a chip. So I'm sure that they would have known how cancer can be treated as well. And that's one thing that I didn't want because people have access, people will talk about how are you, what are you going to do, has your hair fallen, how's your sex life, all that kind of stuff, right? I mean, they would ask you 10,000 questions. And those 10,000 questions could stir up any emotions in anybody. So I made it a point to tell my immigrant family and her immigrate family, my in-laws, that let her sister be the bearer of information if anybody wants to know. Nobody is going to call us directly or indirectly to ask us how we are. And if any information has to be taken, either can be taken from my brother or her sister. Because talking to people is also an exhaust, exhaustive process. You know, you have to you have to explain the same thing. And you can imagine after going to the oncologist, after the CD scan, after the MRI, after whatever, you know, everybody will call, the brother will call, the sister will call, how did it go? And you have to keep repeating the whole situation because you come up with the blood test, you have the different markers. So you always come up with maybe 60% negative news and 40% positive news that the markers are stable, right? So, how do you explain to each individual? Because everybody's concerned, and rightfully so. I know that everybody cares, yeah, but then it becomes a very tiring process for us to keep explaining what it means because I'm trying to also absorb the information that the oncologist has given. And what I would do is I would take a very good friend of hers with me to the oncologist, because Jyoti left the discussion with the oncologist and the results to me. So I would ask the questions, I would prepare a list of questions because it's like an exam. You're waiting for the test results, you know, two, three days after you've gone through the scan, etc., and then you're waiting for the markers, what has improved, what has deteriorated. She would just shut herself down in front of the oncologist. She said, just talk to my husband. But the doctors here only would like to talk to the patient. So we had to kind of give the consent that I'm the person in charge of the whole setup. And I would have a third person who would, if I had any confusion, because if I was emotion and if I was under stress, that I've not heard the right news or the test results have not come out in the way that I thought it would come out, then I can validate with the third person so that I have clarity of thought that what the next step should be. So that you know we can then discuss with each other. And that's the strategy adopted, which helped me because did I understand you correctly? And then she would, the third person would say, Yes, this is what I also understood, because then we would seek some guidance from our doctors in the family who would then tell me that, yes, do this, do that, right? So that's the boundary that I set up with close friends, because everybody then wants to visit you as well, and the rate of infection is high if people come and meet you straight away after chemotherapy. So there were people who got sensitive, people thought we were rude because every patient and the family deals with the situation in a different way. We were private. Some people like to talk about it because that's the way they detailed. And there's no right or wrong answer.

SPEAKER_01: 23:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 23:22

But to the people surrounding us, they don't, some people don't understand. So that was not my responsibility to make them understand. I will maybe have a conference call with my friends and tell them, listen, guys, I cannot repeat the situation 10 times to 10 different people. Get into a call, I'll explain what the situation is. So that's the way I was dealing with it.

SPEAKER_01: 23:43

Wow. It makes sense. I'm sort of laughing because it feels like here I'm calling a press conference. Yeah. But it made sense because it's like you can't repeat yourself 20 times.

SPEAKER_00: 23:53

And the thing with my wife Jyoti was she was so friendly, she was so helpful that everybody thought she is everybody's best friend. But that was the nature, in a sense that, you know, even in a boring party, she would just come up with something and just make the life of the party. So she was a person who you could not forget easily. So people were obviously worried and wanted to know exactly what's happening with her.

SPEAKER_01: 24:16

Like that natural connection you have and just kind of illicit care for her. Yeah. And so for people who got upset with your approach, did you just sort of like move on because you're like, I really don't have time to attend to your emotions, or did you attempt to explain this is why we are asking everybody to communicate with us this way?

SPEAKER_00: 24:38

There have been people whose with the relationship got a bit spoiled, and I don't have any regrets because to me at that moment was her well-being and my well-being and my immediate family's well-being. You know, I could not be bothered about what people feel because they don't understand what we feel and why we are behaving like that, right? So if others, the person who were healthy, you know, they should have taken the more mature approach towards this friendship. You also understand and you're able to differentiate who your true friends are and who are just there as acquaintances, just wanting to know the information. It's a learning process, but a very expensive and a difficult way of learning this process because you have the same in professional life as well. You actually know who your real supporters are and who are just there as opportunistics.

SPEAKER_01: 25:32

And what did you do to take care of yourself as a caregiver during that second phase? As you said, you know, that was much more challenging for you and everybody in the family.

SPEAKER_00: 25:44

You know, uh Saina, the truth is that I've never been a big believer in destiny. I've never not been religious as uh some of the Indian families are, even though I come from a Hindu family where rebirth and karma are some of the principles of Hinduism. I do believe that there is God. The religious aspect of it is completely missing from my bones. I do respect religion. In fact, my wife was from a different religion, and it is a big no in India to marry outside your religion. So she was a Sikh and I was a Hindu. But I married the Sikh way. I did not marry the Hindu way. To me, it did not bother me because marriage in any religion is as sacred as in any religion or any culture would be. And I suspect that God's plan, whatever it is, right, works on a scale that is too large to admit our moral tribulation that in a single lifetime these kind of stuffs happen. Whatever we can try and do and align what we feel is right and the principle that we live by. So I am a person who does not overthink because I cannot control the spread of cancer. I can provide the best environment in the house, I can bring in a bit of fun, try to lead the life of a family as normal as we could, and don't think of saving money because I'll tell you what, Serena, once you lose your partner, money, consumerism has no meaning in life, has no purpose. Because what is important is how do you take care of the person who is suffering or who knows that end is near, right? How do I make the best memory out of those moments? In fact, I took her for a Christmas light viewing on Oxford Street five days before she passed away in a car with oxygen. She had no energy, you know, but I still have that photograph that we are driving on Oxford Street. I'm lucky that God has given me this thought process where I kept it very simple, that you take every situation as it comes and deal with it to the best of her ability, so that your clearer thought, your conscious, that you have taken the best decision, the best steps towards her recovery. And if it works, great. If it doesn't, I have tried my best. So that's the principle that I have lived throughout the 10 years of her cancer journey.

SPEAKER_01: 28:24

And you're saying that was what helped you get through it is having that mindset of I can't control the situation, but I will do my best in terms of what I can bring to the family, to her from a caregiver perspective. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00: 28:41

And I was very clear in my thought that this is a strategy that I want to pursue. Because a lot of people advise me go for an alternative cancer treatment, go to Germany, you will have immunotherapy because that was not available in UK. I did travel there, I did go there. But what I did was to assess whether she can live there for the treatment, away from her dog, away from her children, away from her normal environment that she's used to. Will that help her or will it deteriorate the situation much faster? Because you also got to be happy rather than stressful. So we kept some basic principles that we will keep ourselves as happy as we can in order to stay with the objective of that quality of life was my prime objective, rather than the fact that I'm the one who's kind of deciding on the treatment. No, I left that treatment aspect of it with the good hands of the oncologist because they know it best. Now, right or wrong, it worked for me, it worked for my family. There is absolutely no regret, and I was happy that that's the way it worked.

SPEAKER_01: 29:50

Yeah. And how did you take care of yourself after your wife passed?

SPEAKER_00: 29:55

Well, uh, it's been tough actually, in a sense that I thought distracting myself by going back strongly into work, keeping myself absolutely blocked out from free time so that I don't get to think, I don't have spare time to think of what's going to happen. So in a 16-hour day, I would be back to back for those 16 hours without any. And if I had a half an hour slot, I would do something because I didn't want to sit down. So saying I had two choices, right? So I have a bar on the right hand side, and I have a television in front of me. I could have easily gone towards the bar and you know, kind of destroyed myself, but I chose not to. Because what I had promised her, this was two months before she passed away. She had come back from one of her chemo sessions and she was teaching my son. And I told her that you're not going to make him an engineer at the age of 16, right? When he wants to become an engineer with his challenges, he will become if he wants to become. But you know that what you're doing to yourself by stressing yourself out, he cannot speed up his graduation. I know, and we used to talk about death, we used to talk about life after her. So it was not a discussion that we did not have. We would joke, and she would also joke, Kanan, you will find a better woman than me after I've gone. So she would talk like that. But I had promised her two things that obviously you don't have to worry about your son, daughter's taken care of, and I'll take care of myself from a health perspective and make sure that I'm well, I don't get depressed or I don't get into bad habits. Because I had put on a lot of weight during the last six months because my comfort, you know, was food. Last three months, Serena, I was sleeping an average of three hours because she would only want it to be taken care of by me, she would only want it to be touched by me or take her to the bathroom, etc.

SPEAKER_01: 32:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 32:12

So last three, four years, I have actually been so mentally and physically exhausted because I traveled a lot, I've taken my kids out, immersed myself into work, a lot of sports. But I think this pandemic has done me well because I could get time to reflect upon myself, about my life, what I want to do, because I was just going as a routine, you know, back to back. It had become a very boring routine. In the last one and a half year, I have read a lot. I've read a lot about the Indian mythologies, I've read quite a few books like Secrets. I would recommend some of the caregivers to read Option B, which was written by Cheryl Sandberg. It's a wonderful book, How to Survive, because her husband had also passed away. And mythological books like Bhagavad Gita, etc., which gives you the principles of life from a Hindu perspective. I did yoga and started listening to a lot of spiritual gurus podcasts. It has brought me a lot of clarity as to what I want to do, and I think I'm in a much better place than I was maybe three years back.

SPEAKER_01: 33:19

So it took the pandemic to force you to slow down.

SPEAKER_00: 33:24

Yes. Because I thought to keep myself busy was the best thing to do, to not to think about what's going to happen. Because I had a lot of other challenges, like to ensure that my son can graduate in the mainstream school. I had to take a very bold decision of sending him to the boarding school. So two years he was there because I wanted to make him independent. And I also had a thought, I'm 53, I can die tomorrow. What will happen if I don't prepare my children to be independent?

SPEAKER_01: 33:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 33:55

So I took those practical steps very early on because I didn't want to give that stress to my already stressful children who've lost their mother. So those are some of the practical things that you know one had to take care of. And I would really advise people to really think in that direction as well.

SPEAKER_01: 34:13

Okay, thank you. Any last words you want to share before we close?

SPEAKER_00: 34:18

Yeah, so I think uh it's a very expensive, I would say, learning of life. When they say life is an institution, it's a very challenging, emotional kind of a phase of anybody's life, right? Whoever loses his or hers close ones. It's not an easy journey. Uh the attachment, the emotional connect, you know, the dependence, the partnership. But what comes out of it is that a person matures in the space of empathy, your ability to comprehend other people's suffering, you become a better human being, appreciation for life, compromise. I think there's a lot of compromise. Like I said, I didn't sleep for three hours and I would never feel tired. I was so focused on taking care of her while you know attending my work as well. And frankly, I feel that I was given the privilege, extremely proud, taking care of my childhood sweetheart who had taken care of me. I don't want to wish it on anybody, but given a chance, I would love to take care again. But that means you lose that individual. I hope I never lose a person who I would like to take care of. But I think it's as a single parent, I would say that you can also appreciate what a mother or your partner does. A lot of men don't get that appreciation of your partner taking care of the house, taking care of the children, taking care of the cooking, cleaning. And then some others even have a working life. So a lot of appreciation, and I really feel humbled that I had that chance to take care of someone who I really love.

SPEAKER_01: 36:02

Thank you. You said this in Clubhouse that one time when I was listening in, and that was the statement that captured me when you said it was an honor and a privilege to take care of her. And I just thought that that was such an amazing way to describe that process, being someone who's gone through a similar process with my dad. Those were not the words that readily come to my mind when I reflect on that experience. And it just showed what a big heart you have and how much love you had for your wife to be able to frame your experience in that manner. And I was just so blown away when I heard you say that. And I'm so appreciative of you coming on the show to share your story today. It's humble but with so much love.

SPEAKER_00: 36:52

No, say, I would like to thank you as well. And frankly, it's this podcast I would dedicate to her completely because if she was well, I would not be talking to you today. So it's good that I'm reliving some of the journeys. And I was uh wondering that trying to come onto Clubhouse, for example, and support people, would I relive and would it be again a challenging thing? But happy to contribute to wherever people get any benefit from it. So thank you for letting me come onto your show.

SPEAKER_01: 37:28

I really admired the way Kunal was very cleared-eyed about his priorities in a very complicated situation that often has no good answers. Take the way he managed communication with every person, from doctors to friends and family. He was unapologetic about how and how much he would engage. But those are the types of decisions you have to make when you're taking care of someone with serious health issues. You realize that many of the expectations that you once cared to fulfill no longer matters. And people have to be mature enough to know that it's time to meet you where you are. The other thing that Kunal said that really resonated with me was that money has no purpose once your loved ones pass away. Before my dad passed away, I was super conservative about saving money for retirement. But after I watched my dad get diagnosed with cancer a year out from retirement and barely enjoy the retirement life he was looking forward to, I realized that being prudent about long-term finances was important, but not at the expense of making great memories now with the people I love. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that everyone should go out and rack up a bunch of credit card debts to go on luxury vacations, but it's so important to remind ourselves often that life is so tenuous, and spending every moment honoring this life you have been given is so important. That's a wrap for today. Please follow the podcast if you would like to hear more stories from cancer survivors, caregivers, and family members. I would really appreciate it if you can leave an honest rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Podchaser so I know if I'm serving the interests and needs of you listeners out there. You can also share any feedback and suggestions directly to me by visiting talkabout cancer podcast.com. Thank you for listening.