The Cost of Goodbye

A caregiver's brutally honest account of the emotional toll and practical challenges of caring for a loved one with terminal liver cancer.

Medicine is so advanced these days. This treatment is going to work, my father insisted, even as his doctor had just explained that the liver cancer treatment was about life extension, not a cure.

What followed was a year and a half of navigating his care while he refused to acknowledge he was dying. Family tensions surfaced that we had spent decades avoiding. Singapore's healthcare system excelled at treatment but struggled with the human side of terminal illness. And I discovered that caregiving someone in denial is nothing like what anyone prepares you for.

The Cost of Goodbye peels back the sanitized narratives around illness and death. It looks at how terminal diagnoses can reignite unresolved trauma and force us to confront what we've avoided in ourselves, our families, and our cultures. For anyone who has faced loss and found themselves asking what really matters in the end.