Sneak Peek: Nicole Chung Podcast

Nicole Chung: My father's death at 67 was really sped by years of financial precarity and a lack of access to the specialized healthcare that he needed. He had serious illnesses that neither my mother nor I believed had to kill him at 67 but did because of years spent unable to get the treatment he needed, which is of course a very common story in this country. In the case of my parents, they were often uninsured for many years, as I was when I was growing up with them. And so there was this aspect of our grief that we were really struggling to grapple with. And so I started thinking about writing this story, the story of my grief and my mother's grief too, and how we try to care for each other despite these broken systems. And then I had started working on the book, and my mother was diagnosed with cancer, and so she fought it off once and it came back, and it was terminal. And at that point like everything changed…I had never anticipated writing a book about the deaths of both my parents in a two-year span. And it was a real struggle.