What Dying Teaches Us About Love — Dr. Sunita Puri
What does love look like when everything else has been stripped away? When there is no more time to perform it, delay it, or get it right later?
Dr. Sunita Puri has spent her career in the rooms where that question gets answered. As a palliative care physician, she sits with people who are dying and what she has witnessed again and again in those rooms is something profound about love. About what people reach for at the end. About what they wish they had said. About what it means to stay present when everything in you wants to run.
In this episode, Robin sits down with Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative care physician, literary memoirist, Rhodes Scholar, and Associate Professor of Medicine at UC Irvine. Together they explore why we are so afraid of death, what a terminal diagnosis can give you that nothing else can, and why the conversations we keep avoiding are actually the most loving ones we can have. They talk about what it means to die as you have lived, how to show up for someone who is dying, and what the dying teach us about how to love more fully right now.
This episode carries something deeply personal. It was recorded the day before Robin's mother, Glenda Ducharme, passed away on June 2, 2026. We dedicate this episode to her, a woman who lived fully, loved deeply, and left a mark on everyone she touched.
This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. When life feels overwhelming, therapy can help. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com/loveready.
IN THIS EPISODE
(00:00:00) Introduction
(00:01:18) Meeting Dr. Sunita Puri
(00:04:08) Why We're Afraid of Death
(00:06:28) What Palliative Care Really Means
(00:10:21) Faith, Medicine, and Becoming a Doctor
(00:21:34) Fighting, Giving Up, and What "Everything" Means
(00:32:29) Delivering Hard News and Finding Your Anchor
(00:42:29) End-of-Life Clarity and Dying As We've Lived
(01:01:44) A Listener's Question on Losing a Parent
(01:04:13) Poems on Love and What Remains
(01:10:24) Closing Questions: The Myth and Meaning of Love
(01:13:54) Dedication and Credits
QUOTES
"Embedded within each love is loss. It's the sharp side of loving somebody." – Sunita Puri
"What remains is often much bigger than what is taken away." – Sunita Puri
"I've talked about my dad and when he passed, and the same thing with my twin brother — I loved them so, so deeply. And now that they're not here in the physical, they're even more with me now that they're in spirit — I've taken on more of them in myself, like their gifts, their talents." – Robin Ducharme
"Nothing really ever dies. We don't ever really lose people or their essence." – Sunita Puri
ABOUT THE GUEST
Dr. Sunita Puri is an Associate Professor of Medicine at UC Irvine School of Medicine, where she directs the Inpatient Palliative Care Service. She's the author of That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, a critically acclaimed memoir on redefining what it means to live and die well in the face of serious illness. A Yale graduate and Rhodes Scholar, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, and her work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, and in a Guardian mini-documentary viewed over 3.5 million times. Dr. Puri is a sought-after speaker on how compassionate language can help patients and physicians navigate conversations about living and dying.
Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/sunitapurimd
Website: https://sunitapuri.com/
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