Grow with the Flo
Podcast
Behind the EpisodeOriginal Brief
Grow with the Flo
Behind the Episode
Daniel Wang · Grief, love & finding your way back

There Was
More Life In
Those Five Years

with Daniel Wang — Husband, traveller & member of The Men's Circle

He found me on a plane over the Gulf of Thailand. We were strangers. Within an hour, we weren't. Daniel lost his wife Sherry to cancer three years ago. What followed was grief, depression, and addiction. What turned it was a dream — Sherry, calm and happy, asking one question: "Are you looking after yourself?"

Read the companion
His story

A man who had everything — and then watched it leave slowly.

Daniel Wang met Sherry on a group hike in his twenties. Three of his friends had already tried and failed to get her number. He walked up wearing five-toe shoes, being a goofball, not trying to impress anyone. She thought he was weird. He thought she was strange. Two hours later they were talking under a full moon with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background and neither of them wanted to leave.

They married in May 2017. One year later, Daniel found a lump during a shower. Within weeks they had a diagnosis: stage 3, possibly stage 4, breast cancer.

Act 01
The diagnosis — and the decision not to go straight to chemo
Rather than accept the oncologist's immediate recommendation, Daniel and Sherry flew to Hawaii to think. Sherry was a pharmacist — she understood medicine, and understood that treatment often addresses symptoms rather than root cause. They reached out to every friend in the medical field they had. They wanted to know: what do we actually have control over here? What they landed on was Gerson therapy — an intensive two-year holistic protocol involving cold-pressed juices eight times daily, a strict organic vegan diet, and coffee enemas. They used their wedding gift money to buy a $2,000 commercial juicer.
Act 02
Living anyway — road trips, kayaks, and a camper van through the national parks
Most Gerson patients stay home. Daniel and Sherry refused. They converted a van, got a trailer, loaded in the juicer, and drove from San Francisco to Montana and back — stopping wherever they wanted, inflating a kayak whenever they found water, bringing their dog Aura. At one point they're juicing on the side of a Nevada highway, Sherry's father holding a camping table steady next to an open bonnet, an inverter converting the engine battery to run the press. You can laugh at it now, Daniel says. At the time, it was just fire.
Act 03
The final week — and the moment of letting go
In her last days, Sherry was in a wheelchair, on pain medication, barely able to hold her toothbrush. Daniel had moved them to an Airbnb in Palo Alto — near a rose garden, with spare rooms for the friends and family who flew in from Thailand and Taiwan. He made protein ice cubes shaped like hearts — the only thing she could still eat. He says he panicked toward the end; he felt the mission slipping. He'd been so certain she'd recover. Late one night, checking on her, he realised she wasn't breathing. He asked someone else to confirm it. He wasn't ready. He says he was nowhere near ready.
"

Before the diagnosis, we felt invincible. Like we were just taking on the world together. And then all of a sudden — whoa. What is this?

— Daniel Wang
About Sherry

She was his compass. She still is.

Sherry outlived her prognosis by three years. The doctors said two years, maybe less. She lived for nearly five after the diagnosis. And she didn't just survive those years — she enrolled at City College, joined the women's tennis team, took Spanish classes, learned flower arranging, and performed in two dance recitals on stage. When she could no longer play tennis herself, she showed up to cheer her teammates anyway.

In memory of

Sherry Lee Wang
— bountiful sunshine, always

She honeymooned in the Danakil Depression — the hottest inhabited place on earth — because it looked like another planet and they wanted to see it. She went to Ethiopian food on a first date and ate with her hands without hesitating. She had a closet floor to ceiling with costumes: pirate festivals, parrot festivals, Dickens fairs. She wore joy like it was the only outfit that fit.

When Daniel talked about her in this conversation, he kept pausing — not because he was sad, but because the feelings were so layered he needed a moment to locate the right ones. Sadness and joy at the same time, he said. Gratefulness and grief together, inseparable.

Her growth, he says, hasn't stopped. It continues in him. She appears sometimes as a dragonfly that lingers a little longer than it should. He notices. He thinks: yeah, that's probably her.

Adventurous She had an endless supply of sunshine. You gravitated toward it without trying.
Generous When she saw the empty closet in Daniel's dream, her first thought was how good her clothes must look on their friends.
Present After the diagnosis, she lived on fast forward — not from fear, but from love of being alive right now.
Steady Even when she could no longer play, she showed up to the tennis courts to cheer her teammates from the sideline.

for Sherry

5 Years Sherry lived after a stage 3–4 diagnosis — three more than the doctors predicted
8× Cold-pressed juices per day during Gerson therapy, for two full years
2 Dance performances Sherry completed on stage during her illness — she had two left feet until she didn't
Grief & darkness

Not grief as a concept. Grief as a beast.

Daniel understood what grief was before it happened to him. He didn't understand what it would actually feel like — the way it removes appetite, drains colour, and leaves you alive but somehow not living. He calls it a wandering soul. Just floating. Without direction or purpose. Friends were reaching out. A therapist called every few days, then every week. Everyone offered help. He couldn't accept it. He wasn't ready.

🌊
Anticipatory grief — mourning someone while they're still alive
The grief didn't start when Sherry passed. It started the day of the diagnosis. Daniel spent years carrying that weight — the what-ifs, the why-us, the quiet fear — mostly alone, mostly inside. As a man, he didn't feel like vulnerability was available to him. Showing grief felt like failing at the job of support. So he suppressed it. He says now: he needed to cry. He didn't allow it. He knows better now.
🌑
What the addiction was actually filling
Late nights, alcohol, pornography. Daniel names them plainly — no performance, no shame spiral, just honesty about what they were: escape. The apartment was quiet. The lights were off. No one was there. The drinking wasn't about pleasure. It was about making the silence bearable. "I was drinking by myself. There was no one to tell me — hey, maybe this is enough." So he kept going. And it became a cycle.
"

A chunk of me was just cut out. And I didn't know who I was anymore. For the longest time, my mission was to support her. And then that mission was gone.

— Daniel Wang
The turn

She came back in a dream. And she asked one question.

Sherry walked into their apartment. Into the bedroom, into the closet — the one that used to be floor-to-ceiling with costumes and colour and her whole world, now mostly empty. Her jaw dropped. Then she smiled. "That dress probably looks really good on our friend," she said. Then she looked at Daniel and asked: "Are you looking after yourself?" That was it. That was the whole thing.

Break open
"Holy shit. I'm throwing my life away."
The dream didn't arrive with an answer. It arrived with a mirror. Daniel saw clearly — suddenly, completely — that everything he and Sherry had worked for, all the fight and the fire and the five years, was supposed to feed his life too. Not just hers. He'd been letting it rot. The help that had been offered to him for months — the therapist, the friends, the community — he was finally willing to receive it. Not because things got better, but because he chose to open the door.
"

She came into my dream to save me. And that's when I was willing to receive help. It was offered to me — I just wasn't ready to take it until then.

— Daniel Wang
What recovery looked like

Not a moment. A series of small returns.

Daniel didn't recover in a single arc. He recovered in pieces — through community, through Sherry's world, through the act of choosing to show up for things that had nothing to do with grief.

🌸
He joined her classes
Flower arranging. Tennis. Dance — with two left feet, by his own admission. He walked into Sherry's dance community, met her teacher Paula, met her teammates, and let them carry him for a while. He met Coach Mary, who pulled strings to have a water fountain installed on the tennis court with a plaque in Sherry's memory. He was there when it was unveiled.
🤝
He found a men's circle
TMC — The Men's Circle — gave Daniel what he hadn't been able to find elsewhere: a container where it was safe to feel things and say them out loud without being told that wasn't appropriate. Men from different ages, backgrounds, walks of life. All in the same room, willing to be honest. "Just not feeling like I was going through all of this alone," he says. That was the whole point. That was the gift.
🐭
He let the grief be nonlinear — the vigilant mouse
The thing about grieving, Daniel says, is that it's never fully over. Sometimes a wave just crashes in from nowhere and you're in deep sadness again with no warning. Other times you remember why you're still here. He's stopped trying to find the clean arc. He breathes. He meditates — not as a solution to any specific problem, but as a lifestyle that puts him in a better position to handle whatever comes. He describes it as becoming a "vigilant mouse" — stepping outside the moment just enough to choose how to respond.
"

Her growth hasn't ended. It still continues — in me. She's still my compass. She always will be.

— Daniel Wang
Closing wisdom

The GwtF closing question. Daniel's answer.

He thought about it for a moment. Then he said:

"

If you're open to it, there are so many opportunities in the world. Life's too short to dwell in sadness all the time. It has its place, don't get me wrong. But keep living. Stay open. Let people find you on planes. You never know where the conversation goes.

— Daniel Wang, closing the conversation
Grow with the Flo · Daniel Wang
"Follow your intuition. Do everything with love. And just see where it takes you."

He lost his wife. He lost himself for a while. And then she came back in a dream and asked one quiet question — and everything changed. This episode exists because Daniel said yes to a stranger on a plane. Because some stories need to live outside the people who carry them.

for Sherry
— Episode companion · Daniel Wang · Grow with the Flo