In 2023, comedian Dai Henwood opened up about receiving a terminal bowel cancer diagnosis. In his new three-part documentary, Live and Let Dai, he takes us behind the scenes with chemotherapy, his strong spiritual side and a trip to Japan where he takes part in a death ceremony. He talks to Capsule about living with cancer, the importance of spirituality and how giving up drinking helped him handle the incurable diagnosis.
In our story series ‘How Are You Today?’, we have a meandering, mental-health focused chat with some of our most well-known New Zealanders. Check out previous chats with people like Hayley Holt, Kiri Allan and Jacinda Ardern.
Hi Dai, How Are You Today?
I’m good, thank you! This morning, both of my kids wanted to go to a golf driving range – so we went along to that. Pre cancer diagnosis, I would have got quite frustrated, because they were getting frustrated, whereas now I was like, ‘This is awesome – the sun is out, we’re all having fun.’ I’ve learned to live in the moment more.
Your new documentary series, Live and Let Dai, came out last week and details your experience with cancer treatment. When did you know you wanted to make something like this?
I was diagnosed in April 2020, towards the beginning of that first lockdown. And I chose not to go public until 2023 – so I had the better part of three years there where I had six surgeries and multiple rounds of chemo as I got to grips with all of this.
My initial thought was that I was going to get through this – then I could go public with a positive ‘here’s my story, here’s what I learned.’ And then I got, under Western medicine, an incurable diagnosis. And then I just decided I would go public, because I wasn’t being authentic to myself. It was making it harder, that no-one knew what I was going through except close friends.
When I eventually did a long-form interview about it with Jacqui Brown, the response to that was so good that I thought, ‘actually, maybe I can be useful here. Maybe I should look at documenting this.’
So much of good comedy is about being reactive and observational, and I would imagine that’s very hard when you have something as huge as cancer taking up space in your brain, and you can’t talk about it.
Oh, absolutely. And I studied Eastern religion at university and it was only through doing this documentary that I realised that stand-up comedy is, for me, a Zen space. I can’t think of anything else… so that was a huge release, because I was on stage, and I wasn’t thinking about cancer.
Because every time someone mentions anything, my brain relates it to cancer. Someone might say something about the next All Blacks World Cup and my brain will go, ‘Shit, the next World Cup is three years away – will I be watching that?’ So, it’s very easy to spiral. Stand-up comedy keeps me in that Zen space, and then I’ve managed to translate that to everyday life.
Does that spirituality help take away some of the fear around death?
It brings me a lot of peace and it also takes away the almost nihilistic, futile idea that if we’re just here for a finite time and then we disappear, what’s the point?
The clock ticks for everyone; it is so important that you try and squeeze the most out of every day because you just don’t know. It sounds so cliché, to live in the now, but it is actually the hardest thing to do.
Six months before I was diagnosed with cancer, I gave up the booze. I was at this point in the path where I was like, did I want to embrace a more spiritual life – of meditation, of living in the moment – or did I want to drink? And I chose the first path, and that is why I am still alive today, because if I was still drinking and hadn’t developed the mental tools to deal with hard times, I think it would have gotten the better of me. Because the mental game is huge in this diagnosis.
I’ve just finished a round of chemo, and I just came out of the fog yesterday. And I’ve got another round starting soon. I could go, ‘how am I going to get through the next six rounds of chemo?’ or I can say, ‘today, I’m feeling good, the sun is out, the kids are in a good mood, and we’ve got a holiday planned.’ There is always something to worry about. Everyone is going to die with a to-do list, so just live.
You’ve never asked for a time frame with your cancer – is that part of managing the mental side of a cancer diagnosis?
I had stage four cancer before I knew I had stage four cancer, right? And I was just rocking around. Nothing internally in my body changed the day before I was diagnosed and the day after I was diagnosed. I was just living then. Why can’t I just be living now?
A lot of doctors and oncologists are becoming more aware of how important language is. I believe that you can influence a person’s life by telling them they’re going to live for five years versus maybe six months. This falls into my mantra of ‘optimism won’t cure me, but pessimism will kill me.’
And I’m lucky – my baseline of happiness is very high. Yes, it’s such a trip dealing with this, but it is amazing when I see the other patients going through this. It’s an absolute leveler, chronic disease. There are people who’ve got a flash Porsche parked in the carpark next to my Mazda, but we’re just the same when we’re sitting there [during chemo]. I’ve seen the beauty of humanity through this diagnosis.
