Tough conversations and anticipatory grief: being a carer
All In The Mind
ABC Australia
4.5 • 825 Ratings
🗓️ 21 March 2026
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When Casey Beros' dad was diagnosed with mesothelioma, she knew her entire world would change.
More than three million Australians are carers — a role people are often thrust into without any kind of map. So based on her own experience, Casey wrote one.
On All in the Mind this week, what it takes to be a carer for a loved one. How to get through the tough conversations and difficult moments — from giving bad news to talking about voluntary assisted dying — and still come out the other end in one piece.
Guest:
Casey BerosHealth journalistAuthor, Next of Kin
Credits:
- Presenter/producer: Sana Qadar
- Senior producer: James Bullen
- Producer: Rose Kerr
- Sound engineer: Roi Huberman
You can catch up on more episodes of the All in the Mind podcast with journalist and presenter Sana Qadar, exploring the psychology of topics like stress, memory, communication and relationships on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | ABC Listen, Podcasts, Radio, News, Music and more. |
| 0:07.2 | The world right now is a disaster. |
| 0:09.7 | It's easy to feel helpless. |
| 0:11.3 | But there was a moment when millions of people around the world said enough. |
| 0:16.1 | I'm Sisonkimung-Kimung. |
| 0:17.4 | Join me for boycott, the fight to end apartheid, |
| 0:19.9 | how Australians joined others around the world to push back against racism and won. |
| 0:25.1 | Whites only teams, we thought that to the average Australian, that would be despicable. |
| 0:30.6 | Boycott, the fight to end apartheid. |
| 0:32.9 | Search for ABC Rewind on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:38.0 | It was one of those calls that I think we all live in fear of. And I can tell you in |
| 0:43.6 | explicit detail where I was, which is kind of strange because I was in a completely |
| 0:48.5 | unfamiliar Airbnb. And yeah, I don't think you ever forget where you are when you receive one of those calls. |
| 0:56.8 | This is health journalist Casey Barrows. |
| 0:59.6 | I remember that the carpet was like flex of, I want to say, pink and blue, and there were two |
| 1:07.4 | single beds in this kind of guest room. And I just remember sort of standing for the first part and then sitting on the edge of the bed and then kind of slumping. |
| 1:17.0 | And I kind of felt the blood trickle from the top of my head out through my toes is what it felt like. |
| 1:23.3 | You know, I realized very, very quickly that this was really genuinely terrible news to be receiving. |
| 1:29.5 | And what was the news? |
| 1:30.8 | The news was that my dad had been diagnosed with a disease called mesothelioma. |
| 1:37.0 | So for anybody who is not familiar, mesothelioma is cancer from exposure to asbestos. |
| 1:43.2 | And being the good millennial I am, I very |
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