‘Dying Out Loud.’ Why KC man with terminal cancer started podcast to talk about it
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- Kris Saim began a podcast titled “Dying Out Loud” based on farewell letters.
- Saim wrote 74 personal letters of gratitude and farewell that inspired the podcast.
- Saim received a Stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis 10 years after his first diagnosis.
Exactly 10 years, to the day, after Kris Saim received his first diagnosis of cancer, he received another. This time, the diagnosis was more grim. The colon cancer he had beaten into remission with chemotherapy, surgeries and radiation had invaded other parts of his body. He was in Stage 4, the most lethal.
Saim is not giving cancer the last word.
The 52-year-old executive and career coach has a lot to say, to his loved ones, friends, people from his past, work colleagues, even strangers. He wrote letters to 74 of them, personal, intimate words of gratitude and farewell that last summer became the basis of a podcast he named “Dying Out Loud.”
He believes that sometimes the most important conversations we can have with one another are the ones we never have, so he’s having them.
He records the podcast from the apartment he shares with his husband, Anthony Saim, in downtown Kansas City. He’s a proud downtown resident since 2005, “before it was actually cool to be downtown,” as he says.
He spends much of his time there in his new life as a homebody. A once busy social life of dining out and enjoying drinks with friends ... every night has been replaced by karaoke, game and pizza nights at home. Many days, after working remotely from 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., he crashes on the couch.
His podcast audiences can’t see that there are so many tumors in his lungs they can’t be counted anymore. Nor do they know that he lives with daily pain; most often falling somewhere between a three and six on a 1-to-10 scale.
A grapefruit-sized tumor in the bone and muscle in his left shoulder, discovered in October, left him in more excruciating pain than he’d ever felt.
Saim decided to speak publicly about death because he doesn’t want people to fear it. While surveys show that 91% of Americans believe talking about death and dying is normal, 27% are uncomfortable with those conversations. And 31% are uneasy thinking about their own mortality.
But for those who have questions, or want to know more about colon cancer — especially prevention — Saim is there, an open book on his podcast and social media.
It’s where he recently shared that he has decided not to continue chemotherapy so he can live his life to the fullest.
It’s where he revealed in the last few days, for the first time publicly, that he was sexually abused from the age of 4 until he was 16.
“I never told anyone. Not as a child, not as a teenager, not as a young adult,” he told his audience. “I built an entire life, successful, purposeful life, on top of that silence And that silence became so much a part of me that I stopped noticing the weight of it, until I started writing.”
Saim will answer any question about death. People ask him all the time, “Are you afraid to die?”
He is not. He’s more concerned about how his husband, their two adult children and the grandkids will fare. What will that first holiday without him be like? But they, too, are having conversations about death, and he is confident they are prepared.
“It’s been a very great and cathartic and healthy experience for me to share all the good, the bad and unfortunately some of the ugly too, and be an open book for people who are curious as part of that,” he said.
His father, retired from the Army, died five years ago, leaving the family without its anchor.
“To lose him, that was our family’s first big shock,” he said. “And after he passed, I got my diagnosis, and everyone’s been dealing with a lot emotionally in our family and I just want them to know that they shouldn’t have any fear, because I don’t.
“I just want people to know I’m OK with everything and I might feel a little ripped off because there probably could have been a good 30 more years of life.
“But if this is the card I’m dealt then I’m just going to make a full house out of it. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do.”
He’s taking care of the humans in his life. He wishes he could do more for their two dogs, Zoey and Bailey.
“To just not show up at home for my dogs anymore, that’s one of the most heartbreaking things that I can imagine because there’s nothing that I can say that is going to let them know,” he said.
“Dogs are very in tune with human health. And they know that my health is deteriorating ... they never leave my side, ever.”
Bad blood
He was 38 and stressed, working 24/7, managing a team of 75 and billions of advertising dollars when he was diagnosed the first time with Stage 3 colon cancer in 2012. He got sick and thought he had given himself an ulcer.
“And there was a particular day where I had gone to the restroom, there was blood in my stool. And it was the kind of blood that they say, this is the kind of blood you should go see a doctor for,” he said.
The bright red blood was the literal red flag of colorectal cancer, compared to the darker or black and tarry blood that often indicates upper gastrointestinal bleeding.
His general care doctor told him, “We need to get a colonoscopy as soon as possible.” At the time, government guidelines recommended colon cancer screening for Americans at age 50, a recommendation lowered to age 45 in 2021 as colorectal cancer cases rose among younger adults.
After what he’s been through, Saim says age 45 is too late for such crucial screening. Colorectal cancer has become the leading cause of cancer-related death in Americans under 50.
“It needs to be 30. But I think that will probably happen in the next decade,” he said.
The diagnosis launched him into two years of chemo and radiation treatments, along with “a pretty massive surgery that landed me in the hospital for about 30 days,” he said. “And at the end of that two-year mark I started what would be an almost 10-year remission.”
He spent the next decade knocking things off his bucket list. Able to work remotely, he moved to Amsterdam for a year, cruised the Caribbean, visited Mexico, traveled across Europe.
And then.
“On the 10-year anniversary of my initial diagnosis I actually found out I had Stage 4 cancer. So Sept. 18 is a day I do not like because both of my diagnoses came on Sept. 18,” he said. “I should have probably played the lottery because that’s some really interesting luck.”
‘Lit up’ with cancer
His symptoms were different the second time.
He had a “weird” feeling in his chest and worried that he might have a clogged artery or blood clot. A CAT scan revealed a massive shadow on his lung that turned out to be a tumor.
“And upon further inspection I had several tumors in my lung that were colon cancer that had taken a whole decade to work its way through the bloodstream and turn into a tumor,” he said.
He has cancer now in both lungs, his right kidney and the adrenal gland on top of that kidney. Hot spots in his neck and lower back are also “very lit up with cancerous lymph nodes.”
“Because of all the cancer in my body, we pick surgeries pretty wisely,” he said. “And none of the things that I have currently is really something that we can fix with surgery at this point in time.”
He was shocked that he had cancer in his lungs. He’s not a cigarette smoker and only started vaping marijuana after his first diagnoses to ease anxiety and nerves.
“It has been kind of really one hit after the other,” he said. “In the last almost four years now, I think I’ve had one test that came back that actually suggested good news, and that only lasted for two weeks. And then things were back to normal again.
“But most every scan at this point is, ‘OK, here’s where it’s at now.’
“I think one of the biggest things I learned about colon cancer is because it’s associated with your colon and your rectum, those are areas of the body that people are not comfortable talking about.”
74 letters
After his second diagnosis, during 18 months of long, oppressive, eight-hour chemotherapy sessions, Saim began writing letters to people in his life. He was writing for himself, releasing thoughts and emotions crowding his mind, never intending to send them.
“It really just became a way for me to say the words to people and just get it out of my head. So this was roughly a two-year project. I ended up with 74 letters written to a variety of people, dating back as far as my friend in first grade,” he said.
He wrote a letter to his mother, brother, the kids and grandkids, and Anthony. He wrote letters to his best friends, his high school drama teacher, high school business teacher, coworkers from every job he’s had and his therapist.
“And over the course of the summer I started thinking about when I die, could Anthony mail these letters to these people? And as we were talking about that — because you know he’s obviously going to be grief-stricken when it happens — that’s a big ask to give to your spouse as part of your legacy,” he said.
So Anthony suggested mailing them, but tracking down addresses and gathering envelopes seemed like a lot of work. So Anthony suggested they record Saim reading them.
That idea morphed into doing it in a podcast with Saim reading the letters live to the people he wrote them to, some of whom he hadn’t spoken to in decades. The podcast is on YouTube, Apple and Spotify.
“It’s a heavy conversation,” Saim said. “We talk about fun things at the beginning and memories. But usually when it gets to the letter, usually there’s not a dry eye in the house and it has just become such an amazing gift to reconnect.
“That conversation may well be the last time I see them, but now I know that I have given them everything I have left in my heart for them and I will cherish that conversation and all the memories I have with those people until I can no longer do that.
“I mean selfishly, it was an amazing gift for myself. I never even set out for it to be that. But I listen to the episodes over and over again.”
Anthony, Siam’s husband of nearly two years, said the podcast has given his husband and the letter recipients the chance to not leave anything left unsaid, a frequent regret when loved ones die. “This is opening the door to have open and honest conversations, whether they’re good or bad,” said Anthony.
Saim is ready to move into a new season once he and Anthony get 74 episodes ready. He’s going to start writing letters to people new in his life, people he’s met more recently, shifting goodbye to “I’m still here.”
He regrets never recording his father singing “Happy Birthday” to him every year, “but now I know that I am leaving people a record not only of my voice but my face and they can see the emotion in my face when I’m reading this letter to them.
“And I hope that especially for my children and my family and the really close friends that have been in my life for decades, I truly hope that whenever they’re missing me the most they will open up their episode, fast-forward to the letter and hear those words come out of my mouth.”
This story was originally published April 15, 2026 at 5:30 AM.
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