Nigel Latta, clinical psychologist, author and broadcaster, died on Tuesday at age 58, after being diagnosed with gastric cancer in 2024. Through various interviews and in his latest book, Lessons on Living, which was released yesterday, he has shared deeply personal and poignant perspectives on living with the disease –
Nigel Latta had this advice for anyone fighting cancer
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Speaking to the Herald’s Money Talks podcast on May 8, 2025:
“After you take care of the basics and you can pay the bills and feed the kids and do all that kinda stuff, [money] doesn’t matter. I’d trade anything to be free of the whole cancer cloak.
“The money stuff literally doesn’t matter to me... What matters is time. Money buys me time because insurance has meant that I’ve been able to get access to some of those drugs.
“I think I’ve bought [Lotto tickets] about once or twice. To me ... Lotto feels like you’re giving up. If your financial plan is Lotto, you’ve given up, and so you need to get a better financial plan.”
READ MORE: Nigel Latta’s final message to his wife before death
On perspective
Speaking to RNZ on January 14, 2025:
“If I could swap this thing for being bankrupt and flipping burgers somewhere for minimum wage, I’d do it … if I could do that and be guaranteed 30 more years with Natalie, I’d do that in a second.”
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On the importance of insurance
Speaking to the Herald on May 8, 2025:
“I’ve become a huge advocate of insurance. [My wife] Natalie and I, everyone [who] comes over, we just grill ’em; have you got health insurance, check your assurance, have you got income protection?”
On what really matters
Speaking to Woman’s Day on May 15, 2025:
“I could have just spent the next 30 years taking everything for granted that’s important to me, like most people. I think everyone knows that love is really the only thing that matters, but it’s letting that change your behaviour.”
Speaking to RNZ on January 14, 2025:
“Almost everything that we worry about doesn’t matter. The stuff that matters is time with the people that you care about. ... I know that’s the most obvious advice and when you’re not living under this, when you’re not faced with that being taken away, you just take it for granted … holding the hand of the person that you love – that’s all I want to do.”
On optimism
Speaking to RNZ on May 7, 2025:
“Optimism really is a superpower. It really does help … A number of cancer specialists have talked about the fact that if you’re relaxed, if you think the world is a pretty good place, and you’re optimistic, your T-cells are more active than if you’re pessimistic.”
On facing a terminal diagnosis
Speaking to RNZ on May 7, 2025:
“I’ve basically spent 30 years talking about resilience in one form or another. And then this thing comes along and it goes, ‘okay, let’s see how good you are’.”
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On love and legacy
From Latta’s book, Lessons on Living:
“After working this toolkit all my life, and staying on the road all these long years, and getting up after all the falls, and pushing through pain, and stress and suffering, and all the triumphs, and all the disasters, and all the joys, and all the sorrows, and raising a family, and all that brings with it, and finding love, and most of all having now lived through months and months of staring down the clucking face of death itself, I finally arrived at the last enduring truth.
“I learned what I always knew but never truly understood. There is only one metric that really matters when we measure ourselves against the way we’ve chosen to live our lives: in the end ... there is only love.”
Speaking to Woman’s Day, on May 15, 2025:
“Being in love has changed the questions that I ask when I do couples work. I used to ask a lot about things that people enjoyed doing together, but now I’m much more interested in how people feel when they’re together. Now when I see love, it’s like, ‘Oh, they’ll be all right. Love is there’.”