The day was October 13, 1998, when I received a call that changed my life forever.

“Stuart, am I ready to die?”

Juwita was her name; however, I used to call her “my sunshine” because she would always put a smile on my face every time we met and spoke.

She was barely one month from her 26th birthday when her doctor broke the bad news to her: “Unfortunately, miss, your biopsy report isn’t so good. You’ve been diagnosed with terminal-stage cancer of the breasts, and you are left with about three to six months of life.”

A few days later, when I delivered the claim check to her, I became emotional, and she gently wrapped her two hands on mine and said, “Stuart, don’t cry for me. What you have done for me no one else in the world can do, and I really want to thank you for that.”

From that moment on, I knew I could no longer look upon this job as a job, this career as a career, but rather I knew there and then that this has become a mission ― a mission to empower people to take charge of their lives by taking financial responsibilities.

I embraced and printed this sentence on the back of my name card, and eventually it also became the statement of purpose for my agency:

We have four competitors: death, old age, disability and critical illness. Our mission is to get to our people before our competitors do.

Everyone loves fairy tales because they always “live happily ever after”; however, that was not the case for Juwita. I received a call from her sister on February 13, 2000, saying that Juwita would like to meet me and that she wasn’t doing very well.

With mixed emotions, I arrived in a room where she was lying on a bed with oxygen tanks beside her and a mask over her face. My sunshine, my Juwita, had been reduced to having yellow skin and bones and a blotchy belly. Her brother, who was there, took her oxygen mask off and bent down to listen to what she would like to speak to me.

With tears in his eyes, he said, “Juwita would like to sit up one more time to thank you for allowing her to die here and not at the hospital or at a charitable home.”

All I could do was to tap her hand gently and tell her not to say anything anymore and that everything was going to be OK … although I knew that it was the end.

Moments later, she was gone, and I will never forget her.

What is life insurance?

A life policy is just a time-yellowed piece of paper with columns of figures and legal phrases, until it is baptized with a widow’s tears. Then it is the modern miracle, an Aladdin’s lamp. It is food, clothing, shelter, education, peace of mind, comfort, and undying love and affection. It is the sincerest love letter ever written.

Our job, our purpose, our mission is to help you write this love letter.

A beneficiary of my own planning

On December 13, 2014, during my weekly soccer game, I wasn’t feeling very well and played badly. It was also my son’s 12th birthday, so during his birthday celebration, I told my kids that Mommy will be sending Daddy to the hospital after dinner.

There was a sharp pain that ran from the back of my neck to my left arm and all the way to my lower back. I couldn’t even feel my feet.

At the hospital, I was told that I was suffering from a heart attack. However, the doctors also found that my hemoglobin level was down to a critical level of 6, as I was experiencing intestinal bleeding.

What followed was a torturous journey of extensive and expensive medical treatment. All in all, I’ve had 23 surgical procedures, from December 2014 to December 2019.

I’ve had a total of 14 bags of blood transfusions and 23 jabs of EPO (erythropoietin) to restore my hemoglobin level so that they can carry out the various procedures in between.

For my heart, a total of six coronary angiograms were performed with five stents inserted.

For my small intestines, a total of 12 endoscopies and colonoscopies as well as one angiogram procedure to locate the bleeding point were performed. Once they found the culprit, a major surgery was carried out to remove the 2-cm cancerous tumor together with 20 cm of my duodenum. I was extremely lucky to escape chemotherapy or radiotherapy.

Then I developed acute colitis in November 2015 and hence had a PICC procedure ― an 80-cm tube was inserted through the veins in my arm, which would carry antibiotics directly into my heart for 24 days.

And, finally, there were three more surgeries to correct the anal fistula that manifested after that.

Throughout this entire ordeal, I didn’t stop doing what I’m passionate about. In fact, the last stent to my heart was just inserted on December 23, 2019.

Life insurance is a social miracle, and we are just ordinary people who are willing to put in extraordinary efforts into what I call a “work of heart.”

I am grateful that I am in this business of creating social miracles.

Stuart Shee Yew Kuen, BBA, is a 22-year MDRT member and founder of Advisors in-Sync. A highly regarded speaker, he has spoken in more than 50 cities over 16 countries on various sales and agency leadership platforms, which includes various international MDRT platforms. An associate trainer with the Kinder Brothers International (KBI) and Leadership Management International (LMI), he also conducts workshops on sales, leadership and master agency building. His book, “Work of Heart,” was published in May 2019.