In this special episode, Dr. Kimberly Hubenette sits down with her father, Dr. Quan, who lost his first wife nearly two decades ago and has been remarried to a fellow widow for 16 years. He breaks grief down into three concrete paths: live alone and cope solo, remarry and rebuild, or move in with family. He chose remarriage — and credits a chance encounter at a Chinese restaurant, where a fellow widow slipped him her phone number, changing his life.
The conversation also covers something rarely discussed out loud: the signs many widows and widowers report from a departed spouse, from a light bulb that should’ve been ice-cold but wasn’t, to a toddler grandson who swore his late grandmother read him bedtime stories. Father and daughter land on the same truth — you can love more than one person, just in different ways, and grief doesn’t mean you stop living.
If you’re navigating loss, this episode offers a roadmap, not platitudes.
Episode Highlights:
06:05 Backstory: Dr. Quan’s Widowhood — Losing His First Wife
10:54 Patients Sharing Grief: Conversations Beyond Dentistry
12:41 Dating After Loss )
15:20 The Choice to Keep Living:
17:48 Three Ways to Cope with Spousal Loss
21:18 Memories Persist: Pride in Shared Life
23:00 Pick a Road & Move Forward
27:00 Signs From Beyond
31:30 Feeling Loved Ones’ Presence & Unexplained Signs
33:00 What’s Your Choice
Resources:
📖Grid: Once in a Lifetime You Get to Start Over by Dr. Kimberly Hubenette
📖Live, Love, Survive, Thrive! by Dr. Kimberly Hubenette (COMING SOON)
Thank you for listening.
To keep my podcast alive,
Wanna buy my dog Dakota a bone?
Quotes:
11:09 “I thought my life had ended when my wife died. The loneliness, the grief, and the pain were there, and I thought it was over for me.” —William Quan, DDS
14:25 “My patients weren’t just my patients; my patients were my friends.” —William Quan, DDS
14:18 “You survive, you don’t give up. I know that my late wife wouldn’t want me to give up, and she wants me to continue. So that’s what I do. Life is very simple. It’s not complicated. You just keep going.” —William Quan, DDS
17:33 “Love is an omniscient emotion.” —Dr. Kimberly Hubenette
18:41 “I found out there are three ways to cope with the loss of your spouse, and I have picked one way and I’m happy with it.” —William Quan, DDS
20:59 “I wish I had taken more videos of [Mark] talking, because sad to say, the longer it is, the harder it is for me to remember his voice and my mom’s voice. It’s sad because I thought I’d always, always remember it.” —Dr. Kimberly Hubenette
22:48 “Life was full of choices. You pick a road, you try not to look back, and you keep going down that road, and that’s how life goes.” —William Quan, DDS
25:36 “Grieving is always going to be there. It’s always going to be a part of us. However, we can always help others along.” —Dr. Kimberly Hubenette
Meet Dr. William:
Transcript:
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Hi everybody, Dr. Kimberly Hubenette here, and this is Live, Love, Survive, Thrive, and we’re joined here today with my dad, Dr. William Quan. Say hi to everybody.
Dr. William Quan: Hi, everyone,
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: That’s my dad, Dr. William Quan. Now we’re in San Diego today, and I’m visiting because we’re going to go see my niece, Chloe. She’s graduating from UC Riverside, and we’re going to go see her graduate tomorrow. Very exciting. Today is a Monday, and usually we meet once a week, Mondays, and one Monday a month we are live, and we’re at Daniel’s Chapel of the Roses last week. Well, today for me, I’ll tell you what I did. I actually had a lot of things happen to me, and the first thing is I thought I lost my laptop. I was so devastated because I lost my laptop, and I had to wait until I bought a new laptop. I went to Best Buy, they were going to load it up, and for some reason I kept looking, looking, looking through my car, and I actually found it on the vertical behind the seat. So, for two weeks I was ranting and raving that I lost my laptop at Oakland Airport, but in fact it was always there, and I also thought I lost my credit card. So it’s a part of me thinks that you know what I think I need to stop and smell the roses. I need to stop, slow down, and just be present, and that’s a lot of things to think about, because being present is actually something that I think not a lot of people do. A lot of people are just going, going, going, and they don’t stop and think about what they’re really doing, because sometimes people can lose things, or they think that you know it got stolen or something, but no, I had to think about this, and honestly, I have to slow down. I have a lot of things going on in my mind, and my mind goes a mile a minute, and I just have to slow down because somebody’s telling me I better slow down or else something worse is going to happen. So I just want to have that as one of the teaching things today that you really have to slow down in order to speed up in your life.
So make a long story short, I ended up finding my laptop. I even found my other credit card, which I tried to shut down. So now I have two new things that I shouldn’t have done. I bought a new computer, and I got a new credit card number. Well, I can’t take the new credit card number back, because I already shut the other one down, but I did take back my laptop, and they luckily it was only two or three days old, so they took it back because I never really picked it up because I had them trying to configure it. But I’m so happy that I got my old laptop back, and they said that I was going to have at least three or four years left on my laptop, so might as well just keep the same laptop. Just because I could buy a new one doesn’t mean I need a new one, and I really have everything that I need on my old laptop. So there you go. What do you think about that, Dad?
Dr. William Quan: Well, I’m illiterate, so I guess it’s okay.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Do you find sometimes that if you do too much that you lose sense of track of time and lose things?
Dr. William Quan: I guess
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: You have any thought about that?
Dr. William Quan: Well, I just try to stay in my own realm, doing what I like to do in my dental practice, and with my second wife, Linda, and in San Diego, enjoying life, and I’m doing okay.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: So, a little bit of background about my father and myself, he’s on this podcast because he actually lost his wife. How many years ago?
Dr. William Quan: I lost my late wife 18 and a half years ago/
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: And that was with my mom, Anna, and he’s been lucky enough that he survived, and now he’s thriving. He has a new wife, and Linda, who is also a widow, and hopefully one day she’ll tell us her story, but really she’s kind of shy, so she might not. But let’s talk about this. Don’t you think you’re lucky in life to have met another person to share your life with, and that she’s also a widow?
Dr. William Quan: Yeah.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: And is that how you think that you are compatible in such a way?
Dr. William Quan: Well, I’ll go even one step further. I think I’ve been blessed in my life from day one when I met my late wife, I always thought that God was watching over me. God had his wings over me in my eyes. I got a good wife the first time around, and she got me through dental school. If it wasn’t for her, I never would have made it. She gave me hope. She was my trusty companion, and we got through dental school. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but I had a good companion, and now we started my dental office after I got out of dental school. She worked with me as my secretary and my assistant for about 10 years before she went on with her own career as a teacher. And then we went through life, we ended up with kids, family, and I worked like I’m in my 56th year of practicing dentistry. I think it gives me a reason to keep living, because I was trained well at USC School for Dentistry back in ’70 when I graduated. And I still use what I’ve learned to practice in 2026 I still work about, I’m 81 years old now, and most of the people in my high school class from El Central California have retired.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: What about your dental class? Has everybody retired there too?
Dr. William Quan: That I lost track of my dental class. We haven’t had a reunion in my dental class, but I had at reunions in my high school class, and, like I said earlier, most everyone has retired in my high school class, but I keep working, and see, I’ve learned from talking to my patients, especially the ones that retired. I keep hearing this one statement from the retired people, they told me they wish they never retired. They didn’t have anything to do in retirement. So I hear this, and I realized I don’t want to retire yet, because I, I like to work about three or four days a month practicing dentistry gives me a reason to still be creative, functional, and it gives me a reason to keep going, and plus I have loyal patients. I’ve had some patients since day one, like 56 years now. And my patients tell me they don’t want me to retire, they don’t know where else to go, because they trust my skills, my diagnoses, my treatment, and they don’t want to go anywhere else.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: And trust is a pretty good thing, right?
Dr. William Quan: Yeah.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: I mean, because you’re. Very, you know, as a dentist, and I’m a dentist also, by the way, but you have this certain sense, and they trust what you say, and basically, they come from all over. What’s the furthest walks of life versus length of time that they’re tend to get how far away they live, right?
Dr. William Quan: I have patients, they’re farmers or teachers, other people just work for living. I have judges, medical doctors, surgeons, I have fellow dentists coming to see me.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: And they tell you stories about their life and their widowship. So before you were a widow, you had patients that talked to you too, right?
Dr. William Quan: That’s right.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: What’s the commonality of some of the stories that they tell you when they first lose their loved one?
Dr. William Quan: When they lose someone dear to them, for instance, when it happened to me 18 and a half years ago, I thought my life had ended when my wife died, I thought I was a goner. Actually, for a year, I tried to live by myself, cooking and being by myself, I would find that when I got home after work, I could hear a pin drop in my house. It was so lonely. The loneliness, the grief, and the pain was there, and I thought it was over for me. And then, for some crazy reason, after a year I couldn’t take it no more. Then I started looking for companionship, and I found this one patient of mine that I tried to date, and she wasn’t interested. Then I found an old girlfriend of mine from high school days, and she wasn’t interested. And then, lo and behold I ran into one of my patients in a Chinese restaurant, she was waitressing and hey, he did something totally unusual, she passed her phone number to me, but she was a widow and I was a widower. I started dating her, and lo and behold, I’ve been married for 16 years now, and like I told you earlier, I think God has been watching over me, making sure that I had a life, and I’m grateful.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Would you say that it’s easier to date somebody that’s a widower, also, or not?
Dr. William Quan: I think it would be easier, because she has gone through what I went through, and she knows how to cope and stuff, and we get lost quite well. We’ve been married 16 years, and like, I celebrated my 16 year anniversary with her, like, three weeks ago, and I told her thanks for the first 16 years. I want 16 more from her, so we get along.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: And would you say it’s easier because you know you have things in your house and she has things in her house that are both from your previous spouses, so would you say that you know she allows you to grieve and you allow her to grieve, too?
Dr. William Quan: I was told my son don’t talk about like your legal wives, your needle wise, and stuff that they don’t want to really care. But hey, I found it. That’s how I got to know my second wife. I picked her mind, how she felt, where her background came from, and I started to learn more about her life very deeply, and she relates to me. We get along quite well.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: How about with your patient?
Dr. William Quan: Oh, what’s crazy is I have a small dental practice. I found out when my late wife passed away that my patients weren’t just my patients, you know, my patients were my friends. They kept propping me up because they told me they noticed that it’s very obvious when my late wife died. I went down the tubes, I looked sad, unhappy, and my patient told me they saw that. Now they see that I’m happier, that hey, I’m living again, and the thing is, like Kimberly said, you survive, you don’t give up and. I know that my late wife wouldn’t want me to give up, because I think she’s watching over me in heaven, and she wants me to continue. So that’s what I do. Life is very simple, it’s not complicated. You just keep going.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Anybody in the audience there know what we’re talking about? What has been anything that you’ve noticed in your life, and you know, let’s write it down and talk about this, because it’s a very important thing. You know, basically, if you want to have that in your life again, do you want to have that in your life again, and do you want another spouse? Because obviously we say, oh, when we pass away, we’re going to see our spouse in the future again in heaven, and they’re looking for us in heaven, and we’re going to find them in heaven, and then we have another spouse. So there’s interesting situations where you know some spouses don’t want us to have another spouse, or there’s some spouses that say, “Hey, yeah, I have another spouse, or the opposite side, there’s some spouses that are jealous of the other spouse that was already gone. So, what do you do about that? I mean, there’s all walks of life right, Dad? When we’re talking to our patients, we hear a lot of different things, and obviously it’s HIPAA not to tell anybody about who’s saying what. There is something
Dr. William Quan: I had this one patient when right after I lost my wife, he was a little too. And she flat out told me, don’t you dare date again, because you should be loyal to your late wife, and he wouldn’t want you to date again. He was the only one out of several 100 pages that told me that the rest of them told me it was okay to search out happiness again, and hey, I found it, and of course, to be blunt with you guys, I still love my first wife.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Obviously, you’re always gonna have.
Dr. William Quan: I love my second wife too, so you keep going.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: There are times of love in your heart, right? Can you love more than one person to people?
Dr. William Quan: I’ve thought about that, Kim. You can love more than one person.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: In a different way.
Dr. William Quan: Yes, yeah, yeah.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Because love is an omniscient emotion,
Dr. William Quan: Yes.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Just like I love my brothers, my dogs, my nieces, my nephews, my dad. I guess you could love more than one person.
Dr. William Quan: Yeah. See, like when my late wife passed away, I broke down how to cope in three different ways.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Listen, good ladies and gentlemen, write this down.
Dr. William Quan: One way was live with it, be by myself, but I realized when I did that, I tried it for a year, I still had pain, major grief, and unhappiness, but I was trying to be by myself and trying to cope with everything by myself, the other way is what I did, where I went out after a year, and I found another spouse. And then the third way I found out is one of my patients who lost her husband, she went to live with her children and grandchildren, so I found out there’s three ways to cope with the loss of your spouse, and I had picked one way, and I’m happy with it.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Do you think that your life’s like more fulfilled with the new person in your life, and you’re sharing things with them?
Dr. William Quan: Yes, yes.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: And if you didn’t, then what would have happened.
Dr. William Quan: Well, I would have died from misery,
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: But you know, like, you know, you had my brothers and you had the nieces, I mean, your grandkids, but it wasn’t enough, huh?
Dr. William Quan: That’s correct. It wasn’t.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: They would always invite you to things, but did you feel lonely even though you were there?
Dr. William Quan: Even though I was with them, I felt alone.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: So, what did you do? Did you stay with them more, or did you go home because you felt sad?
Dr. William Quan: A little bit of both. And then when I found my second wife, I got after her again. You have to pick up the pieces, you guys. You can’t just live in the basement and tolerance, it’s doable, but it’s not good for you. Like I told you guys, had I not met my second wife, I would have been dead by now.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: And how old are you?
Dr. William Quan: I’m 81. I lost my first wife when I was 64
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: So that was.. gosh, that’s been a while.
Dr. William Quan: It’s been a while, 18 and a half years.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Yeah. Sometimes when I think about it, it’s sad, but the longer that my mom has been gone, I can’t remember her voice anymore. But then I play my tape of her, because I have this tape of her from my telephone, my old telephone recordings, and I hear her voice, a voicemail, or I see a video, or something. But you know, 20 years ago it was, we didn’t have like that many videos on our cell phones, and now it’s perfected. Where we could take a video and listen to it, and watch it, and you know, have it in the cloud, so that we could see it again. I think that I have a handful of my husband Mark’s videos too, that I wish I would have taken more videos of him talking, because sad to say, the longer it is, the harder it is for me to remember his voice and my mom’s voice.
Dr. William Quan: Yes, I feel the same way,
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: And it’s sad, because I thought I’d always, always remember it.
Dr. William Quan: But see, you know, your memories don’t go away. Your memories are strong. I still periodically feel sad about everything, but my memories are really good on my late wife. I know we, we were at King, we went through life together. I’m proud of what we accomplished.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: So, today the project for us, since you guys have your journals and everything today, let’s make a note of things that is keeping us busy. What we would do in life, as number one, are we going to be freshly looking through things and making sure that we’re living life in a way that helps us memorialize the person in a way that helps us cope with the person not being there, or are we going to go out and find another spouse and thrive with a new spouse. I mean, you could do any of those things and still thrive in life if you wanted to.
Dr. William Quan: Sure. And you know what happened to me and how I cope with it is not totally unique, because many people have gone down my road, and I told you, like, two other roads you could go down, but you know the life was full of choices. You pick the road, you try not to look back, and you keep going down that road, and that’s how life goes.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: You think if Linda didn’t meet you, that she would have found another person too, or not really.
Dr. William Quan: She had been a widow for 10 years? At that point, she was raising her two kids, and actually, when I first met her, she said, told me it wasn’t interested in looking for another.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Oh, she just wanted a friend,
Dr. William Quan: Yeah. And, but I told her, you know what, I’m looking for a wife,
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: So, see, then she changed her mind. She went from one road to the other,
Dr. William Quan: That’s right.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Did you, did she ever say anything about that?
Dr. William Quan: No, she’s happy, I’m happy.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: But how did you change her mind?
Dr. William Quan: See, I guess you realized that I was as good as her first husband, and I’d help take care of her and stuff. Yeah, and the word compatible and hey, it’s worked like I told you 16 years
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Because she changed her road to match your road and that you know, honestly, I don’t know if we’ll ever interview her, because she’s kind of shy, but you know, but my father will be able to explain it to you in his perspective of that, right, Dad?
Dr. William Quan: I think so.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Is there anything else that you want to tell the audience?
Dr. William Quan: No, we’ve sort of covered most of the bases. Like, the important thing is don’t give up, keep going.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: I wanted to talk about something about what keeps me going, is having things to do, and like I said, I was really busy, but I think I have to make sure that I slow down a little bit, but this doesn’t mean don’t do anything, because I don’t want to be sitting around like doing nothing, so I have projects. I create my project. So my project is basically having the podcast, helping others with their grief on Mondays, just like today, giving them little projects to do, and then writing my books, and I also like to talk to all my patients about life, because I feel like if I calm them down when I talk to them at my work, then it’s helping them, you know, like we can transform lives with peace. Why can’t we transform lives with emotion and helping them progress through their journey of life? Because grieving is always going to be there, it’s always going to be a part of us, however, we can always help it along.
Dr. William Quan: Like I told you guys earlier, my patients aren’t just my patients, they’re my friends. And when my patients come in, we don’t just talk about their dental problem, we talk about life. As a matter of fact, my secretary tells me I talk to my patients too much
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: More than you work, but it’s therapeutic for you at that.
Dr. William Quan: I think you’re right. For me, it’s definitely therapeutic. Then you’re aware of the fact that, well, what’s interesting, other people have problems, like, and hey, when they hear how you cope with it. It might help them cope with their problem.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette:
Is there any one story that any of your patients have told you that are so interesting you’d like to share about a spouse and a second spouse or third spouse?
Dr. William Quan: I’ve heard this more than once, where after your spouse is gone, there are things that happen in your life that you’re aware that your spouse spirit is still there, be it like one patient, whenever they find a penny on the ground somewhere, it’s been left by their spouse. Another one is it’s hard to pinpoint, but there will be things that you’re departed and then that you see in your life, and you go, I don’t understand how that could happen. For instance, like right after my wife died in San Diego, we waited two or three days to go back to El Centro at the Planners Funeral, and I love telling this story. We walked into my house in Central, I hadn’t been in it for like three months, I know when I left it, I shut off all the lights. So when I walked into it, my kids were with me, Dr. Kim, my two sons, my grandchildren, they’re all with me. We walked into my house, and I realized my bedroom lamp were on. So I told my kids, you know what, your mother turned that on for us to welcome us into her house. So my son, he told me, “Dad, you’re full of it, that can’t possibly happen. So I went up to one of the lamps, and I grabbed hold of the light bulb. Had it been on for three months, because I hadn’t been in there that long, it would have been hot as hell to the touch. It was cool to the touch, you guys. That means someone just turned it on before we walked in. And another thing that same night, my granddaughter was out there in the living room, playing a tune on my wife’s piano, so I asked my son, when we were in the bedroom talking about the light bulb, I asked my son, did you give your daughter piano lesson? Becaus she’s actually playing a tune, so we went out to the living room, and there was a sheet of music on top of the piano where my granddaughter, who didn’t know how to play the piano, she played by touching certain keys. And I knew that that sheet of music had been in the seat for the last 30 years, and then when we walked in that night, someone put in the sheet of music on our stupid piano. It was my wife. And then another story that I heard was my grandson was two years old, I heard this one a couple weeks after my wife passed away after a funeral, my grandson had been telling parents that his grandmother’s spirit would come in at night in him very early and read books to him. I myself thought my grandson would be crazy, but to see there are things that the departed is trying to maintain and let you know that they’re still here. Like I’d go drive home from San Diego, going to L Central, and like the first month I would look to the passenger seat, I’d be driving, I would see my departed wife sitting in the seat. Now it’s been 18 and a half years, I don’t see her there anymore, but you know what, feel her there, she’s there, she’s accompanying me on my trip back and forth, she’s always listening, and that’s comforting, you know. So there are these things that the big artist will do, and you know, you don’t laugh at these things, because I’ve talked to other people and they have experienced similar problems and they don’t know the explanation, but it happens, and I see that I notice it, so stay open-minded about everything. Of course one of these days, when you’re gone, you will meet your spouse again in heaven, and so, but in the meantime, the spouse is trying to stay in contact with you. So there, these are things that I’ve experienced. So, there, you and Kim did tell me certain things about Mark and her after he’s gone, that he knows it, so stuff happens, you guys, yeah,
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: For me, there’s been things that happen that nobody can explain, except for me thinking about is Mark, because there’s certain things that he does, like if I really need something, I’ll ask, and it’s always done. I can’t explain how or why or what, but I think he’s always there watching out for me, and he used to tell me I should go find another spouse once my spouse, once he passed away, but I still haven’t. But maybe you know, who knows if that’s going to happen. My path of life is different than my father’s, because I’m doing everything on my own, and I’m teaching people, and I’m, you know, going out to the wilderness, I’m doing things on my own. I’m hiking. I’m being a survivor. I’m helping people just like you to figure out life again. There’s no right or wrong, but that’s it. Okay. Tell us another story. Anything else?
Dr. William Quan: I can’t think of anything right off the bat. I hear a story from other from my patients.
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: So anyway, I’m gonna say that your homework today is going to be to write down the things that you hope to accomplish, and see if you’re going to do it alone or with somebody, and if you have somebody, great. Explain how you’re doing it together, and if you’re doing it alone, see how you’re going to do it alone. And there’s no right or wrong. We just want to hear about your stories, so tab with us, let us know next week, because next week on Monday, same time at 4:30 we’re going to start another pot and talk about this, okay? So, say bye for now.
Dr. William Quan: Bye, you guys. Nice visiting with you,
Dr. Kimberly Hubenette: Okay. See you next week.