Sarah Wildman's daughter Orli died from cancer when she was 14. "She would sometimes ask me, 'What do you think I did to deserve this?' And of course, that's not an answerable question," Wildman says. The NYT Opinion writer spoke with Terry Gross about her daughter's treatment and death and living with grief.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. Parents want to protect their children, but how can you possibly protect your adolescent child from a terminal illness and inevitable death? My guest, Sarah Wildman, realized the inevitability after her older daughter, Orly, was enrolled in hospice. That was after three years of treatment for a rare form of liver cancer that had metastasized.
Early was 14 when she died in 2023. She endured several rounds of chemo, a liver transplant, two brain surgeries, and a tumor that pinched her spine, leaving her unable to walk. Wildman is a staff writer and editor for the opinion section of the New York Times, where she wrote several pieces during Early's illness and after her death.
reflecting on what it was like to be a parent of a child facing mortality and the differences between how hospitals, hospice, and Judaism deal with illness and death of a child compared to an adult. She described the expert medical care Orly received and the reluctance of some doctors and nurses to speak openly and realistically about what Orly was facing.
She also wrote about the impact on her younger daughter, Hana, who was nine when Orly passed away. Several years before Orly's diagnosis, Wildman wrote the book Paper Love about her grandfather, who fled Austria after the Nazi invasion, and his girlfriend, who he left behind. No one in the family knew what happened to her, but the book describes how Wildman spent years tracking down the story.
She is no stranger to writing about death and the importance of memory, whether it's the Let's start with a video that Wildman posted on Instagram when Orly was 12 in sixth grade, and Sarah interviewed her about what she was experiencing. It was 16 months after the initial diagnosis. She was in the middle of a second round of chemo and, as a result, was bald.
People just assume that I'm not confident with how I look, and I think that's just really strange because I'm really happy With being bald, I think I'm beautiful. And not everybody has to agree, but that's what I think about myself. And I think a lot of people don't see that as a norm, which it obviously isn't. But people think it's not beautiful.
So they try to remind me over and over again, which is really nice. But I already know that, so I find it really strange because you wouldn't tell a normal person that they're beautiful over and over and over again. And eventually that makes me feel like, oh, if you're only saying that because you think I'm not, does that make sense?
Yeah, it does. It's interesting. It's like they're somehow reinforcing its non-normativity by constantly telling you you're beautiful as though you'd think it was strange. I mean, you happen to look really good with a bald head. I'm just going to say that. Do you feel like that regular life is just sort of continuing on and you're still in this cancer space? Yeah.
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