Sarah Wildman: Let Grief Be Messy

Summary

Podcast Episode Summary

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All There Is with Anderson Cooper

Episode: Sarah Wildman: Let Grief Be Messy

Date: April 17, 2026
Host: Anderson Cooper
Guest: Sarah Wildman, Staff Writer and Editor at The New York Times

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Episode Overview

In this deeply moving episode, Anderson Cooper speaks with Sarah Wildman about her experience grieving the loss of her teenage daughter, Orly, to a rare and aggressive liver cancer. The conversation delves into the complexities of anticipatory grief, the challenges and messy realities of bereavement, and how society approaches (and often avoids) the topic of death, especially when a child is lost. The tone is candid, raw, and occasionally darkly humorous, highlighting both pain and moments of connection and beauty that persist through grief.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Introducing Orly and the Beginning of Their Journey

• Sarah's Recollection of Orly:
  • Orly was diagnosed at 10 with hepatoblastoma. She was active and joyful, loving to dance and play basketball despite growing pain prior to her diagnosis (01:56).
  • Sarah struggled with how life outside seemed unchanged, reflecting:
    • “How could everything in my house be exactly the same, but everything totally different?... You could still reach across it for a little while” (02:44).
  • Orly endured multiple surgeries and chemotherapy, enduring the isolating reality of cancer and then, later, the pandemic.
  • Orly’s resilience: “After that first brain surgery, she was back on a surfboard two weeks later. She read 15 books.” (03:32)

2. Facing Mortality and Conversation about Death

• Orly’s Awareness and Need for Honest Dialogue:
  • Orly wanted to talk about what she was facing, which was often harder for Sarah than for Orly herself (04:39).
  • Sarah recalls:
    • “I sort of wanted someone to give me a guide as to how to even have this conversation without it all falling apart.” (04:54)
  • The emotional struggle of “the hyper present”—focusing only on the good in the immediate moment, rather than on impending loss (06:10).

3. Communication and Medical Realities

• Difficult Conversations with Doctors:

  • The realities of prognoses were often ambiguous. Sarah only heard “six months to live” from a hospice nurse, not directly from doctors (08:24).
  • The medical system’s reluctance to acknowledge the nearness of death led to confusion and denial.

• Desire for Clear Guidance:

  • Sarah wished for someone to help facilitate important talks and decisions: “I needed somebody who really knew us to sit down with us and say…What are the things you want to discuss?... Kids can do that too.” (10:09)

4. Orly’s Voice and Experiences

• Instagram Live and Orly’s Reflections:
  • The episode features Orly’s own words via an Instagram Live, where she shares the loneliness of her cancer journey:
    • “For a whole month, everybody talks about it...And then after that, a lot of people ditched me...It helps me see who real friends are.” (10:40)
  • Sarah treasures recordings and wishes she had more: “I wish I’d just hit record. I think I didn’t because I thought to do so would indicate that I thought we weren’t going to get more of those [moments].” (12:55)

5. Last Moments and the Reality of Loss

• Orly’s Final Hours:
  • Sarah describes being with Orly as she died, an experience both disquieting and deeply intimate.
    • “There’s something so profoundly off kilter about having nurtured someone from birth and seeing them leave.” (15:11)
  • The tension between wanting to remember every part of Orly and finding some memories impossible to unsee.
  • The struggle to re-enter societal life:
    • “Every single step without her was a step away from losing that visceral experience of living with her.” (17:47)

6. Living with Grief

• Ongoing Grief and Transformation:

  • "I feel like I walk around with this sign that no one can see that I'm not complete." (19:16)
  • Grief is a complex mixture: isolation, anger, fear, longing, and the challenge of relating to others.
  • On anger:
    • “I broke up with a therapist who said, ‘I’m worried you’re angry.’ And I said, ‘Have you googled grief? Because I think it’s the second one on the list.’” (19:43)

• Retaining Connection through Ritual and Memory:

  • Sarah describes small rituals, like texting Orly’s old phone and finding comfort in Orly’s lingering voice and handwriting (14:12).
  • The importance of small objects and rituals as ways to keep Orly present, such as gifting friends white beads with gold ‘O’s to place in meaningful places (35:43).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On isolation and missed opportunities:
  • “I just remember one of the nurses came through and she said, ‘What happy memories you have on your walls.’ And I was so angry. I felt like: Is that it? The memories are dead? Is that the end of living?” (09:29)
• On living 'half a life':
  • Anderson: “My entire life, I wanted to have a scar on my face like Harry Potter...So that someone would know without me having to say anything, that I was living half a life.” (21:29)
  • Sarah: “I feel like that’s a half a person. Yeah, that’s what I feel like. Oh, that’s when I was whole. Oh, I remember that.” (21:46)
• On the societal myth of “perfect death”:
  • “Somehow, collectively, as a society in the West, we’ve come to decide that there’s some kind of perfect death....A lot of the time, it’s out of time...For childhood cancer in particular, the idea that we can’t save every single child feels like, how can that be?” (25:15)
• On "I can't imagine":
  • “It is an expression of distance and of pity...I can’t imagine your pain is a personal promise. I won’t do it. I can’t face it. I’ll never have to. Thank God it’s you, not me.” (27:22)
  • “Every time I hear it...I think for many children, it’s around the age of, like, four or so, right? The first moment that you realize none of us will survive forever. We’ve always imagined it.” (27:51)
• On keeping Orly’s spirit alive:
  • “What does it mean to hold beauty and pain at the same time? Because they’re both there always. And somehow not telling myself I can’t see beauty, that I don’t deserve it, and not letting myself deny the pain because it’s always there.” (38:20)
• On advice and letting grief be messy:
  • “Let it be physical...Let it be messy to not make other people comfortable. That’s not your job...It has that potential of danger to it, almost, sometimes catastrophically, and at the same time, it also continues to grow.” (35:48-36:30)

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Noteworthy Timestamps

| Segment | Timestamp | Details | |-------------------------------------------|---------------|------------------------------------------------------------| | Introduction to Orly and cancer journey | 01:56 | Sarah’s loving memories and the shock of diagnosis | | Orly’s resilience and humor | 03:32 | Bouncing back after brain surgery, love of Harry Potter | | Honest conversation about death | 04:39 | The difficulty for Sarah vs. Orly’s willingness | | Living in the ‘hyper present’ | 06:10 | Focusing on the moment to avoid anticipatory grief | | Hospice and medical communication | 08:24 | How Sarah learned of Orly’s prognosis | | Orly’s own words (Instagram Live) | 10:40 | Loneliness, friendship, and feeling left behind | | The wish for more recordings and letters | 12:55 | Sarah’s regrets about not capturing more memories | | Orly’s final moments and aftermath | 15:11 | Vivid, raw recollections of death and its disruption | | Living with ongoing grief | 19:16 | Sarah’s day-to-day struggle and mixed emotions | | Societal expectations and "perfect death" | 25:15 | Why “success” and “failure” are the wrong metrics | | On "I can't imagine" | 27:22 | The distancing effect of common grief platitudes | | Connection through beauty and signs | 28:42; 30:46 | Finding Orly’s spirit in everyday joys | | Ritual: beads and memory | 35:43 | Sharing Orly through symbolic objects and shared memory | | Advice: letting grief be messy | 35:48 | Permission for “messiness” and authenticity in grieving |

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Conclusion & Takeaways

This episode is a tender, honest, and sometimes raw exploration of what it means to grieve—especially as a parent losing a child. Sarah Wildman invites listeners to let grief be as complicated and “messy” as it needs to be, disregarding societal pressure to tidy up or hide their pain. Through poignant storytelling and candid reflection, Sarah and Anderson give permission for sorrow, beauty, and even humor to coexist—and encourage all who are grieving to find their own way to continue, incomplete but still moving forward.

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Further Reading:
All of Sarah Wildman’s articles about Orly can be found on The New York Times website.

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Transcript

[Anderson Cooper]

Welcome to all there is, wherever you are in the world and in your grief. I'm glad you're here. A couple years ago, I began noticing some articles written by a mom named Sarah Wildman about her child Orlie, who'd been diagnosed initially with a rare form of liver cancer. Sarah's articles were beautiful and moving, and I've been wanting to talk with her for a long time. She's a staff writer and editor at the New York Times. Her daughter Orly was 10 when she found out she had hepatoblastoma, and which she and Sarah and her husband Ian and their other daughter Hannah went through is extraordinary. And it's what so many parents face when their child gets sick. Orlie died in March 2023 when she was 14. I can't wait for you to meet Sarah and learn about her remarkable daughter, Orlie. That conversation begins in a moment.

[Sarah Wildman]

My name's MacKenzie, and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like, really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at gofundme.com that's gofundme.com gofundme.com this podcast is supported by GoFundMe.

[Anderson Cooper]

Can you tell us a little bit about Orly?

[Sarah Wildman]

Yeah, I'd love to. I often say, you know, I really don't love to focus on her death because it kind of erases all that. She was right. And I think that's some of the problem with bereavement. In some ways, it's so hard to see the person. She was diagnosed at age 10 with a really rare form of liver cancer. She was on a basketball team and she was dancing. She was an amazing dancer, but she was starting to have all this pain and no one understood it. We kept going back and forth to the doctor. No one put anything together. And the fall of 2019, she went to the ER and was diagnosed. Her liver was full of tumors. She was in so much pain. And I started to cry and she said, you can't cry, you'll scare me. And I sort of like sucked them all back in. And I didn't cry around her again for a long time. I didn't feel it was fair to her and because I was trying so hard not to sit in a place that was as dark as that. But when I came back from the er, I wrote in my journal, how are the eggs? Still good. Shouldn't the milk be sour? How is the food in my fridge? Still hasn't it all expired? How could everything in my house be exactly the same, but everything totally different? Everything else was exactly the same, except we could sort of see through the scrim of the life we'd led into the life we were about to lead. And you could still reach across it for a little while. She had many rounds of chemo. She had metastases to her lungs three times and very painful surgeries to remove those. The pandemic set in in March 2020. And she was so isolated because of this inability to fight off infection. She was so vulnerable. In the summer of 2022, when she was 13, it metastasized to her brain every time. She would be sort of remarkable in bouncing back after that first brain surgery. She was back on a surfboard two weeks later. She read 15 books.

[Anderson Cooper]

She loved Harry Potter.

[Sarah Wildman]

Loved Harry Potter. She had a talmudic intensity about it. She was so joyful so much of the time. I mean, there were very, very, very low moments and so much fear. We sat with so much fear so much of the time. And my prayer, such as it was, was super simple. I just want to keep her. We were on a path to a cure for a really long time. But then she had a second brain tumor, which is an obscene sentence. And at that point she started to write in her journals that she was worrying about whether she would ever see 9th grade.

[Anderson Cooper]

Orly wanted to have conversations about death, about what she was facing. How was that for you?

[Sarah Wildman]

Harder for me than for her, I think, even though she really, really, really didn't want to die. I struggled with this question more than Ian, her dad, and my partner, he sat in it with her more than I did. And I regret that. I think that she actually, really wanted someone to say, no, we have a miracle for you. I mean, she actually even wrote that at one point. How come no one's talking about a miracle? She kept wanting to try every drug trial and every last ditch effort, but she did say to me really early on, we took a long weekend to Miami, and she ran out to the waves, and we stretched out on this lounger, and it seemed really beautiful. And then she turned to me and she said, what if this is the best I ever feel again? So it was really present for her. And it was very hard to know where to sit as caregiver. I sort of wanted someone to give me a guide as to how to even have this conversation without it all falling apart. I really wanted to hold onto hope probably longer than she did in some way. But when they realized it was her brain, the first thing she said was, so I'm gonna die. And I didn't speak. I couldn't speak in that moment. And the doctor said, you're so mature. And I was shaking. I wasn't crying. I was shaking. And later she said she was angry with me. She wanted me to contradict them, and I couldn't. Then that summer, what I ended up doing, because she bounced back, I started to live in what I called the hyper present. I could no longer think beyond the minute I was in. This minute is a good minute. And this is what we're going to do. She's on a bike and we're at the beach. And I'm going to absorb every single second of this moment, be in that exact second. We are not dying right this second. What does this minute feel like? I don't want to lose this moment. I don't want to sully this moment. I don't want to besmirch this moment by anticipatory grief. After she had a second brain tumor, we started losing her in pieces. She started losing words here and there. And there were just so many indignities. And there were ways in which I worried. I didn't want to worry about losing her, but I was worried about losing her all the time. I was in this sort of traumatic intermediary space. I didn't know how to sit there. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to absorb it. Doctors would say, what do you want? And I would say, I want her to fall in love. I want her to graduate. I want her to make mistakes. What do you mean, what do I want? What does that even mean? I want the years that were promised her. I didn't realize I was asking for too much. I don't want to worry that these are the only 10 good minutes. And what if I take a walk and I miss them? I want her to go out with her friends. And come back too late and us argue about a curfew. I don't know. What do you want from a 14 year old? I just want her to get to do things. So what do you mean by what do I want? How do you want me to live right now? How am I supposed to do this? I didn't know. And our world got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until we were spending almost all of our time in her room. And after New Year's, as 2022 became 2023, a tumor compressed her spine and it took away her ability to walk. And she just couldn't believe that her world had narrowed so dramatically. And Orly got upset with me for not making plans for her to have a summer camp. Why aren't you booking me summer camp?

[Anderson Cooper]

Did a doctor ever tell her that she was going to die or tell you?

[Sarah Wildman]

It was not quite said in that way. I mean, yes and no. When they recommended her for hospice, they said hospice is a backdoor to home nursing because kids can receive concurrent care. An adult who goes into hospice, it's really comfort care and mostly end of life. But for children, it's a sort of two track. And they said we wouldn't have to give up doing drug trials and everything else. And then when the hospice nurse called, I said, well, we're starting a new drug trial. And the nurse just blithely said, well, you know, they told me she has six months to live, right? And I said, no, you're the first one to say that to me. And I was driving and I had to pull over, and I sort of fell apart that night. I thought, I don't want to have a kid in hospice. I don't want that. Sometime later, an oncologist approached me and said, I heard you didn't finish the intake. And I said, is it true? Does she have six months? And she said, well, that's an antiquated way of thinking about hospice. And what I think she meant was, no one can predict death.

[Anderson Cooper]

How long did she live after that?

[Sarah Wildman]

About six months. Yeah, six months. I just remember one of the nurses came through and she said, what happy memories you have on your walls. And I was so angry. I felt like, is that it? The memories are dead? Is that the end of living? Are we no longer creating memories? One doctor, when I was obsessing, I said I just wanted to take her to Paris. I don't know why you get these sort of things in your head. And he said, you're not going to get to make the memories you want to make. And it was actually one of the clearest sentences anyone had said to me.

[Anderson Cooper]

Did you want people to bring it up? Would it have been easier?

[Sarah Wildman]

I needed somebody who really knew us to sit down with us and say, we're at a really dire moment. What are the conversations you want to have? What are the things you want to discuss? Do you want her to write letters? Kids can do that too. The same way you can with an adult.

[Anderson Cooper]

You guys did an Instagram live.

[Sarah Wildman]

So the Instagram live was when she was in a second season of chemo after a lung resection. And she was really just brilliant in terms of explaining to you what it felt like to be a 12 year old.

[Anderson Cooper]

Let's just play part of it.

[Sarah Wildman]

Do you feel like that regular life is just sort of continuing on and you're still in this cancer space? Yes. I think it's also because it was really, really big deal. Like when I got diagnosed, for a whole month, everybody talks about it. I really tried to help. And then after that, a lot of people ditched me. I mean, I just think that it was cancer. Helps me also see how real friends are. But just so many people went out without me and just forgot that I was going through all this stuff. I think that, yeah, it goes on without me and sometimes I feel alone. I love hearing her.

[Anderson Cooper]

Yeah, she's just incredibly impressive, you said in the Instagram live, so I feel okay commenting on it. She looked amazing bald.

[Sarah Wildman]

She was an incredibly beautiful bald. Yeah, she was amazingly beautiful bald. And poised and articulate and funny and a bit wry. I used to show that video to doctors when she was doing poorly or not speaking in the hospital so they could really see who she was. I think the other piece about the video, which I love and I wish I had, is that as a result of this weird, hot house, horrifying terror roller coaster ride we were on, I knew what our adult relationship would be. We went out one night in Manhattan and we ran around and we went to see a play and then we careened out of there and went to late night ramen. And she was like, oh, you're actually kind of fun. Thanks.

[Anderson Cooper]

High praise.

[Sarah Wildman]

Exactly. I have a tape of her just that I made that summer slightly surreptitiously. Although she later got mad at me and she knew I was doing some of these. But I came in and I filmed her and I said, don't you love me? And she said, I love you. And I really, really wanted to have her saying it, like on tape. But I love hearing her like this.

[Anderson Cooper]

I want to ask you about a couple of things you've written. You said, what if we were presented with something other than relentless hope? If we had been asked to really consider that Orly's time on Earth was limited, how would we have used that time? How do you think you would have done things differently, or do you.

[Sarah Wildman]

I wish we'd recorded more. I wish that last summer when she was really good, I used to lie in bed with her and we would just talk for like, hours. Way, way, way too late. And I wish I'd just hit record, you know, I think I didn't because I thought to do so would indicate that I thought we weren't going to get more of those. I would have had her maybe write letters to us. I wish we'd really sat in this idea of what would she like her legacy to be. I wish we'd asked her the questions that I would want to ask anybody who is facing death. And I think, you know, maybe I wouldn't have had the equilibrium to do it. Um, to some degree, also, you're in such crisis mode. I just wish we had established ways to listen back to her voice even more. Our electronic lives are very, very, very easily erased. And in fact, most of her text messages disappeared one day because they weren't. Something happened between. If you weren't texting to her. And I still text back and forth with that phone. Totally ridiculously, I still have it on.

[Anderson Cooper]

You still text her?

[Sarah Wildman]

I send myself stuff from her phone still. And every now and then, I'll send her a message. My really beloved, incredibly gregarious, unbelievable brother in law died out of the Blue on December 19.

[Anderson Cooper]

What was his name?

[Sarah Wildman]

Michael Repetti. We called him Mikey. On Orly's birthday, which was January 13th, we let go this biodegradable kind of dove balloon that you can write all over, and Hannah wrote on it, I hope you're with Mikey and I hope you're together. And I love that because the one thought that gave us some solace was the idea that maybe they were together. And oddly, Hannah didn't know this. I had texted that to Orly's phone, said, are you with Mike? Are you both okay? But I find some solace in that idea, you know, whatever that means. But I wish I'd sat with her in it more, you know, I would like to think that she didn't feel alone in it. I mean, I was with her as she died, you know, you were able

[Anderson Cooper]

to be with her.

[Sarah Wildman]

We were totally alone. The hospice didn't come. It was really, really, really intense. It was Ian, me, and our old caregiver who had come back to help us out. She hadn't been doing well, but we didn't know. We knew enough that in the morning when Ahana said goodbye and asked if she should stay home from school, and we said no, the night before, Orly had said I love you to her, when that was enormous. But then things took a very bad turn after Hannah left for school. But Hannah sensed. We all sensed something had shifted and we didn't know. And my heart, like, beats faster telling you the story, but things started all disintegrating. And for a long time, I couldn't unsee some of the things I saw in those minutes or that hour. You know, our babysitter who was with us, she kept saying, tell her you love her. Tell her you love her. Tell her you love her. And I just kept saying it over and over and over. And I didn't get up for hours. The hospice nurse didn't come for several hours. And I stayed there in the bed with her, which, if you had told me at some point that I could be somebody that could do that, I wouldn't have thought so. But I also knew there's the things you want to memorize, right? We had the same freckle on our knee. Like, we used to hold hands a lot when she was really small. I think I took as much comfort from holding her in bed as she took from me. You know, just something so essential to it. There's something so profoundly off kilter about having nurtured someone from birth and seeing them leave. And I know I'm not the first person to have done it, but it felt so out of order. I couldn't stand the idea of letting people take her out. It was not cinematic. It was not pretty. She was in pain. I can hear even though she didn't really speak in that last hour, but I just can hear Ian cry my baby in a hallway. And I. All of it is something like I can't un experience. It was so disembodied and so beyond myself in some way, and yet I didn't want to leave because then I'd never have another chance to hold her. And what does that mean? And how do you go back out into the world? I kept feeling her absence everywhere afterwards. I didn't know how to be in the world. I didn't know what to do with myself, you know, I didn't know. I felt like in free fall, you know, what does it mean? Now, what does anything mean? How do I put one foot in front of the other? How do I relate to anybody? How do I. How do I go out looking like a person? How do I not appear to every single person that I'm completely shattered? I kept feeling like every single step without her was a step away from losing that visceral experience of living with her. And what does it mean to sort of hold that memory? I know you've talked about this a fair amount, this fear of losing both the profound and the daily.

[Anderson Cooper]

My kids are 4 and 5, and I've been recording all those moments of, like, just laying on the bed together, all those moments that you talked about that one normally wouldn't. And I've been doing that the last six months a lot. It's so crazy how over time one forgets all these. All the moments that make up one's life with somebody else. It's terrifying.

[Sarah Wildman]

They call me Ima Mommy in Hebrew. And I think, do I have a recorder of her saying it? I just want to hear her call my name.

[Anderson Cooper]

We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Sarah Wildman. Welcome back to my conversation with Sarah Wildman. Has grief been different than you thought it would be?

[Sarah Wildman]

I feel like I walk around with this sign that no one can see that I'm not complete. I stay up too late. I'm afraid of sleeping. I'm afraid of not sleeping. I fill in a lot with work. I'm alone a lot. Call me high functioning. I don't know what that means. I broke up with a therapist who said, I'm worried you're angry. And I said, have you googled grief? Because I think it's the second one on the list. I was like, yeah, I'm angry. And I don't think I'm allowed to be angry.

[Anderson Cooper]

I'll show you how angry I'm really angry.

[Sarah Wildman]

You should be here. It's a mix of things because it's also navigating everyone else's grief and my own and not knowing where I sit with it at sometimes being, like, just walloped by missing her and wanting people to sit with it with me in some ways that I'm not good at asking for it.

[Anderson Cooper]

You're good at writing about it.

[Sarah Wildman]

It's the one space I feel like I'm able to shed all the inhibition I have about talking about it. Every time I pull out a receipt from a old bag or pocket, I look at the date every single time and I think, was Orly with me? Did I sufficiently Appreciate that day that she still walked this earth with me or was on the earth with me. Did I pay attention to it? Was I celebratory enough of it? And every time I see a date, I think, where were we? What was happening for her? Was she sick yet? Was she gone? It has totally redefined everything about how I see the world and how I fear other loss also. It's like that Mary Oliver poem. At the end of the poem, she says, joy's not a crumb. The way in which we don't get to choose how much time we get happiness and how much we don't. And we've just sort of run into it. Sometimes. I'm very open about it, and sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I feel like I should have a sign around my neck, caution when approaching something like that.

[Anderson Cooper]

My entire life, I wanted to have a scar on my face like Harry Potter. Well, I always thought like a Bond villain, but, like, running from down, like, across my eye, like, down, like this. So that someone would know without me having to say anything, that I was living half a life.

[Sarah Wildman]

But that's it, exactly, right? It's a half a life. I feel like that's a half a person. Yeah, that's what I feel like. I feel like I'm. Oh, that's when I was. That's when I was whole. Oh, I remember that. For me, it's like every time I meet someone, then it's a. It's a coming out.

[Anderson Cooper]

I noticed I was doing a quick apology thing. I would be like, I had a brother, but he died. And then sparing them the next embarrassment of them saying, how did he die? And then I would say, by suicide. And then making them really awkward. I would try to do it all in one swoop. I didn't want them to. To feel awkward about it. And now I'm sort of, like, okay with the awkwardness of it, I guess.

[Sarah Wildman]

I think that's the thing, though. You do have this moment of, like, you know, I have a dad kid. I had this moment when somebody asked me recently, how's the family? And, you know, you want to say something like, han is really into volleyball. Or at least dad, you know? Do you think for you that the way your emotion is as high to the surface is because for so long.

[Anderson Cooper]

Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean, I've buried it my entire life. I've never cried.

[Sarah Wildman]

You didn't cry when Carter died?

[Anderson Cooper]

I maybe cried. I found out I was in Washington when my mom reached me on the phone and called me and I think maybe I. I don't think I cried that night. I cried some, like, in a pillow by myself, and maybe while giving. I gave a eulogy and maybe cried during that. But I buried that pretty quickly. And certainly with my dad, I buried that very, very quickly. And I realize now, largely through talking with Francis Weller, that I developed this voice in my head that was designed to protect the little kid that I was. And it's still the voice I have in my head. And it's a very unreliable narrator, it turns out, and it tells me to be wary of everybody, and I follow that voice to. It seems high achievement, high functioning, as you said. But as you said, alone a lot and very isolated and find it very hard to maintain any connection other than work. Now, with my kids, it's different. But prior to having kids.

[Sarah Wildman]

Yeah, you know, I was invited to a night out the other night, and the more people that got invited onto this text chain, at one point I was like, oh, no, I'm out. Yeah, there's no way. I'm not doing this.

[Anderson Cooper]

I can do, like, one or two people, maybe in something, like. But by and large, I bail out on everything.

[Sarah Wildman]

I did go to a party around Halloween, and I wore this dress, but everything else about my outfit was sort of 1940s. And this woman said to me, oh, I really like your dress. And I said, oh, it's my bat mitzvah funeral dress. I wore it to Orli's Bat Mitzvah and then her funeral, and she just kind of backed away. You know, she just was like. She didn't know what to do. And I was like, oh, I guess that was. That was maybe too much. And I realized, oh, you know, that space of humor. The interesting thing is I sometimes think Hannah is the best at it. In fact, you should do a kids episode with different kids on.

[Anderson Cooper]

I would love that.

[Sarah Wildman]

Yeah. She's really. She had this moment the other day at school. She told me that something happened and she turned to someone and she said, death doesn't have to be awkward. You're making it awkward. And I said, how come you, at 12, are better at this than. I can deal?

[Anderson Cooper]

She said that to somebody at school?

[Sarah Wildman]

Yeah.

[Anderson Cooper]

Wow. You said death, when it comes, feels like a failure. Can you talk about that?

[Sarah Wildman]

Somehow, collectively, as a society in the west, we've come to decide that there's some kind of perfect death. It's around the age of 100. You know, you're surrounded by all your loved ones, and you've done all the things you want to do, and you say goodbye to everyone and you pass peacefully. And I suppose that happens sometimes. And it's amazing, but a lot of the time, it's out of time. But we aren't actually able, as a medical establishment to necessarily intercede every time. And yet I do think, especially with something like childhood cancer, there is a sense of failure with it. That's the sense I got. And I think it's part of the reason why it's hard to talk about. I mean, look, some of it is also the American ethos. From the very beginning, people would sort of act like, she's gonna have such a great college essay. She's gonna triumph over this, and she's gonna have done this amazing thing, or, like, at each stage, you know, after she had a liver transplant, well, now you're done, and you've done this thing, and you got what strong family you are. And so as a result of that being the narrative, it's very hard to show anyone the brokenness even in the middle of it, the fear, the terror, the fighting, you know, because there's so much tension. But, yeah, I think that for childhood cancer in particular, childhood illness in particular, the idea that we can't save every single child feels like, how can that be?

[Anderson Cooper]

The underfunding of childhood cancer is one of the great crimes. I mean, it's. It's unbelievable.

[Sarah Wildman]

It's unbelievable.

[Anderson Cooper]

For a society that claims to care about children, it's shocking.

[Sarah Wildman]

It's really shocking. I mean, the more we understood how little research had been done into childhood cancer as we looked at it, how many of the treatments either were created for adults or decades.

[Anderson Cooper]

Yeah, they're decades old.

[Sarah Wildman]

Decades old. Yeah. So there's this strange dichotomy between we don't fund it, and yet we somehow believe we should all be able to overcome it.

[Anderson Cooper]

You wrote, the weary griever is used to the expression I can't imagine. It is an expression of distance and of pity. It is a declaration of separation, an implication of difference, and a means of personal reassurance. I can't imagine your pain is a personal promise. I won't do it. I can't face it. I'll never have to. Thank God it's you, not me. Few and yet, some of the best art is art that does precisely this sort of imagining, refusing to look away from the very human condition of grief.

[Sarah Wildman]

Yeah. Every time I hear it, and Hannah will say it now, too, you can imagine you've imagined it from the first moment your child slipped on the handlebars and Fell to the ground, and you ran over to make sure he's okay. You imagined it for the first moment, you felt a fever, and it terrified you. And then you reassured yourself, and you imagined it from the first moment you realized that your parent could die. I think for many children, it's around the age of, like, four or so, right? The first moment that you realize that none of us will survive forever. We've always imagined it. So when people say, I can't imagine, and they do all the time, they really are distancing themselves and protecting themselves. I know that sounds maybe more bitter than I mean to sound, Although sometimes I'm bitter. The expression I can only imagine is a little bit better than I can't.

[Anderson Cooper]

Do you feel her?

[Sarah Wildman]

Yeah, I do. Sometimes more than others. Sometimes I'm desperate to, and I don't. I've had some amazing moments of really feeling her. A couple months back, I did this loop around my neighborhood, and I was like, warlie, where are you? Three quarters of the way through, these two older women were speaking very excitedly in Spanish next to a tree. And I don't know why I stopped them. And I said, what are you looking at? And they said, this bird. It was in Spanish, And I saw a pigeon or something, and I said, okay, this bird. And they said, no, no, no, not that bird. This one. And it was this resplendent woodpecker on the tree in front of us. And they said, we're so glad you stopped. And I said, I'm so glad I stopped. And we all, like, grinned in this huge way, and we were so. And I walked away, and I thought, what just happened? Why did they even talk to me? Why did they show me this? And then I was like, oh, and maybe this is insane, but I was like, oh, Worley, I think that was you. I mean, that's what I felt. And maybe you can tell me, like, no, but I don't know if it matters what you think, you know. I mean, it does, because you're Anderson Cooper, but. But in that moment, I thought, oh, I feel you here. I feel you in that weird moment of a woodpecker on a city street and these random women turning to me and speaking to me in Spanish. Why, you know, why would they even necessarily think I spoke back? Why do they want to share it? And it was so hard to see joy in this total mundane moment and yet totally extraordinary. And I thought, because I had this half a second where I felt joy, and I don't know that I can, like, hold joy all the time? No, but I got to feel it for, like, a moment. And in that, I felt her.

[Anderson Cooper]

It's beautiful to feel her as joy.

[Sarah Wildman]

Yeah. I think what's hard for me is when I want to and I can't. And so I don't always know that I can conjure it.

[Anderson Cooper]

Yeah.

[Sarah Wildman]

And then sometimes I really can, and it can be painful, even as it's amazing. Yeah. I never want to not feel her, I guess, is the thing I feel like the essence of her, the energy of her, the orderliness. And sometimes it's just sort of keeping her present, you know, it's like, weird. I actually smelled it the other day out of place. There's a diffuser still in her room that still has the smell in it.

[Anderson Cooper]

You kept her room?

[Sarah Wildman]

Yeah, Ian works in it now. I changed the bedding because she died there. I made it really beautiful. She was really, really aesthetic and really, really, really neat. She had a notebook, Anderson, from when she was 11. And facing the transplant, that she tabbed things. I'm scared of things that might make it better. Questions I have. And she'd written on tabs. I mean, she was really organized. So the room, she had all these feminist posters up. She was very political, very curious. She also loved Marvel, which she got into secondary to Harry Potter. And, yes, have kept it. And I did it in her, what I thought would be her aesthetic.

[Anderson Cooper]

You wrote that a friend of Orly's had given you a tremendous gift. The knowledge that Orly had tried to prepare herself. Four months before she died, she texted her friends to say she knew she would not survive. She thought she had two years left. She texted them, but doesn't everyone? I just will die a little sooner than most. This is a great opportunity for me, actually. Everyone's focused on the time they have left. They forgot to live. Did you know that she had written that?

[Sarah Wildman]

I didn't know until after she died. I wrote the friend and I said, I've lost most of her text messages. Are there any messages you think I should see? And this kid sent it to me, and it really blew me away, actually. I knew that she had started to say she thought she had two years. I knew that she was thinking about death. I knew that she didn't want to die. But, no, I didn't know this. And I don't know if she told other friends anything similar. I think one of the hard parts about losing a child is you don't have the dimensional community you do as an adult. I sort of find myself craving memories, you know, Wanting people to send me their memories, to provide more anecdotes, more stories. This is the thing about untimely death. Time sort of stops at that point. And everything you imagine for the future is altered because that person then doesn't get to be with you at every marker. And the photos are forever wrong. The dining room table is always wrong. The number of tickets you buy is

[Anderson Cooper]

always wrong because it's three in your case and not four.

[Sarah Wildman]

Yeah, yeah. Every time I set the table, like the house sounds different. I just remember there was one point early on seeing Hana, instead of playing catch, throwing a ball endlessly against a wall. Now it might mean nothing. Maybe she would have thrown the ball against the wall anyway. Literally, the partner was gone with whom to catch the ball with. I find it hard to fill the space. I can't make any more photographs of Orly. I can't make any more memories of her. And I am always aware that she's not here. And so I try to bring her in other ways and maybe. And some of it's in. A lot of it is in the writing. I always say that it shouldn't matter that she was remarkable, but she was remarkable. One of the great tragedies is her not getting to show more people that and getting that chance. And my grief is so entwined with that as well. In some way, in addition to feeling like there's nothing I can do to fill this hole, even if I wanted to. And so how do I live like this? How do I move through the world? You know, I give people. I have some for you. These little beads. We took white beads emblazoned with gold O's on them, and we put them places we wanted her to be, wanted her to see, and took a photo there or just left it for someone to find and wonder what it might be. And I started giving them to people who were going places like Zanzibar, for example. Maybe it's like a restaurant that you think she or she really wanted to act. Maybe you're in a theater, but you wish she was there too, and leave a bead. It's lovely in some way. It's like this little semi permanent breadcrumb. I also like the idea of having someone have to think in that moment about her in a space she should be.

[Anderson Cooper]

Is there something you've learned in your grief that would be helpful for others?

[Sarah Wildman]

A woman wrote me who was not American born, but she said Americans have this politeness and a decorousness. She was like, let it be physical. And one of the Things I think about a lot is let it be messy to not make other people comfortable. That's not your job. If they're uncomfortable, it's like there's a tree on the way to Hana's school, which has grown through a power line. And I almost think of that as, like, grief, right? It has that potential of danger to it, almost, sometimes catastrophically, and at the same time, it also continues to grow. There were these trees we saw just above Barcelona, we were hiking, and these Mediterranean pines that grow into the rock, like, completely improbably. How do they survive? It looks like the wind should totally take them down, but they're somehow dug in, and they're really. Some of them are really twisted, but they're also extremely beautiful. I think that it's a constant evolution. But I'm not fine. I'm not fine, and I don't know if I want to be fine. I think the thing about grief is I don't want to release it. I think it is a way of retaining her. I don't know that I could, but I also don't want to. Somebody had said this to me early on, and I didn't believe it, but it's true that sometimes, like the wailing and incredible amounts of tears at the beginning, you miss at some point. Well, maybe that wasn't the case for you, and that's why you're there now. But I guess my advice is to let it be all the things and not have any expectation of self, and not to be angry with yourself and not to feel let down by yourself, but let it be what it is. One of the things I've written about a lot is that Orly had this ability to sort of see beauty and run toward it. And right after that first brain tumor, when she got on a surfboard, she biked off alone, and she was out on a jetty. And I found her, and we were worried about her. And she said, this is so good for me. This moment, this beauty, is so good for me. And I kept thinking, how is she able to see that even after going through this brain tumor and brain surgery and knowing that probably the road ahead is getting worse? Whatever she saw there, I guess that's what I try to look for in grief, too. What does it mean to hold beauty and pain at the same time? Because they're both there always. And somehow not telling myself I can't see beauty, that I don't deserve it, and not letting myself deny the pain because it's always there.

[Anderson Cooper]

Thank you.

[Sarah Wildman]

Thank you.

[Anderson Cooper]

All of Sarah's articles about Orly are available to read on the New York Times website. A couple things to tell you about next week. On Tuesday, April 21, I'll be sharing a new podcast episode. It's a conversation with Rachel Goldberg Poland and her husband John. Their son Hersh had his hand blown off and was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival in Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023. He was later executed in a tunnel in Gaza. Then on Thursday, April 23rd I hope you join me at 9:15pm for live streaming show. All there is live. You can only watch it on our grief community [e-mail] it streams live there for free. You can also communicate with others in the comments section who are watching at the same time. Again, CNN.comAllThere is on Thursday night, April 23rd at 9:15pm and if you missed the live stream, it'll be posted the following day for a week on the site. All the older episodes of that live show, they're all available on demand for CNN subscribers. And if there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others, we'd love to hear from you. You can leave us a voicemail 404-827-1805 thanks for listening. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone.