Sarah Wildman
speaker
168 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Sarah Wildman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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 everybody feels like this year has been hard we actually did that you know when you made your reels the other day you know everybody felt that 2020 was really tough and even the beginning of 2021 hasn't been terribly easy so
Does that make you feel like people get it more, what it feels like to be in isolation? Or do you feel even more distanced?
That makes me sad, Orly, for you to say that, but I mean.
I wanted to do that interview with her because I had actually just written a piece about how she had used TikTok despite my...
reluctance about how incredibly public a TikTok account could be and did become, but also because I wanted people to see what it meant to be a kid in cancer care, a really articulate kid, a kid who was really grappling with it and thinking about it and considering it, especially at a time in the of lockdown, really feeling quite sorry for themselves.
And what Orly does in that interview, in addition to sort of winning over everyone who watches it, is to sort of realign the way people are thinking about their own sadness, their own sense of isolation, and to show how she was so joyful, even during extremely hard experiences.
I think it did. It also allowed us a different kind of focus. When you're chatting with your kid, you're often multitasking. You're making dinner, you're driving, you're getting them from one place to another. And a focus 30 or 40 minutes where you're asking question after question, waiting for the answer. It's sort of an unusual format for parent and child.
It's just not exactly how it goes, you know, outside of how was school? Tell me something interesting. Who did you sit with at lunch? And in this context, it also allowed us a total lack of distraction. A lot of the time we have our phones on us. Something is dinging. You say, let me just quickly check this text. And both of us had to put aside all devices and just focus on this question.
Did she have difficult questions for you over the years that you had trouble answering? Yes. She would often ask me, starting at the very beginning, had I ever experienced pain like she was experiencing? And at first I said, well, I've had two pregnancies and two rounds of childbirth that long labors that ended in C-sections, I thought I understood pain.
But she was facing a kind of pain I realized I really had never encountered. And I didn't know anyone who had encountered a physical pain. And she would sometimes ask me, What do you think I did to deserve this? And of course, that's not an answerable question. There was nothing. And it really challenged us to look at this question of, is there such a thing as deserving pain?
She would ask me about God, you know, both girls. We had a very severe experience where Orly ended up in the ICU in Hawaii. We were on a Make-A-Wish trip. It was brutal and terrifying. And Hana said, do you think God doesn't love us? The kinds of questions that they asked during this... really showed my hand, if you will. I was not able to really offer a concrete answer to any of these things.
I would say, I don't think that there is a God that is that activist in this way, because there is so much pain around the world. And we are experiencing this, but I don't think it's about God not loving us. You have to see divinity in the people who are helping us. I would try to turn it into thinking, how can we see good in the situation? But sometimes I was really stymied.
Did you have your own questions about God and your child's suffering? You know, at the very beginning, we have a very close relationship with our rabbis. And early on, one of them asked me, are you angry with God? And that's a question that actually has come up again and again within the family. But for me, it wasn't angry. It was more, as my grandfather would have said, wo ist Gott?
Like, where is God? Can you even see God in this? How does it even, what does it mean to have come from a faith tradition? and feel like you've done the right things, whatever that means. Whether it means religiously, because we actually have Shabbat, we keep a kosher house, we follow many of the rules. We thought of ourselves as relatively good people.
I mean, what does it mean to face this question and have... The whole world turned upside down. It felt like there wasn't really a space for God within it. And you had to constantly search for what that looked like. I had to really see it in the divinity of people who went out of their way to help us and that weren't afraid of us.
It is very easy to be afraid of a family going through a catastrophe.
It's really difficult because sometimes I also felt that people wanted me to cry with them. And I cry a lot, but I can't cry every time someone cries to me. And I sometimes... felt that it was hard. I didn't know who to comfort in that space. Sometimes what ends up happening if someone cries to me is that the roles reverse. I end up comforting them. I can't say it's okay because it's not, right?
And I think one of the really difficult things about facing a parent who has lost a child If you think anyone who's lost anyone, but particularly in parental bereavement, is that you cannot make it better. There is no betterment of this. There's no, it's going to get better. She's not coming back.
What's easier, though, is when people aren't afraid of mentioning her name or reminding me of a story or telling me something I didn't know that she'd told them or that she'd done for them. It's very hard when people cry to me, and I am a little bit at a loss as to where I fit in their grief.
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