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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Appearances
You'll have home nursing. But it turned out, first of all, where I live, there wasn't a home nursing option within our hospice care insurance benefit, one. And two, when the hospice nurse called for the intake... I said, we're starting a drug trial. You know, we're not giving up concurrent care. We've agreed to talk to you because we need some home assistance.
And she said, yes, but you know that they told me she has six months to live, right? And I said, no, you're the first to tell me that.
We often let her bring it up. And she actually had an idea for a podcast. It's a little bit like what Shannon Doherty ended up doing herself, although this didn't exist at the time. She told me she wanted to create a podcast, conversations with her until she died. They would have this sort of frisson of anxiety about it, you know, how you wouldn't know how long it would last.
And so, which was very, very funny. She once had a text argument with a friend, and the friend said, I think you sound strange, and Orly texted, well, I'm literally dying. Because she was an adolescent, you know. And at the same time, she very much did not want to die. And she would tell us, sometimes she would cry about it.
In one email that I read that she sent to someone that was not me, she said she learned how far the metastases had gone. And in that fall of 2022, the cancer spread further. And she said, no one is talking about a miracle. But there's some small part of her, I think, that hoped we would. We did try three different last-ditch efforts of various drugs to slow things down.
What the doctors would do is ask for her consent at this point. In starting a new drug. And when the doctor said, are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to try yet another treatment? And she said, she really yelled, yes, yes, you've given up on me. I think she didn't want to give up. And yet at the same time, she did want to grapple with it.
I mean, you know, she was 13 and then 14. We obviously disagreed about things. I mean, before things really took an extremely dark turn and she was still trying to go to school, one day she emerged from her room and told me very proudly that, that instead of doing any schoolwork at all, she had watched every single Marvel movie back to back to back to catch herself up on the entire Marvel series.
And I should feel extremely proud that she had reached this accomplishment. And I was a little nonplussed, you know. She was very annoyed that I didn't see this as the remarkable achievement of, you know, she'd barely slept. She'd read none of her assignments. And all she had done was catch herself up entirely and knew absolutely everything now about Marvel there was to know.
She had this ability to do this. You know, she did this, I used to say she had a Talmudic relationship with Harry Potter, right? where she really started to read it against the grain and started to be very angry with Dumbledore for knowing all along that Harry would face the things he faced.
It's interesting, and she talked about this in her own bat mitzvah, that she struggled with Dumbledore as a savior character in the same way that she struggled with the idea of God, because in her hospital room, no deity showed up. And, you know, I think we all would argue, but I would try to make up with her immediately. I wouldn't go to bed angry. I would apologize faster than probably I should.
It was really challenged parenting, and it still does, because I didn't know how to discipline in this space properly. When all the rules seem to have been thrown out the window. I didn't know how to put limits on things. How do you put limits on phone use when you have so little outside interaction?
How do you say you have to really focus on algebra when you don't know actually if any of it will matter? It's really difficult. And I once said to her, well, isn't it good that we have so much time together? We really get to bond. And she said, this is the time I'm supposed to be breaking away from you. Yeah.
She was hilarious and cynical and tenacious and would often really try to push the boundaries of permissibility when she could. You know, we had one perfect week and weekend right before her brain tumor was We went to New York. We were all extras on Fleischman is in Trouble. Oh, seriously? Yes. How did you do that? I wrote to Taffy Ackner and I said, this is Orly's dream to be an actor.
And she's just gone through this third lung surgery, you know, one of many, many, many surgeries she's had. What do you think would you do? Could she be an extra? And she said, how about all four of you? And I ended up nine hours on a television set in a bathing suit, which was not what I had planned. You both worked at the Times, so you probably had some kind of connection. I did. Yes, I did.
And I knew her from the Times. And also she had followed our story. And she was really happy to do something for Orly. But the thing that Orly did on that set was she left us and the extras were sort of corralled together. And she sat with the stars and the directors and watched the dailies and sort of insinuated herself among them. And no one was unhappy with it. It was such a gift.
She liked to push boundaries as much as she possibly could. She liked to whenever she could see the moment of autonomy.
Hannah was six when Orly was diagnosed and nine when she died. And the week after the shiva, we borrowed a friend's apartment in New York and she started hysterically crying on the street one night. And we said, what's happening for you now? What are you feeling? And she said she was so angry with God. She was worried she'd be punished.
She was worried that there would be some sort of consequence of this anger. And we ended up calling up one of our rabbis and saying, let's talk to Hannah about this idea. And the rabbi said, Hannah, we are all angry with God about losing Orly. And in fact, in Jewish tradition, there's a lot of anger with God. It's not very strange to be angry with God. But sometimes Hannah will get very upset.
She really does not know how to have any relationship with God right now. And she's very, very angry that God could have taken away someone as young, someone as vital, someone as important as Orly.
So Jewish morning practices, many people know, you bury immediately. You have a week-long shiva, a period of time where people come to you and you're not supposed to cook or do anything. All that's the same. Everybody's supposed to do it for you. And you're not supposed to look in a mirror. I didn't do that. I did look in the mirror. you aren't supposed to make your own food.
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