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
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.
Everything's brought to you. And you sit. You just really sit low. And every single day, the entire community is supposed to surround you. And then you emerge out of that and you have a 30-day period of of mourning, and then you emerge out of that.
And if you're a child mourning a parent, you then have a whole following year where every single day for 11 months, you stand up and you say the mourner's prayer, the mourner's Kaddish. If you lose a child, all the mourning rituals end at 30 days. There's If you lose a parent, you're not supposed to attend a wedding, to go to a concert. You're not supposed to attend a joyful dinner.
You're not supposed to incur joy in some way. You're not supposed to go out of your way to do something that's particularly delightful unless it has to do with your work. As a parent who's lost a child, you can do whatever you want. I found this fascinating. Completely destabilizing. I wanted them to tell me that I needed a policy of abnegation.
I wanted them to tell me that you should be recognized as a mourner every day because in truth, in the modern world, you are seen as a mourner. Someone who's lost a child is seen differently, is sort of outside society all the time. And yet, because these rules were set in antiquity, when unfortunately child loss was far more prevalent— You had no rules. You could do whatever you wanted.
And that felt like you were in free fall. And so we started to sort of change things a little bit. And, you know, one thing Orly did really early on after the first brain tumor and that when she got back on a surfboard and got back on a bike, one day she biked off from me. we had been gifted a house, a very, very tiny, beautiful little space on Martha's Vineyard. And she'd biked away from me.
And I found her sitting on a jetty, looking out to the sea with a book and a journal. And she said, this is what I needed. This is so good for my mental health. And it was just all this beauty. And she was able to take in that beauty. And I thought, okay, that's what she tried to do. That's what we'll do in this first year morning period in free fall. And when we don't have to do anything.
We don't have to say a prayer every day. We're not recognized in the community in the same way. So we're going to have to reset this and make our own path.
I mean, I think all parents feel at some point that they're failing in both spaces. But strangely for me, work was an enormous respite. For one, I leaned heavily into editing a lot of the time during Orly's illness. And I would edit at crazy hours, you know. Ian and I would trade off every day at the hospital, 24 hours on, 24 hours off.
But I could edit at 2 in the morning, in the dark, while she slept. And it would allow me to focus for an hour, two hours, five hours, in increments, away from the trauma of my immediate present. And... I also think it gave me a different sense of the world's vulnerabilities. I would often say this to people after Orly died, that I understand loss differently.
I understand pain differently in all forms. I think it made me a hope. It made me a better editor and a better writer. What's really strange is that I sometimes feel that It has been some of the best writing I've ever done, which feels really awful in some strange way that it can write to write beautiful sentences. And yet, in some way, I think it's about honoring her with them.
I want so much for people to know her. But yes, I think even now when I'm working, I worry, am I giving enough to Hana? Hana needs a lot right now. Can I drop everything when she gets home for the day and pick it back up later at night? Do I just sacrifice, let's say, sleep? Maybe I just won't sleep as much. There is this sense that it's impossible to do both.
But I was in a really, really fortunate position in the most unfortunate of times to be working with a team of people who constantly said to me, if you need to take a break, take a break. If you want to step away and take a leave of absence, take a leave of absence. And that was very fortunate because it allowed me to be present and advocate for Orly in the hospital and outside of it.
in ways that I wouldn't have been able to do in most other positions.
Yes, in some way, yes. And I worked with... I was privileged to get to work with Rachel on both two audio projects for The New York Times and at her first essay for us. I met her... across the airwaves, the week of October 7th. And what was remarkable to me was at the end of our conversation, and it didn't make it into our audio production, was she said she was glad that it was me.
She'd read the Orly stories. And she was sorry for what I had been through. And it was really a remarkable moment of someone going through tremendous trauma, being able to step outside themselves and then offer empathy outside of their space.
I produced a number of the hostage stories that we ran, and I've also worked with Palestinians, because I do think there is a commonality of loss and grief and pain that transcends conflict and to some degree is possibly... one way out of it. Seeing our human connection feels to me one of the most important things that we can do right now.
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