Sarah Wildman: Let Grief Be Messy

New York Times writer and editor Sarah Wildman’s daughter Orli was 10 when she was diagnosed with a rare liver cancer. Anderson reached out to her after reading her remarkable essays about Orli's life and death. Their conversation is thought-provoking and deeply moving. Host: Anderson Cooper Showrunner: Haley Thomas Producers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams, Madeleine Thompson Associate Producer: Kyra Dahring Video Editor: Eric Zembrzuski Technical Director: Dan Dzula Bookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome to All There Is. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. A couple of years ago, I began noticing some articles written by a mom named Sarah Wildman about her child, Orly, 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, Orli, was 10 when she found out she had hepatoblastoma, and what 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. Orly died in March 2023,

• 0:41Anderson Cooper?

  when she was 14. I can't wait for you to meet Sarah and learn about her remarkable daughter, Orli. That conversation begins in a moment.

• 0:53Anderson Cooper?

  Can you tell us a little bit about Orli?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  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

• 1:40Speaker 01

  cry around her again for a long time. I didn't feel it was fair of 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 at all expired? How could everything in my house be exactly the same, but everything totally different?" Everything else is 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.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  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 and bouncing back. After that first brain surgery, she was back on a surfboard. Two weeks later, she read 15 books.

• 2:52Anderson Cooper?

  She loved Harry Potter.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Loved Harry Potter. She had a Tom Mute 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 ninth grade.

• 3:31Anderson Cooper?

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

• 3:39Speaker 01

  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. And 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?

• 4:24Speaker 01

  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 on to hope.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Probably longer than 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. I could only be in that exact second.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  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?

• 6:28Speaker 01

  I want her to go out with her friends and 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.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  So what do you mean by what do I want?

• 6:44Speaker 01

  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 Norrie got upset with me for not making plans for her to have a summer camp. Why aren't you booking me summer camp?

• 7:16Anderson Cooper?

  Did a doctor ever tell her that she was gonna die?

• 7:21Anderson Cooper?

  Or tell you?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:27Anderson Cooper?

  How long did she live after that?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  I felt like, is that it? The memories are done? 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.

• 9:06Anderson Cooper?

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

• 9:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:24Anderson Cooper?

  You guys did Instagram Live.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. 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.

• 9:38Anderson Cooper?

  Let's just play part of it.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Do you feel like that your, that regular life is just sort of continuing on? And you're still in this cancer space?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Yes. I think it's also because it was really, really big deal. Like, when I got diagnosed for a whole month, like, everybody, everybody talked about it. Everybody tried to help. And then after that, a lot of people ditched me. I mean,

• 10:04Speaker 02

  I just think

• 10:07Speaker 02

  that it was, it, 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.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  I love hearing her.

• 10:29Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah. She's just incredibly impressive. You said in the Instagram Live, so I feel OK commenting on it. She looked amazing bald.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  She was 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 that video, which I love and I wish I had, is that as a result of this weird, hothouse, horrifying, terror, roller coaster ride we were on.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  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 I, we careened out of there, went to late night ramen and she was like, oh, you're actually kind of fun. Thanks.

• 11:16Anderson Cooper?

  High praise.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  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, I really, really wanted to have her saying it, like on tape, but I love hearing her like this.

• 11:39Anderson 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?

• 11:55Speaker 01

  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 really, 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, 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.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  And I think, you know, maybe I wouldn't have had the equilibrium to do it. 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 they even weren't texting to her. And I still text back and forth with that phone. Totally ridiculously, I still have it on.

• 13:11Anderson Cooper?

  You still text her?

• 13:12Speaker 01

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

• 13:24Anderson Cooper?

  What was his name?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  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 ride all over. And Hannah wrote on it, "I hope you're with Mikey. And I hope you're together." And I loved it 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. I 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 had 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?

• 14:10Anderson Cooper?

  You were able to be with her?

• 14:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  We knew enough that in the morning, when Hannah 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, and that was enormous.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  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 old 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 was the things you like, want to memorize, right? We had the same freckle on our knee.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  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. And 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?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  How do I not appear to every single person? Then 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.

• 17:28Anderson Cooper?

  My kids are four and five, 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 to me how over time, one forgets all these, all the moments that make up one's life with somebody else. It's terrifying.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  They call me Imma, mommy in Hebrew.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  And I think, do I have a recorder for saying it? I just want to hear her call my name.

• 18:03Anderson Cooper?

  We'll be right back with more of my conversation with Sarah Wildman.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, host of the Chasing Life podcast. We're going to talk about rethinking how we die. How we think about death in the first place greatly informs how we live. Our guest is Dr. BJ Miller. He's a hospice and palliative care physician.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  We are aging as a people. This is a worldwide phenomenon that we are aging and therefore getting closer to the end of life on some level as a group. It's not at all surprising that you'll see a revving up of interests, services, and also sort of anxiety that pushes us away from the subject and makes us cling to life.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Listen to Chasing Life, streaming now, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 18:55Anderson Cooper?

  Welcome back to my conversation with Sarah Wildman. Has grief been different than you thought it would be?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  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. They call me high functioning.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  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 involved.

• 19:36Anderson Cooper?

  I'll show you how angry.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  Really angry, like, you're here. You know? 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. It's sometimes being like just walloped by missing her and wanting people to sit with it with me in some ways, and I'm not good at asking for it.

• 19:59Anderson Cooper?

  You're good at writing about it.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  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 an old bag or pocket. And 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.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  And how I fear other loss also. It's like that Mary Oliver poem. At the end of the poem, she says, joy is 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 you have to 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.

• 21:15Anderson Cooper?

  My entire life, I wanted to have a scar on my face, like.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Harry Potter.

• 21:19Anderson Cooper?

  Well, I always thought of it 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.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  But that's it exactly, right? It's a half a life. I feel like that's.

• 21:34Anderson Cooper?

  I'm half a person.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:49Anderson Cooper?

  I noticed I was doing a quick apology thing. I would be like, I had a brother, but he, 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 feel awkward about it. And now I'm sort of like, okay with the awkwardness of it, I guess.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  I think that's the thing, though. You do have this moment of like.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  You know I have a dead 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.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Do you think for you that the way your emotion is as high to the surface is because for so long?

• 22:33Anderson Cooper?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:35Anderson Cooper?

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

• 22:37Speaker 01

  You didn't cry when Carter died?

• 22:40Anderson 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, um, and certainly with my dad, I buried that very, very quickly. And I realize now largely through talking with Francis well, that I developed this voice in my head that was designed to like 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.

• 23:24Anderson Cooper?

  And I follow that voice to, it seems, high achievement, high functioning, as you said. But as you said, of 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, yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:52Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  There's no way. I'm not doing this.

• 23:54Anderson Cooper?

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

• 24:02Speaker 01

  I did go to a party around Halloween and I wore this dress and, but I, 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 Orly'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. Um, the interesting thing is I sometimes think Hannah is the best at it. In fact, you should do a kids episode, different kids on.

• 24:38Anderson Cooper?

  I would love that.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's really, she had this moment the other day at, 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 was, I said, how come you at 12 are better at this than I can do?

• 24:52Anderson Cooper?

  She said that to somebody at school?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 24:56Anderson Cooper?

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

• 25:00Speaker 01

  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, and 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.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  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, you know, from the very beginning, people would sort of act like, she's going to have such a great college essay, she's going to triumph over this and she's going to 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 a 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, for childhood cancer in particular, childhood illness in

• 26:25Speaker 01

  particular, the idea that we can't save every single child feels like, how can that be?

• 26:32Anderson Cooper?

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

• 26:38Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable.

• 26:39Anderson Cooper?

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

• 26:42Speaker 01

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

• 26:56Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah, they're decades old.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:07Anderson Cooper?

  You wrote, "The weary griever is used to the expression, 'I can't imagine.' It is an expression of distance and a 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. Phew." 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.

• 27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, every time I hear it, and Hannah will say it now, too, "You can't 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 from 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.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  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."

• 28:28Anderson Cooper?

  Do you feel her?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  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 of months back, I did this loop around my neighborhood, and I was like, "Worley, where are you?" And 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."

• 29:17Speaker 01

  And I said, I'm so glad I stopped. And we all like grinned in this huge way. We were so happy. 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, really? 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?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  You know, why would they even necessarily think I spoke back? Why did they want to share it? And it was so her 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 now, but I got to feel it for like a moment. And in that I felt her.

• 30:32Anderson Cooper?

  It's beautiful to feel her as joy.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 30:43Anderson Cooper?

  Yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  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, is the thing. I, I, I feel like the essence of her, the energy of her, the ordliness. 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 the, out of place. There's a diffuser still in her room that still has the smell in it.

• 31:09Anderson Cooper?

  You kept her room?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  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. 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, I've kept it. And I did it in her, what I thought would be her aesthetic.

• 31:55Anderson Cooper?

  You wrote that a friend of Orley's had given you a tremendous gift. The knowledge that Orley 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?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  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

• 33:03Speaker 01

  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 always wrong.

• 33:32Anderson Cooper?

  Because it's three in your case and not four.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Every time I set the table, like the house sounds different. I just remember there was one point early on seeing Hannah 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 writing.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  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'd put them places we wanted her to be, wanted her to see,

• 34:58Speaker 01

  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'd love, or she really wanted to act. Maybe you're in a theater, but you wish she was there too, and leave a bead.

• 35:18Anderson Cooper?

  It's lovely.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:29Anderson Cooper?

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

• 35:34Speaker 01

  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 Honda 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?

• 36:16Speaker 01

  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,

• 36:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  And not to be angry with yourself and not to feel let down by yourself, but then to 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 went on a surfboard, she biked off alone and she was out on a jetty. And I found her and I was worried about her. And she said, this is so good for me. This moment, this beauty, this 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?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 38:18Anderson Cooper?

  Thank you.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 38:21Anderson Cooper?

  All of Sarah's articles about Orly are available to read on the New York Times' website. A couple of things to tell you about next week. On Tuesday, April 21st, I'll be sharing a new podcast episode. It's a conversation with Rachel Goldberg-Polin and her husband, John. Their son, Hirsch, had his hand blown off and was kidnapped from the Nova Music Festival in Israel by Hamas on October 7th, 2023. He was later executed in a tunnel in Gaza. Then on Thursday, April 23rd, I hope you join me at 9:15 PM for my live streaming show, All There Is Live. You can only watch it on our grief community page at CNN.com/AllThereIs. It streams live there for free. You can also communicate with others in the comments section who are watching at the same time.

• 39:02Anderson Cooper?

  Again, CNN.com/AllThereIs on Thursday night, April 23rd at 9:15 PM. And if you miss 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.

• 39:32Speaker 05

  Get ready for election night. CNN is available to stream live now with an All Access subscription. Plus, get exclusive content and interactive Q and As with CNN's journalists. Subscribe now. Visit CNN.com/AllAccess.