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 orally 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, Orley, was 10 when she found out she had the 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, when she was 14. I can't wait for you to meet Sarah and learn about her

remarkable daughter, Orley. That conversation begins in a moment. Can you tell us a little bit about Orley?

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 suck them all back in. And I didn't cry around her again

for a long time. I didn't feel it was fair at 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 is exactly the same except we could sort of see through the scrim of the life we'd led

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