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Parents want to protect their children, but how can you possibly protect your adoles child from a terminal illness and inevitable death?
My guest, Sarah Wildman, realized the inevitability after her older daughter, Orly, was enrolled in hospice.
That was after three years of treatment for a rare form of liver cancer that had metastasized.
Orly was 14 when she died in 2023.
She endured several rounds of chemo, a liver transplant, two brain surgeries and a tumor that pinched her spine, leaving her unable to walk.
Wildman is a staff writer and editor for the Opinion section of the New York Times, where she wrote several pieces during early's illness and after her death reflecting on what it was like to be a parent of a child facing mortality and the differences between how hospitals, hospice and Judaism deal with illness and death of a child compared to an adult.
She described the expert medical care Orly received and the reluctance of some doctors and nurses to speak openly and realistically about what Orly was facing.
She also wrote about the impact on her younger daughter, Hannah, who was 9 when Orly passed away several years before Orly's diagnosis.
Wildman wrote the book Paper Love, about her grandfather who fled Austria after the Nazi invasion, and his girlfriend, who he left behind.