Kate Bowler: But have you ever felt like something terrible happens and then suddenly you’ve been exiled to a faraway planet? One where it’s hard to remember what normal people talk about. Or what it’s actually like to, I don’t know, tolerate small talk. One of, I think, my very, if you don’t mind me congratulating myself, one of my very favorite jokes is I started referring to myself as a small talk survivor. And so now Everything Happens makes these great stickers that say Small Talk Survivor. Because hey, I think we’ve earned them. My name is Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. A lot of us in this community know what it’s like to live on that planet far, far away from quote-unquote normal people. And today’s conversation is for us. We dive right into the marrow of it all. It’s about all the joy and the laughter and absurdity and all the love that cannot be erased by sorrow. I’ve been waiting a long time to talk to this incredibly special guest about a very delicate topic and I know you are absolutely going to love her. Sarah Wildman is an incredible human being. She is a writer and editor at the New York Times where she brings rare clarity and compassion to some of life’s hardest stories. Her daughter Orly was just 10 years old when she was diagnosed with liver cancer And she lived with staggering courage. And more procedures and pain than most adults will ever face until her death at the age of 14. Sarah’s essays on grief and caregiving are some of the most powerful and piercing and tender I have ever read. Her work has been honored with a Carolyn C. Mattingly Prize for mental health reporting and a Deadline Club Award. She is a really stunning writer and an obviously spectacular human being. So I feel so honored that she’s joining me here today. Sarah, thank you so much for having this conversation with me. I’m so glad to be here. It’s really weird to read somebody and to know immediately that you just love their heart. And one thing that you do is you bring this unflinching clarity about parts of parenting and illness and grief that most people just want to turn away from. But you don’t. And you stay there and invite us all to bear witness. So At the outset, I just want to say I am like certain that we are all better for it.
Sarah Wildman: I really appreciate that. I mean, I think that some of it comes from how much I myself would like to turn away from it, and I haven’t been able to. You know, I often wonder who would I have been without this? Would I have risen to the occasion? How would I’ve been if it had been someone adjacent? And how it’s changed me to not be allowed to walk away. It’s a privilege in some ways to have to sit in it And at the same time, you realize how lonely it is to sit there because we’re not in a culture that really embraces pain. And it’s a very American ethos that you might go through something really difficult, but then you’re going to triumph. And what happens if you don’t? It becomes terrifying. And sitting with that. In sort of exposing to myself and to my children at very young ages, Hannah, my younger, was six when she was diagnosed. I kept thinking of myself as the false wizard, you know? I could only show them the heart and wisdom and courage they already had inside that they were born with, but that I couldn’t actually alter anything about the present in which we were sitting.
Kate Bowler: Perfect description. Feeling like the wizard. You’re just like behind a curtain being like it’s there, I swear it’s here, but I can’t make it. Look, I think his parents-
Sarah Wildman: You know, we take on this mantle that we’re going to resolve everything for our kids in this era in particular, you know, and you really, really want to. I want to actually just say before I got into this sort of sad, deep, dark space that actually, you, know, the saving grace has been sort of dark humor about what a total failure I feel like I am, you. No, I mean that in like a D for comedy way, except it, yeah. You know, like if somebody says to me, how are you doing? It’s like, you want to invite people into that constant duality in which you now live, where you’re never really allowed to fully believe in the falsity of perfection again. You’re always exposed. I mean, you could have these pops of real joy, but it’s undergirded by a knowledge that you really wish you hadn’t earned.
Kate Bowler: The darkness being a place of the deep humor and the deep terror and the deep love is very, is very real to be. Because how else do you, I don’t know, or, or even let yourself or do other people even let you expose like what a joke it all, it all is that everyone else pretends that like pretends to be untouched by pain, pretends that everything’s always going to be okay. I do think in a way, sometimes it’s only the joke that can tell the truth of it.
Sarah Wildman: It shouldn’t matter that she was remarkable, but she was really remarkable. I would love to hear about your remarkable kid. I mean, first of all, from the very beginning, she had a clarity about where she was in the world and what was available to her. But she also would do things like, really early on, a priest passed by and he stopped and he was thinking he was a novitiate. And I said, oh no. Know, we’re Jews. It’s okay.” She was like, no, no. No. Bring them in. Like there’s no atheists and foxholes. She was, like, we are going to cover the bases. But then she brought him in and asked him all these theological questions, you know, about resurrection, things I didn’t know she even knew anything about, you know. And then she asked him to explain what a priest was, the difference between a priest and a rabbi and a pastor. And we talked about celibacy. Well, not exactly, because we weren’t quite there. We talked about not marriage. We didn’t go to sex. But she was like, Do you not believe in love? And he was a kind of swine. Love and- in a different context and she was like, but maybe you can have a dog? Like. But she had this Tom Unick relationship to Harry Potter and then later on with Marvel. Her accomplishments were, she came out one day really thrilled with herself to tell me, this is really a couple years in, that she’d done no schoolwork for the past week, I had no idea, but instead she had watched every single Marvel movie back to back to pack, almost without sleeping and really wanted us to like almost hold. A ceremonial meal, you know, to honor the moment of her fully understanding Marvel. Now she hadn’t gotten it, she really wanted to get it. She just was incredibly impish and really loved to live. And she sort of pushed the line on living even at points where it seemed that other people might have fallen into a space of self-pity. And it’s not that she had none of that. She asked me once, what do I think I did to deserve this? And that’s, of course she did nothing to deserve this, but it challenged everything in terms of how we thought about living. How can you think about? Does the concept of deserve, you know, when you’re faced with such enormous pain? And she really wanted clarity, but she also wanted nurses to tell her stories about terrible things that had happened to other people. She wanted to know that she wasn’t the only person that had ever gone through something bad. And she said, maybe they’ll tell my story to someone and it’ll make them feel better. And much to my surprise, she became very big on social media. It turned out that that actually helped a number of kids. There was, I saw it belatedly, and I actually have been in contact with this mom, a mom that reached out to her to tell her how much it meant to her kid to see a kid who was bald doing TikTok dances and just being so filled with joy and orally row back and forth with the kid who was much younger. And actually even wrote an essay about what it meant lose her hair. You know, for a little girl who had classic long ponytail, and for her to shave her head, and then because she was losing all her hair, took tremendous courage. And the only wigs she ever really wore were occasional fantasy wigs. She just didn’t do it. You know, she didn’t feel it were comfortable, whatever it was, but she didn’t hide. She just never hid herself.
Kate Bowler: What do you think she figured out about Joy having to ride the whole roller coaster up and down?
Sarah Wildman: That it’s fleeting. That we can’t ever stand on it. She really understood that we had to grab every moment of joy at any given. I think about this a lot, you know, after her first brain tumor, which I’m going to say is a disgusting sentence, you, know, so at that point she had had a full liver transplant and multiple metastases to her lungs. And so they had cut away at her lungs three times. The third time it turns out that there’s only so many times you can do that and be a great thing and it’s never great. The third time was really difficult recovery, but she bounced back every single time. She just was sort of amazing. And the minute she bounced, she wanted to dive right back into everything. She never wanted to delay. And sometimes that meant trying to do more in summer camp, or it meant getting her a bicycle, or meant enrolling her in dance class. Even when many people would have said, you know, you could take things easy. But after the first brain tumor, we were really… Feeling around in the abyss. I mean, doctors didn’t know what was to come. We didn’t what was come. And we were offered respite by borrowing someone’s house by the sea. And we rented bicycles, which our doctors were really worried about because we were worried about balance with the brain tumor. Yeah. And one morning I woke up and realized she’d biked off without me, which was not awesome because I was worried about her. And I found her sitting on a jetty with a book. And she said, this is so good for me. This beauty, it’s so good for my mental health. And she was able to sort of sit in that moment, you know, where she wasn’t denying everything that had come to pass and she wasn’t denying everything that might come because she’d really started to doubt the doctors who said there were still paths towards cure. She was able to feel that present moment. It’s like the thing people tell you to do in yoga. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kate Bowler: And every good is better than me, that possible lying to me when they say they fully live in the present.
Sarah Wildman: She sort of was like almost intuitively that way, in a way that I find I’m a really bad meditator. I mean, I’m very bad at sitting still, you know? I’m an adult, what if there’s a little fidgety thing?
Kate Bowler: Yeah, totally fidget.
Sarah Wildman: But she was just sitting there and thinking, it’s a gorgeous day, the water’s amazing. I got to ride her on my bike and have a book and that was all of it. Just to see that there’s something about it that in some respects has taught me more about living than anything else. That makes so much sense to me.
Kate Bowler: We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. The quality of living, the way that suffering, serious illness forces time to collapse around you, there’s this strange living moment to moment, and then also like casting about in the horizon for the worst possible outcome, or like being forced to file health insurance information all the time. What did you find were some of the limits and maybe gifts of that kind of hyperpresentism.
Sarah Wildman: Well, the limits are planning anything beyond a day or two, right? You know, when Haas first met her, they said, what would you like to do? She said, I’d like to go to Tokyo. And he said, well, can you think of something more immediate? And she said, why? And I think that one of the hard things about hyperpresentness is the loss of future fantasy that is really fueling, because it gives you the chance to transcend harder moments, right? Hyperpresentness works. When you’re sitting on that jetty staring at that beautiful water, it’s a lot fucking harker when you are in the ICU, right? If you’re hyper present in the ICU finding the beauty in, you know, a cool bandage, what are we talking about? We had it a little bit. I mean the night before her liver transplant, which I will tell you I had a massive anxiety attack before, being full on sitting on the shower, like in the bottom of the rocking back and forth. Panic because it turns out that taking away somebody’s organ that you’ve grown is really scary. Like, um, but then we were sitting in pre-op at one in the morning, which was totally surreal, and we were watching the Kardashians. Because that’s what was on the like mini TV. And it was so hilariously out of body that actually the moment lingered with me as a wonderful one. And she was sort of doing tic-tac in her seat. And in fact, right after, as soon as she was able to get up from bed a week or so, you know, less than a week later, she taught this very, very serious, world-renowned transplant surgeon, the Renegade. Wait, what’s the renegade? To a song and it’s like a dance that was really viral in 2020. And there she is with a million tubes coming out of her body. And the people came from all over all the wards to watch her teach this extremely serious transplant surgeon this and like have him go like the view the whole, I’ll do the whole dance, you know, being hyper present allows you to just totally ride the wave of that moment all the way in. The problem with hyperpresentness is that you start to wonder how far into the coming time you’re going to be allowed. Are you going to go to the next grade? Are you gonna get to take a school trip? Are you go to go the birthday party? Are you are going to make it to high school, one of them college? And are you going to get a chance to… Make mistakes, and just do dumb stuff. So it’s everything that’s lived on warp speed, you know? And you don’t get to ignore necessarily the bills and all that other stuff when you’re the parent involved. I think the other thing is, as the parent caregiver, you have a tremendous amount of psychic pain, but you really wish you could take the physical pain away. You really wish that you could shoulder it, that if someone had to have it You don’t want either of us to have it. If someone had to have, you’d much prefer it to be you than her, like why? And I think that is the other piece of it. She would say, have you ever experienced pain like this? And at first, you think maybe, right? But as time goes on, no, you haven’t. Unfortunately, Kate, you may have.
Kate Bowler: No, no, I hear you, I can hear you. I really am just rereading some of the things I wrote when I was in the middle of it. I remember writing like people think you can only die once, but you can die to a thousand possible features in the course of your single stupid life. It’s just that feeling like you want to be able to waste it on an almost, like she might never actually go to Tokyo, but imagining going to Tokyo. I had the same thing about the pyramids. I was like, I just really want to see the pyramides. But mostly I liked to imagine myself as someone who could see the pyramid. And the idea of not being that person just felt impossible.
Sarah Wildman: You know, exactly. I think that idea, you’re absolutely right. There are all these tiny dots. So she had these two brain tumors, two brain surgeries, craniotomies, which are crazy things. And after the second, she won the lead in, one of the leads in Twelfth Night. And then as the course of that fall went on, she was too tired to attend rehearsal. And it was another, just an indignity, you know, that you just were like, Oh, why can’t she get just this one thing? Why doesn’t she, can’t we just, can’t she just get to do this? And she came to terms with it much better in some ways than I did. It’s interesting a friend of mine who is an amazing sort of, if there’s such a thing as divine presence in this person in some ways, you know, she said to me at Orly’s funeral, there was such a beautiful event, weirdly, but she said at the end, she wanted everyone to stand up and scream. She said, why don’t we all scream now? How are we all talking and laughing? Why aren’t we screaming?
Kate Bowler: Modern medicine is so often oriented entirely around the language of cure, fix, overcome. And it sounds like that is especially true when it comes to childhood disease, but that narrow focus can make it so difficult to have conversations that really matter at the appropriate time. I think that was one of the first ways that I felt absolutely outside of myself, that there were times. Very, very sick and I needed to be able to have a conversation about what things meant and the person in front of me could only reply with statistical language, very limited outcomes language or with a sort of like vague optimism. It felt like oddly honesty was just the first casualty of illness.
Sarah Wildman: As a casualty of illness is such a good sentence. It really is. I think there’s so much fear at how a message will be received. And in pediatric care, certainly in pediatric oncology, there’s such a fear of failure, you know. And I do think, you now, most pediatric hospitals do have such incredible emphasis on cure. But in some ways, I think we’ve all forgotten, in both pediatrics and in adult care, that we’re all finite. I mean, Orly actually wrote this to a friend. She really thought she had more time than she got, but she said that she realized she was going to die, that aren’t we all going to died. Some people get so worried about that idea they forgot to live. And there were a couple of different moments. One is that when she was facing the third lung resection and we asked our providers if we could take a trip. The bigger trip, not a small one. Um, and they balked partially because it’s really hard not to be risk-reverse about when you do your next surgery. There’s an impulse to do immediately, but there wasn’t sort of an honest sit down about what it meant to have a third metastasy. You didn’t really sit down and talk about that. And Ian, and my partner and all this stuff. I had asked them a lot about prognosis and it was really, it was just not a conversation we had. We did a lot of our own reading, but the thing is, is that as a parent, and I think this is true across the board, you yourself latch onto all the kind of outliers and you think you’re going to outrun the data. But at the time our providers began to realize not only that it wasn’t curative, but that. Life limiting truly not that she would die within a certain amount of time. Yeah. What we could have really used were interlocutors that sat down and said, what are the things you wanna talk about with each other? You know, we talk about this in end of life care for elderly people, people who are like dying in the right time, whatever that means, is maybe 100 or some ridiculously like an age that we can all determine is old. Yes, exactly. And once we achieve that age. Exactly. And the meaning question, right? And you’ll gather everyone around you and you’ll have children and grandchildren and you have lived a meaningful life with a big career and you can, you know, you say goodbye to your dog. Anyway, so, but with a child, which is totally out of time, but an adolescent who is luminous and cynical and, you know, list of adjectives, percipacious. I mean, she was. Really aware. And in the spring, she said to me, why do we think it’s going to not keep coming back? And she asked those questions. And at those times, it would have been really useful to have somebody sit down and say, you’re right, it might keep coming back. What are the things you want to do? What’s the theater you want what’s the place you want to walk, what do you want to tell people, or. You know, do you want to write letters to your sister that she can open later? We have just not baked that into the system. The system is set up for us to hold onto hope as long as possible. But I think that it’s fewer and farther between the places that have thought about allowing everyone, provider, child, parent, caregiver, and social workers to address the question of winning. You write this idea of winning and it’s somehow set up as the cellular. And so as a result of that, it’s only at the edges. And I actually think then it doesn’t allow you to make good decisions. It also means that you only get a certain amount of time for your conversations. And this is true in all of your relationships. It is. Some of them. Thank God, lasts many more decades. But if people around you are aware that you actually only have a few months to have those conversations, it behooves them to tell you that. Yeah, that’s right. And because you can’t.
Kate Bowler: I really like when you wrote, it’s not sadness we should fear, it’s regret. I mean, that to me speaks to like the courage it takes to be sad, to count the cost, to say like, this is, yes, let’s talk about a beautiful thing that lives inside limitations, instead of just riding relentless optimism to the very end of the line, and then hope that we can squeeze in that whole conversation in the last chapter.
Sarah Wildman: I mean, look, it’s sad. I cry all the time. But, you know, Ian has all these tattoos now that are in response to her. But so she, this is how cheeky Early was. When she got radiation tattoos, I don’t know if you have, that’s right. Okay, so. Oh, I didn’t have radiation. No, but I’ve seen them a lot. Yeah. Okay. When she had radiation tattoos she convinced them to give her an extra one. Which I’m going to say is not common in pediatric radiation oncology, right? They don’t typically also tattoo the 13-year-old’s dog. So she got three dots on her in her wrist and had a whole idea what she was going to turn into later. And he got them at the same time. He happened to be there that day. And anyway, we were talking about it yesterday for some reason. And I looked at the radiation tattoo and I burst into tears. And I’ve seen it a lot. You know, it’s not new to me that it exists, but I was like, oh my God, it just somehow socked me how much I missed her because it was so reason to ask them to tattoo her and it was exactly her to like have them be like, well. If the parent does it too, basically.
Kate Bowler: Dude, like, I’m the most under-
Sarah Wildman: So orly to get someone to do that, you know, to fandangle her way into this.
Kate Bowler: So true, you know, and to make your life meaningful. I mean, that’s like these things happen, but I just think the wise among us know how to make it into the right story as it’s happening. Like most stories are painful untruths that hurt us in the end, right? Everything’s always, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. God doesn’t give it to you if you can’t handle it. Like all of these stories will just wound us in end, but like, man. When you see someone fold all these beautiful little bits of meaning into their suffering as they go, that does, that creates real…
Sarah Wildman: Know, when she died, it really felt that there was so much fear about seeing her towards the end. I think we do ourselves a disservice to not be present to people in this moment. You know, we are part of a religious community, and it is part of Jewish tradition to visit the sick, as it is in most traditions. We’ve really come to tuck away from everyone suffering as though it’s contagious. You know, to your question of sadness versus regret, I really felt that not visiting her would create so much more regret for someone than the sadness or even the fear. You know, I think, you know you wrote for us ages ago about, not ages ago, but about being the angel of death at a party, cup-toe party. I feel like that all the time. I’m always like, you now the expression in Hebrew is ma’achat ma’avid. I really do feel like it’s very hard for me not to bring her up and how she’s altered everything about how I see the world and what I do and I don’t think that’s very comfortable. You know, I ran into somebody recently and she said, it is so good to see you. And I was like, it’s.
Kate Bowler: Clearly not. Because you’re singing in that crazy voice. Someone in our community sent this amazing video to me recently of their dad had just died this last year and at Christmas, they had kept all the worst cards that they’d received with his stupid, accidentally cruelest things. And then they all read them in a circle. Then they cried and laughed and tore them up and put them in the fire. But watching them laugh hysterically out of that place of deep pain is, it’s hard to get to the catharsis. But man, when you’re there, it is really there. We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. There’s a thing I notice about all those who suffered and they typically are very careful in their word choice. There’s just, even if they’re not sure what to say, there’s just a little breath in there because they want the word to mean something. They need it to mean Something true. And I don’t think that’s ever more obvious to me than in the way I talk about my faith is whatever I say about God needs to be accurate. No longer interested. I wondered how your faith has been informed by your grief.
Sarah Wildman: So my rabbi will often say randomly, at random points, God is good, always. And I often find myself going.
Kate Bowler: It’s a very Pentecostal thing to say and they’ll call it out there like God is good and we’re gonna go all the time and I’m like One at a time.
Sarah Wildman: Moments like that. I keep looking for what my place still is in faith, I think. We are in an era now where there is so much global pain. I have, we’ve discussed a lot of my house. You know, how can you consider an activist God with so much pain in the world, especially child pain. Yes. And having seen it up close. And so, you know, we said it has to be in people. You know it has be in the idea of the way we, ourselves and our action can be, you now, in the image. And that said, it can be really hard to be in a space with families that are intact who have not been touched by this kind of pain as immediately. It can really feel like you just don’t exist in the same universe and on the same continuum. And it’s challenging, you know, all the time. That side, I mean, I feel… Ours is both a cultural and a religious tradition, and we have Shabbat every week, and I feel very comforted by it in some ways. And also, I struggle with it. We talk about this all the time. How will we face the holidays this year? What, you know, the Jewish New Year, Day of Atonement, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, how will we address them? There’s a prayer that I wrote about when Orly was, had had a second brain surgery. The Unetana Tokei Fortress, you know, in Leonard Cohen’s song, you know Who by Fire? But there’s a line in it where it says who will rest and who will wander. The parts about who shall live and who shall die, I always felt were too extreme, but who shall rest and who should wander. That’s lovely. And I don’t feel like I can rest. I’m still wandering. Yes. And I didn’t know that I’ll ever rest. I think that’s the thing. And the question is, are there moments of rest? What does it mean? Like, I had all this… …Chromatic hair walls with everything, which is really fun. Who does not do-
Kate Bowler: I agree, now I’m in grief and now I don’t get to feel pretty.
Sarah Wildman: That’s exactly wonderful. And the woman said to me, well, the good news is it comes back when the trauma stops. And you’re like, cool, cool. When’s that? I’ll think about my calendar. Seriously, I was like, can we pencil that in? Does she come back? Do I have to wait for?
Kate Bowler: The Messiah. Yeah, Sarah, that’s such a beautiful though, because I’ve always thought that like language of peace. I know what love feels like in the middle of grief. I don’t know a lot about what peace feels like in the end of it. And I really love that description of like those who rest and those who wander.
Sarah Wildman: I think that’s exactly right, and I think the question is, can you use love to recharge?
Kate Bowler: You can’t find peace. So good. This is just really helping me understand why I have found peace so inaccessible. I have learned how to. Open myself up more to love when I am terrified. That has been intimately linked to suffering, weirdly. How does one suffer without feeling loved in any way? How? And yet, it’s love that causes so much pain. Do you feel it’s challenged your faith? That’s why I just had someone ask me today. I guess the framework goes like this. Aren’t you so grateful? Isn’t everything a miracle? Isn’t, you know, it just, it’s very future. It’s very like, and everything is good. And then it presses toward the future and all shall be right. And I guess one thing that always really bothered me was that every story about God being good or about heaven. Always made it seem like the accounting books were out and everything was being counted on each side of the ledger and that everything would add up. And anyone who was, of course, ever loved or lost or in pain, knows that it doesn’t add up in any way we can understand right now. It’s just made me very uncomfortable with future promises as being a solution to present pain. And yet I’m someone who truly, like who does believe in the life everlasting, believes that we will be with God forever. I’m sorry that I don’t know this, but in the Jewish tradition, is everyone resurrected in the same moment? Is there like no time lost?
Sarah Wildman: Complicated, I think. I mean, to the degree that I understand it. So we have this idea of the olam haba, right, the world to come. My sense is, yes. The thing I struggle with a lot in this space of like heaven and things like this, I don’t want her with me. I don’t want her in heaven. The right place. People want to comfort you, you know saying things like She’s with God or something like that. No, I want her being snarky.
Kate Bowler: At my dinner table. I’m always thinking what the great reward is that I miss it all. Yeah, exactly.
Sarah Wildman: And it feels. It seems so facile in a world of so much pain to say it’s unfair, and yet it’s an unfair, you know? The concept of fairness. You know, I wrote about this at one point that Hannah was so angry with God right after Orly died that she was really scared. And we actually wrote, we ended up talking to one of our rabbis and they said, we’re all angry with god, God Orly. We all are really struggling theologically with losing Orly, which was really helpful for her to hear. That even theologians felt this wasn’t. Yeah, because we were. Yes, she was. She was robbed of her sister. We were robbed of our daughter. She was, we were robbed at this future and of this incredible. That would have given so much and already had. We did this little photo shoot to pick up her spirits during her second spring of chemo. New agents, all this stuff. She lost her hair again. Watched her great anger, sadness. And we did a photo shoot in a cool park with cool murals with this guy. And it was mid-pandemic. And he told me after she died that he just had a major breakup. Pandemic had really. Wretch havoc on his business. And he, we were at this park and here’s Orly, totally bald, teaching him TikTok dances on a playground platform. And, he was like, if this kid going through another six months of chemo, at age now 12, has now gone through, at that point, 13 rounds of chemos, several hundred days in the hospital, endless amounts of that are really unfathomable. If she can be up here dancing, then I can too. And he has told the story again and again. He told me later that other people had turned him around in some way. And I thought, so why didn’t this kid get to keep doing that? Think of the tiny things she did that were amazing. So I think faith-wise, you can’t. I guess it can’t be true.
Kate Bowler: Transactional, maybe, is this? Yes. To me, it can only then be a story about love that goes on. It can’t have a language of reward or deserve or justice or fairness. There can be no scales. There can no math. Otherwise, it will always, I think that’s exactly right. It will always feel impossible because nothing adds up.
Sarah Wildman: I had this idea, if you’re thinking in the context of Bible, of Abraham arguing with God about the wicked towns, you know? And I, in my mind it was, if I got 15 good minutes an hour with her, is that worth it? Do you think that’s worth still being here? What if it’s five. Because I would take them, you know? But if I could have stayed in that room with her, even at the end for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t. I would have preferred to take her around the world with me, show her everything. I think I felt like I was bargaining for more time and more. Moments. We had this one perfect weekend where we ran around New York and ate late-night ramen and went to see Dear Evan Hansen, which actually was really hard on me. But we went to late- night ramen after that and she was like, you’re actually fun. And I thought I had this glimpse into what our adult life would be together, just this little window. You know, yes. And have two equals looking at each other for a moment. I think you’re fun. Almost like a quick snapshot of what it might have been like if she’d gotten to go off and be in the world and we met up for dinner. I got to hear about her life and it was almost like a time out of time.
Kate Bowler: There’s this ridiculous quote which I remembered right now from the book, Martyr, and it was the bit of something like, but if I laugh, may it be laughter made wise by sorrow. I think sometimes about what it’s like to be. Someone who knows befores and afters and how whether we like it or not, you’re made wise by love, made wise by suffering. It’s so beautiful to hear about Orly and it’s devastating to live in a world without her.
Sarah Wildman: I really appreciate that. I might send you the thing that I carry around with me, by the way. We take these little white beads that have a gold O on them and I drop them in places I would like her. And put her there. And I started at some point over the last year or so to give them to other people. And so I had a friend take them to a beach in Africa and a friend dropped them in Florence and a friends. I mean, I can’t be all the places. I love giving these beats out to people now and have them take her with them.
Kate Bowler: Oh my gosh, I would love that. That’s so beautiful, hun. What a perfect way of caring, caring love.
Sarah Wildman: I can often feel very broken and I’m constantly in search of that, you know, Japanese concept of kintsugi. You know, sometimes I think there’s not enough gold, you know, adhesive in the world. And yet that’s the pursuit. That’s that’s the effort. How do we put our lives back together in whatever broken, messed up, lopsided way then we are and hold her and not lose her. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. And also let the world know her. So thank you for letting us tell her story here. Thank you for let us love her, too.
Kate Bowler: Some stories shouldn’t have to be told. The story of a child who doesn’t get to grow up, the story of the little sister who misses her big sister, the story parents who are left to piece together a future they never asked for, the world that doesn’t quite know how to sit with suffering. So for those of you carrying something too heavy today, a diagnosis, a goodbye, a future that no longer exists, may you be surrounded by people who know how May your pain be honored, not minimized. And may your love be the thing that holds and sustains and carries you forward. So here’s a blessing for life after loss. Blessed are you who feel a wound of fresh loss or of the loss, no matter how fresh, that still makes your voice crack all these years later. You who are stuck in the impossibility, frozen. Disbelief. How can this be? It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Blessed are you fumbling around for answers or truths to make this go down easier, who demand answers or are dissatisfied with the shallow theology and tripe latitudes. Blessed are we who instead demand a blessing, because we have wrestled with God and are here, changed. Blessed are we who keep parenting, who keep our marriages and friendships and jobs afloat, who stock the pantry, because what choice do we have but to move forward with the life we didn’t choose, with a loss we thought we couldn’t live without. One small step, one small act of love at a time. Hey darlings. Well, thank you so much for being with us. It is such a joy to be able to find language together. And if you are someone who likes blessings and reflections and even just to see each other’s comments, and because you’re, I think, the nicest corner of the internet, you can find me over on Substack. It’s keepbowler.substack.com. And if would like to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify, may other people join our community of people. Who leave reviews on Apple or Spotify and know it would really help them thanks. Also, you can come find me on YouTube if you want to see me and my enormous face. You can watch every episode. I’m at Kate C. Bowler. Everything Happens is an incredible team project. We like to say here that everything happens with the Everything Happen team. It’s Jessica Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keith Weston, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, Anna Fitzgerald Peterson, Elia Zonio, and Katherine Smith. This is everything happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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