hot shot casino slot games If My Dying Daughter Could Face Her Mortality, Why Couldn’t the Rest of Us?

Updated:2024-12-11 02:58 Views:183

The first week of March 2022, I flew to Miami with my 13-year-old daughterhot shot casino slot games, Orli; her 8-year-old sister, Hana; and my partner, Ian. We were, by all appearances, healthy. Robust, even.

In reality, we were at the end of a reprieve. Orli’s liver cancer had by then been assaulted by two years of treatments — chemotherapy, a liver transplant, more chemotherapy, seven surgeries. Now new metastases lit up a corner of one lung on scans, asymptomatic but foreboding. We asked her medical team if we might show her a bit of the world before more procedures. Our oncologist balked. Hence, this brief weekend away.

When we arrived at the beach Orli ran directly to the water, then came back and stretched out on a lounge chair. She turned to me and asked, “What if this is the best I ever feel again?”

Three hundred and seventy-six days later, she was dead.

In the time since she left us, I have thought often of Orli’s question. All that spring, Orli asked, pointedly, why did we think a cure was still possible, that cancer would not continue to return? Left unspoken: Was she going to die from her disease? It was a conversation she wanted to have. And yet what we found over the wild course of her illness was that such conversations are often discouraged, in the doctor’s office and outside it.

What would it have meant for Orli’s last year if her medical team had encouraged us to meet her where she was? What if we lived in a society that was able to sit with the anguish that arises for very sick children and their families? In other words: What if we were presented with something other than relentless hope? If we had been asked to really consider that Orli’s time on earth was limited, how would we have used that time?

ImageOrli Wildman Halpern in November 2021, age 12 and a half.Credit...via Sarah Wildman

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