Sarah Mandel, a psychotherapist and author based in New York City, published a video on social media on June 1 that was so shocking that even members of her own family were taken aback by it.
Mandel, who had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer in 2017, made the announcement of her own loss in the message. His demise came only a few weeks before she would have been 43 years old.
On the film, which included a variety of personal movies and photographs, there is a message that reads, “If you are reading these words right now, I have passed away.” “I wrote this message the week I was told I had weeks to months to live.”
“I never in a million years would have thought that I would want my loss announced on social media,” she continued writing in the captions of the photos. “It’s only been a year since your passing.”
However, she stated that “life is unpredictable and full of surprises,” and she reported that she had found that the support she got from “old friends, new friends, and strangers” assisted her in overcoming even the “toughest days of this cancer ordeal.”
“There are times when we all require our hands to be held,” she wrote.
Mandel expressed her affection for her “beloved” husband and their girls as the video drew to an end. She said, “I’ll write it here, and if I could, I’d write it everywhere.” Please know that I adore you, Sophie and Siena, and that I am very proud of you. It’s possible that I’m located someplace beyond our ideas of infinity. That is the extent of my affection for you.
During an interview with PEOPLE, her husband, Derek Rodenhausen, said that he had seen the video after going on Instagram to see whether anybody had posted about Mandel’s passing.
He admits, “I was completely taken aback by the news.” “She didn’t tell anybody about that.”
In spite of the fact that her elder brother, Benjamin Mandel, was also unaware of its impending arrival, he claims that the mother of two has always had a “different perspective” on the world.
“There was a family story where we were taking a road trip and she saw this kind of bleak winter landscape with a crow on a tree, because everything was kind of gray and dark, and she said, ‘That’s beautiful,'” he says in his memory.
After that, she went home and created a picture using a variety of colors and a joyful expression.
At Bard College, where she was studying painting, Sarah met Rodenhausen, who is now 42 years old and had previously studied abroad in Italy.
After getting married in 2010, the couple went on to have two kids. The final transition that Sarah made in her professional life to become a psychotherapist led her to get a post-baccalaureate degree from Columbia University and a PhD in psychology from Rutgers University.
In 2017, Mandel, who was 36 years old at the time, discovered a lump in her breast and was subsequently diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. Siena was her child at the time.
“The thought was, ‘This is probably just a clogged milk duct, so we’ll watch it,'” her brother provides an explanation for the situation. But the situation did not improve.
A biopsy and an ultrasound were performed on her during the time leading up to the birth of her daughter, and the results revealed that she was suffering from cancer.
The medicine Herceptin, which Sarah took after undergoing chemotherapy and radiation treatment, was able to keep her cancer “at bay,” as stated by her brother.
“She went back to having no evidence of disease, which was miraculous,” her husband continues to say. “Then we had a couple good years where she was in pretty good health again.”
By 2021, however, Sarah had started experiencing headaches.
The MRI imaging performed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center revealed that the cancer had gone into her brain. She traveled there to get treatment.
“Then it was just a matter of trying to manage that, which involved multiple different types of medical therapy, radiation therapy again, and it kind of kept things quiet for a bit, but it did ultimately progress,” Benjamin explains further.
Following the conclusion of her medical practice in 2021 as a result of her sickness, Sarah went on to write Little Earthquakes: A Memoir in April of 2023.
“As she started to write it, she started to weave in memories and parts of her own life, and it became a memoir … but also has a self-help component of helping people know how to navigate their own traumas,” the spouse of the author said.
Despite the fact that Sarah was not a “social media person,” Rodenhausen claims that she started using her accounts to record her life and therapy because “she still felt like she had things to give.”
According to the video that she posted as a farewell, “she was thankfully very calm and comfortable in her final restful days.” This comes from the video that she posted. She was encircled by affection on her last night, just as she had been during her whole life. She was surrounded by her daughters, Siena and Sophie, in a loving embrace only a few hours before she passed away.
Since it was uploaded on June 1st, her message on TikTok has been read by more than one million users. In addition, almost three thousand individuals have left comments, with many of them expressing their sorrow.
According to her brother, she lived her life with honesty, embracing “both the good and the bad” and “letting herself feel,” which is a lesson that will be with us forever “for all of us to really embrace life.”
For Rodenhausen, seeing the “beautiful” outpouring of love that it has sparked, in especially for his girls, has seemed like a heartfelt gift from his wife as they come to the end of their marriage.
He continues by saying, “I just loved her incredibly over those 22 years, and we had a wonderful family.”