June 1, Short, emotional videos hit TikTok News about Sarah Mandel, a 42-year-old psychologist, wife, and mother of two young daughters.
“If you’re reading these words right now, I’m dead,” the message on the screen said.
Knowing she had little time left, and in her weakened state, she enlisted help in making the video.
“Just a year ago, I would never have dreamed I’d be getting notified of my death on social media,” she said in the video. But the year before, she had received encouragement from the comments on TikTok after posting a video about her journey and treatment for the aggressive metastatic breast cancer she was diagnosed with in 2017.
She then shared the news with the world and delivered a message from space to her daughters, Sophie, 10, and Sienna, 6.
“I love you guys and I’m so proud of you,” she told them. “Maybe I’m somewhere beyond our concept of infinity, that’s how much I love you.”
Mandel’s final video, a series of photos and clips, showed her in full animation: blowing out candles on a cupcake for her 42nd birthday, stretching in her hospital room, dancing with her family, excitedly opening a box full of her newly published book and singing with a band in a plaza after a chemotherapy session.
The video was posted on the day she died at her Manhattan home, her husband, Derek Rodenhausen, said the cause of death was breast cancer.
The video has been viewed 1.7 million times.
Sarah Hope Mandel was born in Manhattan on June 28, 1981. Her mother, Sally (Allen) Mandel, is a novelist and her father, Barry, is an attorney.
Mandel graduated from Bard College in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and studio art. She thought she would pursue painting and singing in the future. After college, she sang in bars and clubs, including the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, but then switched to psychology. Fascinated by the field, she took several courses at Bard and volunteered at the college. In 2009, she received a graduate degree in psychology from Columbia University.
While earning her doctorate in psychology from Rutgers University, Mandel worked as a therapist at several locations in New York, including Fordham University’s Mental Health Services Program, St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center, and Lincoln Medical Center.
She earned her degree from Rutgers University in 2015 and immediately began working as a licensed clinical psychologist at the Manhattan Behavioral Therapy Institute.
But in the fall of 2017, Mandel was late in her pregnancy with Sienna when she went to the doctor to have a lump in her right breast examined. An online search suggested it might be a blocked milk duct. Her obstetrician agreed, but sent her for an ultrasound, which found the lump suspicious.
A biopsy revealed that she had stage 4 breast cancer that had spread to her liver and bones. But after three months of treatment, she received startling news: a PET scan found no signs of cancer in her body. An almost miraculous result. The results were so devastating that they left her traumatized and in a dissociative state.
“I felt guilty because I didn’t feel anything.” She said this on the podcast “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read.”“There were so many other women here with this disease who would do anything to get this kind of treatment. I felt nothing. It’s a betrayal of the women.”
She was unable to come to terms with her dire situation until she applied narrative therapy, a technique she has used with traumatized patients: She guides her patients to dig deep into their traumatic memories, piecing together even the most upsetting details, writing them down, and reading them aloud in therapy sessions.
“I started writing, and the words just started spilling out onto the page,” she said on the podcast. Soon she had written what she called her “trauma story,” which she read to her husband, then compiled into “Little Earthquakes: A Memoir,” which she published in 2023. That was two years after she gave up practicing psychology after cancer exploded from dormant in her brain. In 2023, the cancer spread to her cerebrospinal fluid.
“Writing became my medicine for dealing with the uncertainty of the present moment,” she writes in Little Earthquakes, “and perhaps most surprising of all, how, through writing my story of trauma, a love letter to life emerged.”
In their review, Publishers Weekly wrote: Mandel said, “She deftly navigates the range of emotions that can be elicited from the words, ‘You have cancer,’ and portrays her family with incredible compassion. Her dogged fight for life will leave readers in awe.”
Mandel is survived by her husband, parents, daughters and brother Benjamin.
Mandel had not told any members of his family about his plans to announce his death on TikTok. Michaela WWilliams She was interested in social media marketing for her book and in March asked Williams to create a final video, overlaying Mandel’s message over photos and video clips.
“She approved the final post before she passed away,” Williams said in an email.
When Mandel died, Rodenhausen notified everyone on the list she had given them, and Williams posted the video after receiving the email.
“I didn’t watch the video until at least 24 hours after it was posted,” Rodenhausen said in an email, adding that “I had never used TikTok myself, so I created an account so I could watch it.”
