12/14/2025
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“This didn’t have to happen.”
For weeks after Gilda Radner died, Gene Wilder couldn’t make sense of it.
“For weeks after Gilda died, I was shouting at the walls. I kept thinking to myself, ‘This doesn’t make sense,’” Wilder wrote.
“The fact is, Gilda didn’t have to die. But I was ignorant, Gilda was ignorant — the doctors were ignorant.”
What followed was not sudden.
It was slow.
Quiet.
Dismissive.
It began on an ordinary Sunday in January 1986.
“For us, it all started on the first Sunday in January 1986,” Wilder recalled.
“We were driving to play tennis in Los Angeles at a friend’s house. Gilda began to feel what she described as a fog rolling in. She said, ‘I can’t keep my eyes open. I think I’m going to fall asleep.’ She lay back and looked like she had taken a sleeping pill.”
Doctors were consulted. Tests were run. Explanations were offered — none of them right.
Gilda was initially diagnosed with Epstein-Barr and told to rest. But the symptoms didn’t stop. They multiplied: severe bloating, stomach cramps, shooting pain down her legs, and exhaustion so deep it altered her daily life.
Still, she wasn’t taken seriously.
Doctors told her nothing was wrong.
Blamed ovulation.
Suggested stress.
Called her “high-strung.”
Advised her to relax.
Ten months passed.
Then — finally — the truth.
Just 36 hours after her diagnosis, doctors operated and removed a grapefruit-sized tumor. The cancer was already Stage IV ovarian cancer.
Chemotherapy followed. Her hair fell out. Her body weakened. And still, Wilder believed she would survive.
Later came the realization that never leaves.
“She could be alive today if I knew then what I know now,” Wilder wrote.
“Gilda might have been caught at a less-advanced stage if two things had been done: if she had been given a CA-125 blood test as soon as she described her symptoms to the doctors instead of 10 months later, and if the doctors had known the significance of asking her about her family’s history of ovarian cancer. But they didn’t.”
The cost of that ignorance was devastating.
“So Gilda went through the tortures of the damned,” Wilder wrote,
“and at the end, I felt robbed.”
Gilda Radner died on May 20, 1989. She was 42 years old.
The woman who taught America how to laugh at vulnerability spent her final years being told her pain wasn’t real.
This isn’t just a tragedy.
It’s a warning.
Listen.
Believe women.
Ask better questions.
Act sooner.
