A Garden for Healing and Hope
Donor Profile
Sara Wilhide was a precocious toddler: in love with nature, fascinated by animals, and drawn—for reasons all her own—to Saint-Exupéry’s classic, The Little Prince.
Sara was also a very sick little girl. She was diagnosed with a congenital heart condition the day after her arrival from Korea and spent the first month of her new life in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. Over the next three and a half years, Sara underwent two cardiac surgeries, living for weeks on end at the hospital with her parents, Steve and Cheryl, camped out at her bedside.
When Sara died, the Wilhide family vowed to keep alive the love she gave and the hope she inspired by providing a place for PICU families in the Children’s Center. Since 1991, Sara’s Room has been a labor of love and remembrance for the Wilhides, who have voluntarily kept it stocked with everything from coffee to magazines to toothpaste—small things that matter tremendously and help lend some semblance of normalcy when it is most needed.
The new Charlotte R. Bloomberg Children’s Center is part of the Johns Hopkins Hospital redevelopment. Scheduled to open in 2011, it has been designed to include sleeping space in the PICU rooms, which means that Sara’s Room will no longer be needed. “We think this is a good thing,” says Cheryl, “but we wanted to make sure that Sara’s memory would live on at Hopkins.”
The love and compassion that have filled Sara’s Room all these years will soon be found outside, in the courtyard between the old and new hospitals. “Sara loved to be outside playing, and Sara’s Garden will be a place of peace and hope for families,” says Steve.
With The Little Prince as its theme, the garden will look familiar to anyone who knows the book but is being built to scale for children—including a baobab tree, little volcanoes for climbing, and an interactive sculpture that lights up like the stars.
The Wilhides’ generous gift of Sara’s Garden will give families the chance to let their kids play and simply be kids.
“The Wilhides’ devotion to the memory of Sara and to the families who come to Hopkins has been extraordinary. This devotion will continue in the new garden, which is a place for quiet reflection and a safe escape for children who come here. Hopkins remains an extraordinary place thanks to the Wilhides and others who partner with us,” says George Dover, MD, the Given Foundation Professor of Pediatrics, pediatrician-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, and chairman of the Department of Pediatrics.
