The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After

by Julie Yip-Williams

Dying has taught me a great deal about living—about facing hard truths consciously, about embracing the suffering as well as the joy. Wrapping my arms around the hard parts was perhaps the great liberating experience of my life.

Live while you’re living, friends. From the beginning of the miracle, to the unwinding of the miracle.

But I do know that there is incredible value in pain and suffering, if you allow yourself to experience it, to cry, to feel sorrow and grief, to hurt.

You will understand that nothing lasts forever, not pain, or joy. You will understand that joy cannot exist without sadness. Relief cannot exist without pain. Compassion cannot exist without cruelty. Courage cannot exist without fear. Hope cannot exist without despair. Wisdom cannot exist without suffering. Gratitude cannot exist without deprivation. Paradoxes abound in this life. Living is an exercise in navigating within them.

our purpose in this life is to experience everything we possibly can, to understand as much of the human condition as we can squeeze into one lifetime, however long or short that may be. We are here to feel the complex range of emotions that come with being human. And from those experiences, our souls expand and grow and learn and change, and we understand a little more about what it really means to be human. I call it the evolution of the soul.

The worth of a person’s life lies not in the number of years lived; rather it rests on how well that person has absorbed the lessons of that life, how well that person has come to understand and distill the multiple, messy aspects of the human experience.

I hate cancer more for what it is doing to Josh than for what it is doing to me.

As terrifying as it is, battling cancer is an individual journey, and the individuality of it is what I must come to embrace.

The sudden prospect of a shortened life and imminent death seems to have the power to do that. Relationships are accelerated—acquaintances can become intimates in an afternoon. Because there is no time to waste, and what is more important than intimacy?

I think I will always oscillate between embracing and rejecting hope.

Indeed, in addition to coming to terms with my own emotions, part of the acceptance process was absorbing and addressing the reactions of family and friends around me, sometimes allowing, but more often deflecting, their incredulity, horror, fears, sorrows, and hopes, sometimes permitting them to be my strength and comfort, and sometimes being theirs.

The sense that we ever had control over any of this seems nothing but a mockery now, a cruel illusion. And also, a lesson: we control nothing. Well, that’s not exactly true. We control how good we are to people. We control how honest we are with ourselves and others. We control the effort we have put into living. We control how we respond to impossible news. And when the time comes, we control the terms of our surrender.

She said it was better to “keep it in the stomach,” a Vietnamese phrase that means to hold one’s tongue, to keep it bottled up inside, all for the sake of preserving the peace.

For me, true inner strength lies in facing death with serenity, in recognizing that death is not the enemy but simply an inevitable part of life.

But the thing is you have to let them in; you have to let them see the heartache, pain, and vulnerability, and not cloak those things in a shameful darkness, and then you have to let those people who care about you help you.

They say that youth is wasted on the young. Now, as I approach my final days, I realize that health is wasted on the healthy, and life is wasted on the living.

And then things happen that jerk us out of our complacency and make us feel small and powerless again. But I have learned that in that powerlessness comes truth, and in truth comes a life lived consciously.