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

by Julie Yip-Williams

Wrapping my arms around the hard parts was perhaps the great liberating experience of my life.

Live while you live, my friends.

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

Eventually, time dulls everything. It removes the intensity of the purest of joys and the hottest of rages and, yes, even the most heartbreaking of sorrows.

Time’s amnesiac power is necessary and healthy, for it encourages life and living, allowing room for new experiences and new emotions, which come with engaging in the present and being vested in the future, and places our memories where they should be—in the past, to be accessed when we need and want them.

It is in the acceptance of truth that real wisdom and peace come. It is in the acceptance of truth that real living begins. Conversely, avoidance of truth is the denial of life.