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

by Julie Yip-Williams

Those things marked me, but they did not stop me.

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. Walk through the fire and you will emerge on the other end, whole and stronger. I promise. You will ultimately find truth and beauty and wisdom and peace.

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.

This is my challenge to you, my sweet girls, to take an ugly tragedy and transform it into a source of beauty,

“Ode on Intimations of Immortality,” by the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, in which he expressed the idea that children are born “trailing clouds of glory,” with the innocence, purity, and knowledge from having just come from God. It is the process of growing up, and the corrupting influence of society and life, that strips them of all their innate angelic goodness, what Wordsworth called their “hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower.”

I also made that promise because I disliked tremendously those bloggers who always presented in the face of a life-threatening illness images of pumped fists and unending positivity and determination. To me, such portrayals were disingenuous, an insult to the intelligence of readers, and above all, disorienting and potentially harmful for those like myself who were newly diagnosed and felt more darkness than light. I wanted to detail and explore that darkness, to let others out there who I knew experienced a similar desolation and lonely darkness know that they were not and are not alone. There is a natural, intuitive fear of darkness; people who are gripped by it are ashamed to speak of it, while those who are free of it for however long wish to run from it as if it were a contagious plague. If the cost of my brutal honesty about my darkness is a highly unflattering picture of me that repels, so be it.

I couldn’t say it better than Albert Camus, who wrote: In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

But what Josh and others don’t understand is that with acceptance and peace, I have learned to live more fully and completely in the here and now, that I now live with a fierceness, passion, and love that I’ve never known. In what is the greatest irony of all, I have come to realize that in accepting death, I am embracing life in all of its splendor, for the first time.

Live while you live, my friends.

We live every day not in the shadow of greatness and grandeur but within the confines of our small but seemingly enormous lives.

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.