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

by Julie Yip-Williams

tried to live always with good intentions and a good heart, although I am sure I have hurt people along the way. I tried my best to live a full, rewarding life, to deal with the inevitable trials with grace, and to emerge with my sense of humor and love for life intact.

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.

There but for the grace of God…—destructive hurricanes and earthquakes, violent shootings and explosions, car accidents, and of course, insidious illnesses. These things shake us to the core because they remind us of our mortality,

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

Life is not fair. You would be foolish to expect fairness, at least when it comes to matters of life and death, matters outside the scope of the law, matters that cannot be engineered or manipulated by human effort, matters that are distinctly the domain of God or luck or fate or some other unknowable, incomprehensible force.

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.

for someone—anyone—to love them as much and as well as I, tore my insides into a million ragged pieces.

Indeed, we will grieve not for what is lost but find strength in what remains behind, through the bonds of human sympathy born of common suffering, and in our faith in something greater than we can conceive of.

So I grew to believe in a little bit of everything, developing my own spiritual and philosophical approaches to life. I believe in my ancestors and that their spirits watch over me. And I believe in God, not perhaps in the image of God depicted in the Bible, but an omniscient and omnipotent being nonetheless. I think God is beyond what my little, limited human brain can fathom, but perhaps something my limitless soul can just begin to grasp in my moments of utmost clarity, moments that the Buddha would describe as the outer edges of enlightenment.

I know that many people never find the kind of love Josh and I share, a love that was tested and strengthened from the very beginning by terrifying challenges (not unlike the life-threatening challenges that face us now).

I sobbed hysterically, thinking back on that day full of promise and glorious possibilities, when we made vows about staying together through sickness and health but had no fucking clue what was in store for us or what it’s like to weather true sickness—we still don’t fully understand, although we certainly understand better than we did that day.

have always prided myself on being good at being alone and felt that I was one of those few people (not troubled by social disorders) who found deep joy in being alone.

The secret has hurt me in ways that few can imagine. Ever since my diagnosis, I’ve redoubled my efforts to find a lasting peace with the secret, feeling like doing so would yield hidden truths that would aid me in this fight for survival.

Anyone who raises young children understands the oftentimes soul-crushing monotony of life’s routines, of battling through fatigue to get up every morning, of rushing the kids off to school, of withstanding the stresses of the oh-so-necessary paying job, of cooking healthy dinners that will likely go uneaten by picky children, of relentlessly negotiating with the kids over when to brush teeth and what clothes to wear the next day and what treats they can have if they eat tomorrow’s lunch. Before cancer, occasionally I would find flickers of the pure joy that everyone says children bring. Happiness came when Mia said something clever and funny or when Belle wrapped her little arms around me and held me like I was the most important person in the world. Joy came, too, when I spent a long weekend away with Josh or hung out with friends during a rare evening out without children. But for the most part, life before cancer, which consisted primarily of working and parenting, was plain old hard and thankless.

As I learned to hold my firstborn against my body, I wondered if I were going to break her fragile body or otherwise fail her as a mother. It would have been naïve and arrogant of me not to have those thoughts then.

These were the most euphoric moments of my life, moments when I was at peace, however briefly, when I had no worries about my past or my future, when I had traveled alone long and often difficult distances to reach my destination, when I felt gratitude in the breathtaking beauty I was so privileged to behold, when I felt like my soul was expanding to encompass a rare and even divine part of the human experience, to see and feel places of such extraordinary natural wonder that they must surely have been touched by the hand of God.

I’m always amazed at how the beautiful and intelligent never feel quite beautiful or intelligent enough, how people constantly agonize over not being thin enough or charming enough. And all of these things matter—beauty, intelligence, weight, and hundreds of other criteria by which people judge themselves—because these are the characteristics people select to determine whether they’re indeed desirable and lovable.

It’s almost as if the fear of being unloved is part of our genetic makeup,

so I was left to answer awkward questions about how I’m doing from people who may or may not care, so happily ensconced are they in the unblemished perfection of their own lives, or, if they do care, are afraid to pry. “Oh, fine. Just hanging in there,” I say vaguely.

I know with a certainty that I could never explain that the hand of God has touched my life.

There was a certain carefree joy in the not knowing, a freedom in not having to be anywhere or with anyone, in the promise of limitless possibilities.

I witnessed through him the extent and power of compassion, the love that one human being can express to another through action alone, not because they know one another but because they are simply members of the same human race.

In my moments of elusive faith, I believed the hand of God had brought me to Los Angeles then so that I could know that kind of magical and singular love, a love that I had never experienced before and, I daresay, that even many of those who have lived many more years than I have never experienced and will never experience. Sadly, it’s the type of love that is shown only when life is threatened, when for a few minutes, hours, days, or weeks, everyone agrees on and understands what really matters.

Is there a reason, a greater purpose, for me being born into this body, in a poor country, and at a turbulent time?

What is that greater purpose? And what is to come next in my life? What lies in my future? What am I supposed to do?

Why did I live when I could have so easily died?

But how can all of this, this whole world, our convoluted, complicated lives, be a gigantic accident? How can people suffer from disabling diseases and die for no reason? How can suffering and death be matters of sheer bad luck?

I have often imagined what my life could have been in some alternate universe where different choices, in which I had no say, were made at critical moments that might or might not have seemed so critical at the time, choices in moments that forever defined the course of my life.

Scenario One made me hurt and sad for everything that could have been. It was what I longed for when I was angry, frustrated, and self-pitying.

But yet, we did meet and marry. In this chaotic universe of so many people and innumerable paths crossing randomly for brief moments of time, our life threads touched and fused together.

If I didn’t believe in the numbers that tell me I will likely not die when I walk out the door or board a plane, if I didn’t believe in the numbers that tell me my children will likely not be shot by some madman invading their school, then I would never leave our home, and would certainly never let my children leave, either.

But odds are not prophecy, and what is expected to happen sometimes doesn’t happen. Plans fall apart.

In part because if this writing were to become the principal means by which my children would come to know my innermost thoughts and feelings after my death, I wanted them to see my real self, a self that, in addition to experiencing many moments of joy, gratitude, and insight, was often tormented by fear, anger, hurt, despair, and darkness.

It left me broken and crumpled on the ground, my rage-filled screams ringing in its wake and a husband and children utterly shocked at the madness they had never thought possible in this woman who was supposed to be their steadfast wife and mother.

Our home will ring with the sounds of innocuous yelling and mundane dramas and warm laughter. And there will be so much love, always so much love.

Your best effort is all you can ask of yourself—no more and no less. And once you’ve done that, there can be no regrets.

I urge all of you who face your own challenges that make you want to fall into the darkness to fight, too, because you, too, are part of humanity, and your fight matters and gives me and others strength when we falter.

she talks to them about what it means to get married one day and how important it is for them to love themselves first and foremost before thinking about loving someone else.

When she died so suddenly of colon cancer at the age of seventy-three, I was convinced that I would suffocate beneath the weight of all the grief, for it was the first time in my twenty years of life that someone I loved and someone I believed loved me just as much had left me.

After years of slaving away, pulling all-nighters, and living under the intense stress of being an associate at a place like Cleary, I had finally found a comfortable niche that was somewhat conducive to being a mother to young children. And then cancer struck.

I read somewhere that those people who cling to such unrealistic hopes have egos that cannot fathom their own nonexistence, the very notion so incomprehensible, so incongruous with everything that has ever been their reality, so wrong that their minds must reject, reject, and reject until there can no longer be denial of what in fact is objective reality.

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.

I have come to realize that in accepting death, I am embracing life in all of its splendor, for the first time.

it would be a powerful symbolic affirmation of life and living and optimism for a future that is bigger than me.

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.

Because bad news seems to come in multiples, a few days later,

Even so, sometimes I think the intensity and ferocity of my emotions are too much for him, especially since he has to come to terms with his own. He urged me to call my sister or my best friend, anyone.

Never in my life have I cried with such intensity and despair. Never have I felt so weakened and alone.

She spoke of how while we often emphasize the power and goodness of the light, sometimes wonderful things can come out of darkness, too.

It is on the boat that my first real and conscious memories of the world were formed. I say real and conscious because these images and sensations are the first memories in which I recall something more than just vague flashes of color and light,