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

by Julie Yip-Williams

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

should be equality of treatment as well as opportunity. That expectation must be derived from growing up in a rich country where the rule of law is so firmly entrenched.

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.

You will understand that nothing lasts forever, not pain, or joy.

Be more compassionate people because of it; empathize with those who suffer in their own ways.

take an ugly tragedy and transform it into a source of beauty, love, strength, courage, and wisdom.

call it the evolution of the soul.

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.

“Ode on Intimations of Immortality,”

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

when I am alone and still and no one asks me to verbalize or justify that faith, I know with a certainty that I could never explain that the hand of God has touched my life.

And yet, as transient as that love can be, its magic, intensity, and power can sustain the most cynical among us, as long as we allow ourselves to linger in the glow of its memory.

“What were the odds of us getting married when we were born?” He posited, “Zero.”

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.