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

by Julie Yip-Williams

you are

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.

These things shake us to the core because they remind us of our mortality, of how impotent we truly are in the face of unseen forces that would cause the earth to tremble or cells to mutate and send a body into full rebellion against itself.

I may be very presumptuous—something far more meaningful: an exhortation to you, the living. Live while you’re living, friends. From the beginning of the miracle, to the unwinding of the miracle.

You will forever be the kids whose mother died of cancer, have people looking at you with some combination of sympathy and pity (which you will no doubt resent, even if everyone means well). That fact of your mother dying will weave into the fabric of your lives like a glaring stain on an otherwise pristine tableau. You will ask as you look around at all the other people who still have their parents, Why did my mother have to get sick and die? It isn’t fair, you will cry.

And every time you yearn for me, it will hurt all over again and you will wonder why.

What I do know for sure is that Mrs. Olson was right. 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.

For a child, there is nothing worse than being different, in that negative, pitiful way. I was sad a lot. I cried in my lonely anger. Like you, I had my own loss, the loss of vision, which involved the loss of so much more. I grieved. I asked why. I hated the unfairness of it all.

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.

You will be deprived of a mother. As your mother, I wish I could protect you from the pain. But also as your mother, I want you to feel the pain, to live it, embrace it, and then learn from it. Be stronger people because of it, for you will know that you carry my strength within you. Be more compassionate people because of it; empathize with those who suffer in their own ways. Rejoice in life and all its beauty because of it; live with special zest and zeal for me.

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.

I have known a mortal fear that was crushing, and yet I overcame that fear and found courage.

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.

And last, wherever I may go, a part of me will always be with you. My blood flows within you. You have inherited the best parts of me. Even though I won’t physically be here, I will be watching over you.

Even long after you have chosen to stop playing, I will still come to you in those extraordinary and ordinary moments in life when you live with a complete passion and commitment.

Know that your mother once felt as you feel and that I am there hugging you and urging you on. I promise.

I long for death to make me whole, to give me what was denied me in this life. I believe this dream will come true. Similarly, when your time comes, I will be there waiting for you, so that you, too, will be given what was lost to you.

Because I had one metastatic spread of the main tumor to another part of my body, regardless of the size of that spread, I was thrown into the category of Stage IV.

For him, as for many people, numbers impose order in an otherwise chaotic world of randomness. And to be told that his wife had Stage IV colon cancer and therefore possibly a single-digit likelihood of living five years was understandably and especially devastating.

He doesn’t understand that my very existence on this planet is evidence of how little numbers matter to me. Numbers mean squat.

To be honest, 60 percent doesn’t sound that great to me, either. In truth, anything short of 100 percent is insufficient. But as we all know, nothing in life is 100 percent.

Don’t I feel so special? I had at least a 99.92 percent chance of not developing colon cancer at this point in my life, and I got it.

So numbers mean nothing. They neither provide assurance nor serve as a source of aggravation. Sure, it would have been better if my cancer were Stage I and there had been zero metastatic spread, but even when the odds are in your favor, you can still lose.

Instead, I choose to put faith in me, in my body, mind, and spirit, in those parts of me that are already so practiced in the art of defying the odds.

My babies became someone else’s children. I knew that they were being well cared for by my parents and sister and entertained by an army of relatives. That was enough for me. I had nothing to give them during those days I spent in the hospital, as I continued to

Chemotherapy will start quickly, as there is reason to believe that the sooner the chemo starts the more effective it will be. I will be on a regimen called FOLFOX, which consists of three drugs, one of which—oxaliplatin—is very powerful. Common side effects: neuropathy (numbness and tingling, including extreme sensitivity to cold in the hands and feet), nausea, diarrhea, fatigue, weakened immune system, mouth sores, hair loss. Yes, hair loss. Ugh! So I will be shopping for a wig.

In the karmic order of the universe, all things will return to equilibrium, and there will—indeed, there must—be balance.

parents not being able to read English. Of all the things I could have demanded as part of my bargain with God, I chose love because love was unattainable. Finding love seemed out of my control, totally dependent on timing and fate.

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

Cancer is so insidious that it attacks your every waking thought. It’s not a disease so much as it is the enemy of existence, come to turn our bodies against us. Whatever modicum of security I once felt is completely shattered. If cancer and bad shit struck once, they can and will strike again. I know

A woman in a support group told me that my deals with God are my form of prayer. I never thought of them that way, since I’ve always been so adversarial with God. But prayer or deal, he’s answered and kept his end of the bargain once before.

But when you have cancer of the gut, perhaps no number more governs your sense of well-being than the number that reflects the level of disease in your blood. Your CEA, it’s called. That stands for carcinoembryonic antigen, which is a fancy term for a specific protein released by tumors, especially those found in the colon and the rectum.

He had sung it to me at our wedding reception. 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.

Because metastatic disease is almost never curable.

Being alone reinforced something I had been feeling—and denying—for quite some time now. As terrifying as it is, battling cancer is an individual journey, and the individuality of it is what I must come to embrace.

But the truth is that we each enter and leave this life alone, that the experience of birth and death and all the living in between is ultimately a solitary one.

No matter how much I would like to take Josh and all who support me on this journey, I simply cannot. And I confess—I am afraid of making this journey alone. That’s hard for me to admit. I 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.

I ended up studying Chinese in college and spent my junior year in Harbin (an industrial city in northeast China known for being the first stop on the trans-Siberian railroad into Russia) and then Beijing.

language. Traveling alone was the single most effective and grueling test I could put myself through, emotionally, mentally, and physically, to prove to myself that I could do as much as anyone else could.

In the greatest of ironies, traveling alone made me feel whole and complete inside; it helped to heal my anguished soul, which for so long had been obsessed with the metaphysical questions.

All of these people whose threads of life have touched mine taught me about different ways of living, thinking, and being, and in doing so enriched my consciousness and touched my soul.

I’ve gotten weak and soft over the years and now I don’t feel entirely ready to tackle this new phase of my life, this newest journey upon which my life hinges, which requires more bravery, strength, resourcefulness, calm, and grit than I have ever had to summon. Unlike

Yet the bliss that can come from my cancer-fighting journey cannot be so different from the bliss I once knew traveling the world. There are extraordinary people whom I have met and whom I have yet to meet on my present course. There are lessons to be learned, resourcefulness and discipline to be cultivated, good to be done, and courage, strength, grace, resolve,

This secret had taken on the weight of shame, as secrets sometimes do.

As she spoke, I could see the scenes play out in my mind; that’s why I believe that the soul remembers trauma long before the mind can retain actual memories.

When I was first diagnosed, I thought that I would never feel happiness in its truest, unadulterated form again. I was certain that every second in which I felt even a modicum of happiness, at seeing Mia grasp concepts like the solar system or watching Belle walk fearlessly into her first day of school, would be tarnished by cancer and that cancer’s ominous presence would invariably invade every moment of my life going forward.

It was in the middle of this conversation that I blurted out, completely unbidden, “You know what? I’m really, really happy right now.” Even I was a little surprised at this declaration. How is it possible to have Stage IV colon cancer and feel for even a second, much less the many moments of that afternoon, the kind of carefree joy that would prompt me to make such a statement?

As a solo practitioner, she did not take a single vacation in the twenty-five years prior to closing her practice, and in return for her devotion to her patients, her patients have an unwavering loyalty to her.

In spending time with Dr. C., I was happy because I didn’t expect to be. I was happy because out of cancer had come this new relationship and a new understanding about another human being who had already been so important to me and my family. I was happy because through knowing and talking to her I felt in those moments an enrichment of my life and soul.

Because there is no time to waste, and what is more important than intimacy?