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

by Julie Yip-Williams

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.

because I was like a deranged animal, devoid of reason, hope, and light. I yelled and hurled things, not at Josh or the children, but at the heartless gods who would do this to me and, in the absence of those gods, at the painfully unjust cruelty that is an inherent part of the human existence. Why me? I demanded of the gods. Hadn’t I already borne my share of trials and tribulations? Hadn’t I already known enough suffering? Hadn’t I lived a good and moral life? The absence of any divine answer arising from the chaos of my thoughts made me even more crazed. Even the gods cower from me. Cowards.

they would grow to love their new mother easily enough. I wanted not to fight, but to flee to a place where I could die. I told Josh I didn’t want to live like this, with this diseased body that had failed me one time too many, with the specter of death looming ever closer; that this was no longer a life worth living, that whatever good that would come from now on, whatever laughter, whatever joy would be poisoned by the cancer, and I didn’t want a life poisoned by cancer. I wanted to start over. I wanted to find escape and rebirth in death. And then I grew angry at the image of this other woman

And yet I also want her, need her, to come into their lives, to take care of my husband and children. I need her to love them as well as if not better than I do; for as long as Josh and the girls are okay, then I know I will be okay. I need them to mourn me, to remember me for a time, and then I need them to move on and live their lives with joy and abandon. This is what I want for them above all else.

In no way am I minimizing the love Josh feels for me. It is very real and deep, but I also know that he is capable of loving someone else, that he should and will need to love someone else. And perhaps that love will be as profound as, if not more profound than, the love we have. He is a good and wonderful man, and I have been inordinately lucky to have him. And I know that the children are resilient, that they will withstand my loss and thrive regardless. They are, after all, my children, and I like to think the best of me flows through their veins.

have always had a tumultuous relationship with the concept of hope, and I still do. I’m not a believer. I will leave the hope stuff to all of you.

They helped me to see important truths about me and how I want my life to be viewed now and after I am gone.

In response to my crying, my mother would ask in her broken English, “Did you do the best you can?” Of course I had. “Then that’s all you can do,” she would tell me.

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 will continue to fight this disease—not with the same gung-ho attitude I had at the beginning—but I will continue to fight it with an even more nuanced, deeper, and more realistic understanding of its deadliness.

As a mother, I don’t get to just walk away from my children, however much I may want to escape further physical and emotional pain or for any other selfish reasons. I made the choice to be a mother and with that choice came sacrosanct commitments, the most important among them being to give my children the tools to live their lives, tools that go well beyond feeding, bathing, and clothing them.

Yes, I suppose that my death will diminish you, but I also understand now that my living and fighting makes you greater than you are. We humans are resilient little bugs. And indeed, anyone who chooses to live and fight and show by example the power of the human spirit that we all share, and its determination to persevere against the brutalities of what life can bring, strengthens us all with a sense of the tremendous potential and fortitude that lie within each of us, a potential that is realized only when truly tested.

love

And by that same token, 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 said it was better to “keep it in the stomach,” a Vietnamese phrase that means to hold one’s tongue, to keep it bottled up inside, all for the sake of preserving the peace.

Before I left my mother, I thanked her for telling me because I truly was grateful. It’s better to know than not know.

I honestly have no idea where all the time goes, a scary thought considering how limited my time is.

But Belle (who is more stubborn than a mule—she would rather starve and faint than eat what she doesn’t want to eat, for instance) is my ageless soul, my uncannily intuitive child, who understands people and life with a precociousness well beyond her years.

We do not believe in hiding from our children. They are not fragile flowers that will wilt under the strain; rather, they are highly intelligent little girls with an enormous capacity to understand and grow stronger with every hard reality that awaits them in their lives. Facing hardship with a solid foundation of familial love from an early age will strengthen them. I know this to be true based on my own life.

Bangladesh—the juxtaposition of ugliness and beauty, suffering and joy, poverty and generosity—came back to me. My journey through cancer is not so different from my journey through Bangladesh; this cancer journey has been and is one filled with ugliness and beauty, suffering and joy, poverty and generosity. How could I help but think that this Bangladeshi woman’s momentary visit in my life was not random at all?

I think most people would be surprised at how much I laugh in the cancer center.

Something about cancer—in which the machine of our very existence, cellular reproduction, turns against us—makes us humans crazed. It is easy to see how that creates within our flawed selves irrationality, fanaticism, and desperation.

He is skeptical, of course, but I suspect he recognizes that many of his patients crave control over their destinies (ha!) and must feel as if they are leaving no option unexplored.

But a beating heart alone does not make for a life.

Are they that afraid of death? Or do they love life that much? Or are they weighed down by the obligations of love that dictate they must live as long as possible under any circumstance for those who rely on them? What motivates them, fear or love, death or life?

I suspect that the old man and X, like many people, are more afraid of death than they are in love with life, and that an animalistic fear overrides whatever rational intelligence they possess; I would guess that they fear the unknown of what Shakespeare called the “undiscovered country,” the probable nothingness they believe lies beyond this life despite their wavering belief in God; they fear having the fire of their existence extinguished as if they had never been; they fear being small and irrelevant and forgotten.

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, death waits like a doorway beckoning me to a new adventure, yet another on my long list of adventures, a new territory to explore and understand and from which my everlasting soul will learn and evolve.

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

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger—something better, pushing right back.

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.

fighting. Josh and others have misinterpreted my actions. It is true—I have spent the last few months confronting my mortality, accepting the likelihood of my death from my cancer, trying to find peace with my destiny. 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. Indeed, the part of me that believes in things happening for a reason believes that I am, through this cancer journey, meant to understand within the depths of my soul this paradox of death and life.

Now, even as death lurks all around me, I live fully and completely while I am relatively healthy and pain-free; now I suck the marrow out of this glorious life I have been given.

“I want to be clear that I am not one of those people who wants to cling to life by a fingernail, that I will always choose quality over quantity, that facing death with dignity and grace means more to me than adding days to my life on this planet,” I declared. But then I paused. I voiced next what I had not verbalized before. “But in telling you this, I feel like I am betraying my husband and little girls, that for them I should choose to live as long as possible at any cost to myself, that time with them is priceless.”

Nothing says “commitment to living” quite like taking out a mortgage.

For those of you who are not aware of the nature of New York City real estate, the opportunity to purchase a neighboring apartment and create a proper living space is a rare occurrence.

any action or consideration that requires even the slightest contemplation of the future is always burdened by the movements and behavior of my cancer and its impact on my mind and body.

For both Josh and me, it would represent the realization of an ambitious dream that harkens back to the precancer days and, despite the cancer, evidence that life can and does go on after an appalling diagnosis, even an incurable one; it would be a powerful symbolic affirmation of life and living and optimism for a future that is bigger than me.

Ever since I was diagnosed, I’ve learned that so much of life’s hardship becomes more bearable when you are able to build and lean on a network of loyalty, support, and love, and gather around you people (even your contractor) who will stand by you and help you. 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.

It took me two solid years of living with metastatic cancer to realize an important truth: barring some physical pain or other impediment brought on by cancer or its treatment, it isn’t cancer that denies me my dreams; it isn’t cancer that would prevent me from going on vacations or buying a new home or doing anything else that I long to do. Rather, it is a paralyzed mind succumbing to the fear and unpredictability of cancer that would deny me my dreams.

In its paralysis, the mind cannot form contingency plans; it cannot be brave and bold and forward thinking; it cannot accept what is without running from what will be.

In one of the many ironies that have come with having an incurable prognosis, it is as if by accepting the inevitability of my death from this disease, I have freed myself from that paralysis. Similarly, I can move forward now with some degree of certainty; I can plan for myself and my family, for as much as I emphasize living in the here and now, living and loving those whom we love by necessity

My self-imposed reclusiveness and isolationism is partly because of the jealousy and the hate.

Whatever explanations I give and whatever information I divulge must be on my terms and at my initiation, not because someone asked or because I was forced into some social interaction. Perhaps isolation, at least emotionally if not physically, is what happens as you get closer to death, as you understand more powerfully than ever before that this journey to the end is one that must be made absolutely alone.

You, Belle, and Daddy are the best things that ever happened to me. But everything good in my life started because I was willing to work hard, to be determined and disciplined because I wanted something for myself so very much. That’s why I want you to learn the value of working hard. Don’t ever forget this story, okay? I want you to remember Mommy’s story forever.

He listened to my ramblings over lunch or tea, observed how I had grown over the months from the belligerent warrior who was determined to beat this cancer to the more contemplative philosopher who seeks above all else to find meaning, peace, and acceptance in a life over which I have little control.

If you are open to these inevitable questions, which only something like incurable cancer can force into the forefront of your mind, if you allow yourself the time and patience to mull over these complex, baffling, painful, and impossible queries, the journey will both change you (for the better, I believe) and make you more of who you have always been.

I regret it because she was my friend, but I also regret it because although most normal people are scared to be around dying people, I find that other dying people are not scared. I am not scared. Because J just arrived at my ultimate destination. She was simply on an earlier train, is all. That proximity to death is a powerful draw to a dying person—to be near it, to commune with it, to give and take comfort from it.

Because life must be lived!

I told Dr. A.C. in no uncertain terms, “I want to die from the cancer, not from the treatment for the cancer.” He responded, “How about you not die at all?”

As he has said, “Just because it’s not typically done doesn’t mean we can’t do it.”

where life meets death, the relationship should go beyond the medicine and the science; it should be about our mutual humanity. I need to feel that bond with the doctor who will either save my life or, much more likely, walk with me toward the end of my life.