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

by Julie Yip-Williams

Anyhow, tonight I lost my shit with my four-year-old daughter, who refused to go to bed. I know it was a reaction to all this cancer crap. I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want my children to remember me as a bitch in pain and unhappy.

Her response: “But, Mommy, I want you to come sleep with me. You can sleep on the floor in my room, if you want.” How could I refuse this child of mine who had ventured into the darkness to extend her hand and offer love and forgiveness to her awful mother?

And I go too, even though I am not Christian, because I want to encourage my family to avail themselves of whatever they can to help them through trying times. I trust that my children are intelligent and discerning and will determine for themselves at a later time, when they have greater maturity and knowledge, whether Christianity or some other religion or belief, if any, is appropriate for them.

think of this as the “gift of grief.” We grieve together, now, and weep for their loss and for my passing, now, so that they are not left to figure it out on their own after I have suddenly vanished.

Or perhaps, more accurately, it is when I witness this child’s wisdom, her singular understanding of me, her magic, that I believe in a God, even that God speaks to me through her.

It was so primal and frightening that the memories of it still make my mother shudder every time she sees an endless expanse of ocean, prompting her to declare even after so many years, “I would have never dared to get on that boat had I known…” But, of course, she didn’t know, and therefore she dared.

Better to die at sea than to live in Vietnam. Better to get on a sinking boat than to stay one more moment on Vietnamese soil.

The Cong An were forcing many boats carting ethnic Chinese to leave at night, fearing that sightings of refugees in flight would encourage the ethnic Vietnamese in their attempts to flee.

own death. Believe what you need to believe in order to find comfort and peace with the inevitable fate that is common to every living thing on this planet. Death awaits us all; one can choose to run in fear from it or one can face it head-on with thoughtfulness, and from that thoughtfulness peace and serenity.

I gave Isabelle a big hug then, marveling once again at this child who in other contexts acts like any other four-year-old, but when I need her emotionally, she becomes a sage and speaks as if she has lived before, as if in some part of her bottomless soul she remembers the lessons from a previous life.

And in that validation, you and I, we, regardless of whether we’ve ever met in person, find a connection, a oneness in our suffering that speaks to the universal human experience, which transcends class, race, culture, time, and space.

And weren’t these shared memories, together with our joined bloodlines, the heart of what it means to be a family?

Because in addition to destroying bodies, cancer has an incredible power to destroy relationships, too. The struggle to keep relationships whole and healthy as cancer does its worst is particularly arduous and, for some people, impossible.

His greatest fear is going on without me. I am angry at him for the happy life I know he will rebuild after I am gone. He is angry at me for getting sick and dying. I feel endless guilt for having married him and dooming him to be a widower at such a young age, and the children to be motherless. He feels endless guilt for not being able to save me. And in all of our fear, anger, guilt, and sadness we feel alone, and so impotent in our inability to help each other.

He told me based on my X-rays, he thought two of the teeth might need root canals. Root canals. He also said that the pattern of decay was consistent with someone who has chronic dry mouth brought on by chemo and other types of medications.

And sadly, I don’t think caregivers get as much attention or support as cancer patients, even though their suffering and loneliness are just as great.

In case you are wondering how exactly that was possible, the surgeon chopped them up. And to prevent cancer from spreading everywhere (which is what would have happened if she had cut them where they lay), she detached the ovaries, lifted them into a bag she had inserted under my skin, performed all the chopping inside that bag, and then sucked the entire bag out through one of the three tiny holes. Medical science is simply amazing.

He has truly basic needs that are generally very easy to satisfy and that, I’ve discovered, I am capable of fulfilling. And he loves unconditionally, with a purity that is in its own way quite beautiful and inspiring.

And within those rituals, there is no cancer, no life, no death, no future, no past, not even that day or hour or even minute, not even Josh or the girls or me; there is just that second, and then the next and then the next. And there is just him.

But then again, it takes tremendous courage to stop all treatments and to let the disease run its course, because then gone is any semblance of a safety net as that person invites death to quicken its arrival. Isn’t that person then truly staring death in the face? Isn’t that person then choosing death on her own terms with dignity and grace?

With fighting and war, there is a winner and a loser. Will you judge me then a loser when I die because I succumbed to my disease? Will you judge me a loser if I simply choose to stop treatment and to stop actively “fighting”? If you do, so be it.

I’m tired of feeling the strain of living as normal a life as possible under the constant threat of death.

So the best thing I can do is to line up as many people as I can to be there for them in the different aspects of their lives. That’s what I want to talk to you about.

I know Mia has musical talent, how much I really don’t know. It doesn’t really matter to me how much talent she has. What matters is that she develops the talent she has. I don’t want it to go to waste.

A friend told me about a little boy who lost his mother to cancer at age one; subsequently, his father remarried, and now, four years later, that boy calls this woman Mom. That story made me cringe and incited hysteria.

So now you understand what I am wrestling with. Is it more courageous to continue or to stop? Is it more loving to leave or to stay? I still don’t know.

How could I do any of this even as I felt the life inside of me getting smaller, as I slipped ever closer to death?

If there is one thing about the family into which I was born that I am very proud of, it is that we are incredibly practical people.

How would he manage to be a single parent while also maintaining the career that means so much

I remember the elation I felt when I told my parents over the phone I had just been accepted into Harvard Law School and how I heard my father clapping with possibly more joy than I felt, like a little boy who had gotten what he wanted for Christmas.

I have felt God’s presence more than once in my life, and I have felt his absence.

Rather than shrouded in shadows, Bangladesh was and is a beautiful place filled with vibrant colors and kind people. My dark prognostications had been wrong. That night in the hospital room, I willed myself to again acknowledge the fear, told myself to do everything within my power to control my destiny and let everything else go, and then ordered myself to look ahead and walk through the fear once more.

I think of the apartment as a gift to my children, a tangible legacy of a home that I hope they will treasure for many years.

To the extent that a place can convey anything of substance about those who labored to make it, I hope their bedrooms, their bathroom, this entire apartment, their home, will bestow upon them the absolute certainty that their mother loved them so very much. Home is where I am now. And, in a sense, home is where I will always be, even after I am physically gone from this world.

But more important, I know it controls me and whether and when I live and die.

to make good on that promise I made myself so long ago. I will be the one to die young. I will be the first among so many family and friends to embark on the greatest adventure of all, the one that involves traveling beyond this life into the next. Were the choice mine, I would stay longer, to watch my children grow up and to age with my husband, to bury my parents, to see more of this life that I have loved so much. But the choice is not mine. It has never been mine.

I will miss this life so very much. They say that youth is wasted on the young. Now, as I approach my final days, I realize that health is wasted on the healthy, and life is wasted on the living. I never understood that until now, as I prepare in earnest to leave this life.

and I realize that they taught me how to die, that I will follow in their footsteps, that they and others in my family wait to greet me and help me make the transition.

Similarly, I think now of all these people I know who have died and the billions of people who have died over the millennia, and there is no reason why I cannot also embark on this rite of passage and do it well.

we always assume that the ideal life is a long one? Why do we assume that it is so awful to die young? Could it be that the ones who die young are better off? Could it be that death offers greater wisdom and joy than this life and those who die young are indeed lucky in their ability to attain those gifts sooner? Perhaps these are simply the musings of a person desperately trying to come to terms with her own early death.

Based on my observations, near the end, cancer becomes even more aggressive, growing at an even faster rate, until it consumes the body it depends on for life. How stupid cancer is, indeed. If only I could negotiate a truce. But despite how it may seem, cancer is not a sentient being with intelligence or reason.

For forty-one years, it had been the five of us. This was my family, even though we kids had grown up and gone on to have our own lives and families. This was still my family, our family. And I knew that going forward, in future family photographs, there would be a glaring absence, a heartbreaking hole that could never be filled. My parents will never have another daughter, and my siblings will never have another sister. Forty-one years together finished in that room on that night.

As much as I hate the cancer, for thirty-seven years my body served me well. It took me all over the world and gave me two beautiful little girls. I could not let the cancer destroy all the goodness that had once been.

in reality, death is truly what is inevitable and life is the option.

These are the people who are so afraid of death they cannot approach it with the dignity and grace that befit an evolved soul.

I hope that at the very least no one will think of me as a thoughtless, mindless person, desperate to stay alive. I hope the world knows that I approached my death with clarity, that I made my decisions not out of panic but with reason, intellect, compassion, honesty, and love, from the best parts of my humanity. At least, this is my goal.

I want my children to be with me. I want my home to be filled with family and friends and laughter and tears and stories and food, the very best parts of life. I want my children to learn by the example of my death not to be afraid of death, to understand it as simply a part of life. I want them to see how loved their mother was and that, by extension, they are safe and loved. I know a death that is at once lively and peaceful and filled with love will be one of the greatest gifts I can give them.

hopeless romantic. The truth is that nothing I say or do will help you as much as time. Time, that undefinable thing that marks the passing of the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and decades; that thing that seems to stretch often agonizingly into eternity and yet is also cruelly gone too quickly; that thing that waits and hurries for, and otherwise spares, nothing and no one; that thing that makes us forget, or at the very least blunts, the good and the bad.

You may even stop visiting me at my grave site with any regularity. I want you to know that that is okay, that that is how it should be, that that is what I want it to be.

I want you to raise our children to the best of your ability, which will require you to be so very present and focused on the here and now.