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

by Julie Yip-Williams

least not now and not in this life. But I do 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. 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.

The lessons that blindness and then cancer have taught me are too many for me to recount here, but I hope, when you read what follows, you will understand how it is possible to be changed in a positive way by tragedy and you will learn the true value of suffering. 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. While I would have chosen to stay with you for much longer had the choice been mine, if you can learn from my death, if you accepted my challenge to be better people because of my death, then that would bring my spirit inordinate joy and peace.

You are sisters, and that gives you a bond of blood and common experiences that is like no other. Find solace in one another. Always forgive and love one another. Then there’s Daddy. Then there are Titi and Uncle Mau and Aunt Nancy and Aunt Caroline and Aunt Sue and so many dear friends, all of whom knew and loved me so well—who think of you and pray for you and worry about you. All of these people’s loving energy surrounds you so that you will not feel so alone.

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.

Oh, how I long to have perfect vision, even after all these years without. 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. I promise. But in the meantime, live, my darling babies. Live a life worth living. Live thoroughly and completely, thoughtfully, gratefully, courageously, and wisely. Live!

I love you both forever and ever, to infinity, through space and time. Never ever forget that. Mommy

Well, I’m here to play the game, and I choose not to live and die by what the oddsmakers say. I choose not to put faith in percentages that were assembled by some anonymous researcher looking at a bunch of impersonal data points. 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. Coach Taylor always told his ragtag Dillon High School Panther football team on Friday Night Lights, “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!” I have clear eyes and a full heart.

want to find someone who will love me until the end of my days with an uncompromising and unparalleled love.”

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

The sudden prospect of a shortened life and imminent death seems to have the power to do that. Relationships are accelerated—acquaintances can become intimates in an afternoon. Because there is no time to waste, and what is more important than intimacy?

While cancer has the capacity to tarnish my happy moments with my children, to taint them with doubts about the future, cancer also has an incredible ability to strip away the ugliness and the things that don’t matter and to put everything in a perspective as bracingly clear as that Antarctic sky. With Dr. C., I forgot about the dreariness of that restaurant. I forgot about the uncertainty of my future. Instead, cancer gave me an ability to focus on the present, to really listen to everything Dr. C. told me, to enjoy and marvel at her stories and her as a human being and our human connection. And because cancer forces me and others to refocus on what matters, what I have found, as with Dr. C., are people coming forward to strengthen and reestablish old relationships or establish new ones—former doctors, high school classmates, fellow parents, distant friends, people I’ve never even met. It is these relationships in my life, a life that for better or for worse is so defined by cancer now, that matter to me most these days, that make me truly happy. It is in these relationships that I am finding the breathtaking beauty, peace, and divinity I once ascribed only to my solitary wanderings.

As I’ve said before, battling cancer occurs in not just the physical realm, but also the nonphysical realm, where the mind and spirit are challenged to find the will to keep fighting, to feel happiness despite the sadness, to find light amid the darkness, to laugh through the fear, to live with abandon and joy under the specter of death. I hope that no matter how difficult the physical war becomes for me and no matter how I may struggle through the nonphysical war, I will always confront my disease with the same kind of courage, honesty, grace, and acceptance that Kathryn has exhibited, she who learned so much about her disease and its treatments, both established and experimental; she who shared that knowledge as no other; she who recognized when chemo was compromising the quality of her life during the little time she had remaining; she who chose to accept with dignity the overwhelming power of the cancer in her body.

Cancer is a force of nature that acts within the human body, just as the winds and rains from a hurricane are forces of nature that act on the earth. We are so small, insignificant, and powerless in the face of those unleashed forces in spite of the marvels of shelter and modern medicine. There comes a time when one must admit that powerlessness and evacuate ahead of the deadly hurricane, rather than remain behind and make some kind of empty symbolic gesture of “fuck you.” Similarly, there comes a time when one must recognize the futility of continuing the personal physical fight against cancer, when chemo is no longer a desirable option, when one should begin the process of saying goodbye and understand that death is not the enemy, but merely the next part of life. Determining that time is a deliberation that each of us must make with her own heart and soul. This is what Kathryn has done; she respects the force of nature acting on her body and has no delusions about somehow still overcoming; she made the cogent decision to evacuate ahead of the hurricane. To me, she has won her war against cancer so valiantly fought in the nonphysical realm.

feel connected to the communities represented by networks of family, friends, colleagues, church, and the other groups that surround us. To belong, to matter to someone, to feel comfort. It’s almost as if the fear of being unloved is part of our genetic makeup, or maybe it is deeper even than that, and is endemic to being born human on a tiny rock floating through infinity. That realization is enough to make even the least self-aware person a little insecure about what it all means, and what our role in this passion play might be. Ironically and rather unexpectedly, cancer has proven to be most effective in chasing away my insecurities, allowing me to shed almost completely those old and painful feelings of unlovability.

My Chinese last name means leaf. The Chinese love their idiomatic sayings, where four syllables can carry deep and profound meaning. There is one in particular that I associate with my time in Los Angeles, both while at UCLA and in the weeks after, and that is “A fallen leaf always returns to its roots.” I was undeniably a fallen leaf then, and I had returned to the place where I grew up, where so much of my family and so many friends remain, and where new friends gathered, where they encircled me, Josh, and our girls in love and protection, where I started the process of rebirth into a new life. My parents would go back and forth between their home and the hospital and then later the rental, toting food and our laundered clothes, chargers, toiletries, and anything else we needed. Cousin N and her husband offered a bed and shower at her nearby apartment so Josh could freshen up in a place more comfortable than my hospital bathroom.

While in some respects the story of my diagnosis was a nightmare, I think it is ultimately a story of love between me and all those who came to support me. 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. 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. This disease may bring me to the final days of my life on this earth, but the story of how cancer came into my life reminds me every day that while it has taken from me the innocence and happiness of my old life, it has also given me the gift of human love, which has now become part of my soul and which I will take with me forever.

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. Well, that’s not exactly true. We control how good we are to people. We control how honest we are with ourselves and others. We control the effort we have put into living. We control how we respond to impossible news. And when the time comes, we control the terms of our surrender.

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.

In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

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 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.

Live while you live, my friends.

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

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.

Another reason I hate hope—it slows down reaction time, it lulls one into complacency; it allows one to live in useless delusion. So, we fought, he arguing that I was being too rash, that any surgery is major, and I arguing that he was constantly living in denial and unprepared to confront reality and that I didn’t have the luxury of time to sit around and deliberate; after all, I was simply following through on my promise to him to do everything I could to stay alive for as long as possible because if it were up to me I wouldn’t do any of this shit. It was a bad fight, which on top of the stresses of trying to schedule the surgery and the ongoing worry of what will be found during surgery, drove me to the brink. Yet more insanity.

It seems that with the latest bad scan results, I will continue 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.

It is my absolute goal to die well, to die at peace, without regret for the life I have lived, proud and satisfied. Why do 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. And yet, I can assure you that I feel no desperation (other than the desperation to finish all the preparations before it’s too late), that if anything I feel almost total and complete peace.

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

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.

and for better or worse, it has also robbed us of that unique euphoria of falling in love. The intense excitement and anxiety of falling in love are only memories now, impersonal almost, as if it all happened to somebody else. Sometimes, I wish I could relive those moments, just push a button and for a few glorious minutes travel back in time and be that young, ecstatic woman falling in love with the man of her dreams all over again. But the laws of existence don’t allow that. By the same token, I don’t remember the innumerable fights we’ve had, either, not even the worst ones, in which we threatened divorce. I don’t remember what they were about. I know there were occasions when I was so angry I wanted to smack you in the face, but I can’t make myself feel that rage now. Time cares not that you are the man of my dreams, nor does it care about the most egregious wrongs we have committed against one another; it cares not whether the experiences and emotions were wanted or unwanted, loved or hated; it does not discriminate. Eventually, time dulls everything. It removes the intensity of the purest of joys and the hottest of rages and, yes, even the most heartbreaking of sorrows.

enough, once I returned from Antarctica, I again became consumed by the minutiae of my life, minutiae that often felt important and momentous—navigating family and friend dramas, drafting hundred-page contracts late into the night and vehemently negotiating with opposing counsel over little words as though it all mattered so much, feeling annoyance at the guy who cut me in line, planning a wedding, buying an apartment, agonizing over which crib to buy, battling the kids over teeth brushing and TV watching and on and on with all the stuff of life. We live every day not in the shadow of greatness and grandeur but within the confines of our small but seemingly enormous lives. It is a natural way to be; after all, we must live our lives. And then things happen that jerk us out of our complacency and make us feel small and powerless again. But I have learned that in that powerlessness comes truth, and in truth comes a life lived consciously. When the time comes, I will happily and with a great sigh of relief climb into my bed knowing that I will never need to get up again. I will surround myself with family and friends, as my grandmother did. I will eagerly greet the end of this miracle, and the beginning of another.

terror, but to say that I also wished fervently for an end to Julie’s suffering—in spite of myself—well, my words are truly inadequate to describe the size of that moment. But those opposite emotions that I felt give you an idea of the confusion that the imminent death of the most important person in your life brings on. When you are as sick as Julie was, deliverance becomes an act of mercy.

To the degree that my book speaks truth about not just the cancer experience but the human experience in general, I want people to be able to find themselves in the writing. And in so doing, I want them to realize that they have never been and will never be alone in their suffering….I want them to find within the rich, twisted, and convoluted details of my life truth and wisdom that will bolster and comfort them through their joys and sorrow, laughter and tears.