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

by Julie Yip-Williams

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.

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,

But in the meantime, live, my darling babies. Live a life worth living. Live thoroughly and completely, thoughtfully, gratefully, courageously, and wisely. Live!

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.

rediscovering the magic and wonder of our powerful children and letting them help us walk through our darkest hours.

years. I grew to embrace a belief in universal balance, something the Chinese very much believe in, as evidenced by the idea of yin and yang (e.g., man and woman, earth and sky, sun and moon, good and evil).

It wasn’t like scoring the perfect report card, which could be achieved through individual will and hard work.

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

“If you’re going to do this shit to me again, if you’re going to give me more shit to deal with in my life, fine. I can handle it. You know I can. But my husband, my children, my parents, my siblings, everyone I love—leave them alone. Dammit! Leave them alone! Do whatever the fuck you want with me, but don’t you dare touch them!”

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.

words have their limits.

she told me that I was worthy of love—I know how cheesy that sounds, but that kind of sentiment is most welcome when you’re traveling around the world on your own.

Whatever the reason, she had failed to protect not only me but Lyna, too; she had failed at her most basic responsibility as a mother.

I would find flickers of the pure joy that everyone says children bring.

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.

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’m always amazed at how the beautiful and intelligent never feel quite beautiful or intelligent enough, how people constantly agonize over not being thin enough or charming enough.

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.

Denial is first cousin to hope.

keep my fake smile firmly plastered on my face.

“A fallen leaf always returns to its roots.”

have learned throughout this cancer journey that when the options aren’t so appealing, you have to go out there and make new options. As much as I acknowledge how little control I have in

do try to control what I can. Then I can let everything else go and let the universe do what it will.

There is so much I need to do.

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.

“Did you do the best you can?” Of course I had. “Then that’s all you can do,” she would tell me.

Absolution is difficult. Sometimes it just isn’t possible. Pity is one thing. Forgiveness is something else altogether.

Live while you live, my friends.