Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 210

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Unwinding of the Miracle: A Memoir of Life, Death, and Everything That Comes After," by Julie Yip-Williams.



My sweet babies, I do not have the answer to the question of why, at 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.

I was deprived of sight. And yet, that single unfortunate physical condition changed me for the better. Instead of leaving me wallowing in self-pity, it made me more ambitious. It made me more resourceful. It made me smarter. It taught me to ask for help, to not be ashamed of my physical shortcoming. It forced me to be honest with myself and my limitations, and eventually to be honest with others. It taught me strength and resilience. 

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. Be grateful in a way that only someone who lost her mother so early can, in your understanding of the precariousness and preciousness of life. This is my challenge to you, my sweet girls, to take an ugly tragedy and transform it into a source of beauty, love, strength, courage, and wisdom. 

Many may disagree, but I have always believed, always, even when I was a precocious little girl crying alone in my bed, that 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. Know that your mother lived an incredible life that was filled with more than her “fair” share of pain and suffering, first with her blindness and then with cancer. And I allowed that pain and suffering to define me, to change me, but for the better.

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. Indeed, each of us as we walk through the journey of our life does so alone. Sure, there are parents, siblings, cousins, friends, lovers, children, co-workers, and many other people who fill our lives, and sometimes their presence and chatter can make us forget that our journey is solely our own to make of as we will. 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.

Because of my blindness, I was viewed as a curse on my family, doomed to a life of dependency, unmarriageability, and childlessness—and therefore worthlessness. No doubt my grandmother believed she was doing me a favor. 

This secret had taken on the weight of shame, as secrets sometimes do. It was a burden that my mother could no longer bear, and so she was finally compelled to unburden herself to me. For the first twenty-eight years of my life, my attempted infanticide was an event known only to the parties involved. But on the last night of a visit home, as I sat recording my mother’s voice telling the story of our family, I had a sense of what she was about to tell me. I already knew. 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.

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 “f**k 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.

Through heaving sobs, I begged Josh to let me go, to let me leave him and our girls forever, for all I wanted to do was flee, get on an airplane bound for unknown parts where I could die alone with a setting sun. In the state I was in, I was a completely unfit mother and wife, an unfit human being for that matter. I tried to convince Josh that my leaving would be for the best, that he is still a young, handsome man with a successful career and he would be able to find someone to replace me easily, that any woman would love our girls, that the girls are so young 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 who would have the time and life I should have had with Josh and my girls. I hate her, this woman I don’t even know. I vow that if she does wrong by Josh and my children, I will hurt her. I will come back as a poltergeist and hurl books and vases and anything heavy and painful at her head. 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.

Ever since I learned that my cancer had metastasized to my lungs and that I have a dim prognosis, more than one person has commented on a change in me, and on my resigned tone, as if I have accepted my death from this disease as a foregone conclusion, even if I don’t know when exactly that will be. More than one person has told me that I seem to have lost my traditional fierceness. Even Josh accuses me now of being a defeatist, that by conceding my fate, I am succumbing to the disease, that I have stopped 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.

A friend who died within two years of her diagnosis told me she sometimes felt like her husband and she were two ghosts living in the same house, pale shadows of their former happy selves, circling each other, not knowing what to say, disconnected from each other and the rest of the world, so lonely and isolated in their individual suffering. I now know what she meant. Because Josh and I are on sharply divergent paths—mine leads toward death and whatever awaits, and his toward a new life without me but with the children and a new wife. My greatest fears are a painful death and not doing everything I want to do before I die. 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.

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.